The classified landscape: Consumption, commodity order, and the 1876 Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia.

摘要

The world's fair of today is a purveyor of images. In contrast, the 19th-century international exhibition was a dealer in things--literally, and in quite undisguised ways. The fairgrounds were dominated by large exhibition halls, devoted to some broad areas of material culture and crowded with goods. In such an environment, order was obviously a practical necessity, but it was also an imaginative act: Each new exhibition provided its managers with the opportunity to re-imagine the order of the world in the most fundamental and minute terms. It is not surprising, then, that the first step in planning an exhibition was the classification of objects. This was a formative act that affected the entire structure of the exhibition--the organization of the site, the design of individual buildings, the arrangement of displays, and, ultimately, the ways goods were catalogued and judged.; This dissertation reconstructs the discourse surrounding the order of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, held in Philadelphia to celebrate this country's 100th year of independence. The managers of the Centennial devised a dual system of classification that was both hierarchical and progressive, and attempted to impose this theoretical order on the built environment of the exhibition. They sponsored a competition for the design of a complex hall; they planned a meaningful installation of exhibits; they tried to arrange the space of the building as a persuasive picture of consumer power. These efforts failed, at least in part, because the organizers overestimated the primacy of classification in the design of the exhibition, while they underestimated the complexity of the fair and the world it was supposed to represent.; In spite of these failures, the landscape of the Centennial forecast the basic features of the consumption-centered environment that we know today--the dominance of the market over other institutions, the warehouse and its cognates over other building types, and the gazing on goods over other forms of behavior. It is in the cultivation of this gaze that the Centennial had its greatest impact: The exhibition was a lesson in looking, which indoctrinated large numbers of people into the sight-oriented world of the consumer.