Anthropology, Art and Museology.” Anthony Forge Memorial Lecture, Australian National University, September 24.49 Tunbridge, J. E., and G. J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester, UK: Wiley.
50 Urry, J. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity.
51 Vergo, P., ed. 1989. The New Museology. London: Reaktion.
52 Wise, J. M. 2009. “The Passion of Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies 23(3): 437–439.
53 Witcomb, A. 2003. Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London: Routledge.
54 Witcomb, A. 2010. “The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Exhibition Making: Towards an Ethical Engagement with the Past.” In Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums, edited by F. Cameron and L. Kelly, pp. 245–264. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
1
THINKING (WITH) MUSEUMS
From Exhibitionary Complex to Governmental Assemblage
Tony Bennett
One of the reasons for the extraordinary growth of interest in museums in recent decades is that museums have proved to be “good to think with” in the opportunities they have provided for engaging with a number of more general theoretical shifts that have taken place across the humanities and social sciences. My purpose in this chapter is to review some of the ways in which the analysis of museums has both helped to shape, and been shaped by, broader developments in social and cultural theory. My approach, though, will be a selective one focused on the different angles of theoretical engagement that are implied by approaching museums as parts of what I have called “the exhibitionary complex” or as “governmental assemblages.” I do not present these as contraries. While the concept of the exhibitionary complex provided the organizing focus for my initial foray into museum theory in the late 1980s, I have more recently suggested that museum practices can be usefully conceptualized as – and as parts of – governmental assemblages.1 I have done so primarily in order to explore the alignments that might be developed between the “veridical twist” that the Foucauldian perspective has contributed to cultural analysis and the “material turn,” particularly with a view to opening up new lines of inquiry into the forms of power that museums both exercise and are connected to. My purpose in what follows, then, is to identify how the conception of museums as parts of governmental assemblages both builds on and departs from the perspective of the exhibitionary complex. I need first, though, to review this perspective and to outline what now strike me as some of its chief limitations as well as its virtues.
The perspective of the exhibitionary complex
A common criticism of the concept of the exhibitionary complex is that it offers a top-down view of power in interpreting museums as a part of the set of relations between state and society encapsulated in Foucault’s notion of the disciplinary society. The criticism is a curiously inattentive one. For, while it is true that I placed the development of the modern public museum alongside that of the penitentiary, I did so precisely in order to distinguish their historical trajectories and the forms of power that they constitute and exercise. Far from aligning museums with the institutions comprising Foucault’s “carceral archipelago” (the penitentiary, the asylum, the monitorial school), I argued that they should be aligned with a quite different set of institutions or apparatuses (international exhibitions, dioramas and panoramas, arcades, department stores). If the institutions that make up the exhibitionary complex are like those of the carceral archipelago in constituting a set of custom-built settings in which particular kinds of power/knowledge relations are produced and brought to bear on those who visit or who are contained within them, the forms of power/knowledge relations involved and their modus operandi are quite distinct. The knowledges that are deployed within the exhibitionary complex do not have the individualizing focus of the psychological disciplines that were brought to bear on the inmates of the asylum or penitentiary, or on the luckless pupils of monitorial schooling, with a view to regulating their conduct. Rather, the exhibitionary disciplines of history, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and natural history were deployed in the new open setting of the public museum where they worked through mechanisms of pedagogy and entertainment to recruit the support of extended citizenries for the bourgeois democratic economic, social, and political order.
My chief contention, then, was not that museums should be approached as sites for the exercise of a set of disciplinary knowledge/power relations but as sites for knowledge/power relations whose field of application was that of free subjects and whose modus operandi was oriented toward the production of a population that would not only be governable but would freely assent to its governance. I drew, for this purpose, on Gramsci’s conception of the ethical state, presenting the role this accords cultural and educative institutions in the production of consent as a counter to Foucault’s account of discipline. I thus concluded the essay by conjuring up an image of the museum as an alternative to Foucault’s depiction of the sealed walls of the penitentiary as the “figure, at once material and symbolic, of the power to punish” (Foucault 1977, 116) that loomed over the nineteenth-century city:
Museums were also typically located at the centre of cities where they stood as embodiments, both material and symbolic, of a power to “show and tell” which, in being deployed in a newly constituted open and public space, sought rhetorically to incorporate the people within the processes of the state. If the museum and the penitentiary thus represented the Janus face of power, there was nonetheless – at least symbolically – an economy of effort between them. For those who failed to adopt the tutelary relation to the self promoted by popular schooling or whose hearts and minds failed to be won in the new pedagogic relations between state and people symbolised by the open doors of the museum, the closed walls of the penitentiary threatened a sterner instruction in the lessons of power. Where instruction and rhetoric failed, punishment began. (Bennett 1998, 99–100)
It is now clear that there was no need to draw on Gramsci in this way to provide a counter to Foucault owing to the respects in which Foucault’s later work on liberal government – not widely available in English at that time – placed clear limits on his conception of the disciplinary society.2 Foucault does not pay specific attention to the role of cultural institutions in general, or of museums in particular, in his account of liberal government. Yet it is clear that they are implicated in the historically novel set of relations between rulers and ruled that this account posits. Far from serving as its opposite, Foucault argues, freedom is, in liberal forms of government, a mechanism through which government operates. Rather than something that is pre-given to power as a limit and check on its exercise, freedom is a quality that is produced in varying forms, distributed differentially through the social body, and consumed via the very processes through which the activity of governing is organized.
The concept of liberal government, in short, provides a resource within Foucault’s work through which to think about the role played by the public museum in the development of a distinctive set of power/knowledge relations, which parallel the development of the disciplinary archipelago but are informed by quite different principles. The significance of this shift of perspective for museum theory is brought into sharper focus when considered in the light of Foucault’s account of the relations between sovereign, disciplinary, and governmental forms of power (Foucault 1991). While I have taken these aspects of Foucault’s work into account in my discussion of the governmental logic of evolutionary museums (Bennett 2004), I
