so it was articulated to two new principles of power: to the power of the commodity and of technology as the most potent public symbols of industrial capitalism; and to the power of the people-nation as the heir to the principle of sovereignty. If the first of these was most manifest in international exhibitions, the second was most evident in the development of national museums which, in the public symbolisms of their architectures just as much as in the thematic organization of their exhibits, embodied a new democratic conception of the principle of sovereignty in making the power of the people-nation publicly manifest to itself. This was not, however, the power of an alien, external force – not the power of an absolutism resting on dynastic or imperial principles4 – but a power arising out of, and related back to, the citizenries of the people-nations in whose name sovereign power was now exercised in ways that remained, and remain, equally marked by what Foucault characterized as the main principle of sovereign power, its circularity: that is, that it pursues itself and its own increase as an end in itself.
At the same time, however, the public museum also became a significant cultural site for the exercise of the new form of power that Foucault called governmental, in which the activity of governing is directed toward “the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.” (Foucault 1991, 100). This is not, it is important to add, a form of power that springs forth from public museums as an entirely unheralded set of practices. To the contrary, it was preceded, in the British context, by the activities of a whole host of private and civic agencies, ranging from literary, philosophical, and scientific societies, through societies for the improvement of public knowledge to mechanics’ institutes, in which the practice of exhibition was connected to various projects of public education and improvement. As an instance of the process Foucault refers to as the “governmentalization of the state,” such ways of acting on the population via exhibitions of public housing and public health campaigns became early features of the exhibitionary complex. The same logic informs their current roles as significant sites for AIDS education, for lessons in tolerance and intercultural dialogue, or, more recently, for campaigns related to climate change (Cameron 2010).
There is, however, a distinction that Foucault draws between the interest that governmental power has in operating through the consciousness of individual members of the population and its more distinctive tactics and techniques in which “the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, but it is also the object in the hands of the government, aware, vis-à-vis the government, of what it wants, but ignorant of what is being done to it” (1991, 100). I shall return to the broader considerations this passage prompts shortly. I draw attention to it here by way of briefly identifying how the public museum also instantiated a form of governmental power which – drawing on aspects of disciplinary power – operated through mechanisms that bypassed the consciousness of the museum’s visitors. These concern the respects in which the museum constituted a machinery for the transformation of public manners, one among many mechanisms for altering the dress, comportment, and behavior of the new mass publics they admitted. This was in part a matter of rules and regulations, of the operation of the museum as space for emulation in which a newly culturally enfranchised working class could observe and copy how middle-class visitors conducted themselves within the museum space, and in part a matter of the disciplinary gaze of museum guards, and the regulatory functions of tour guides and, later, of docents. But it was also, I suggested, an aspect of the architectural layout of museums and exhibitions. Museums certainly continued to be informed by the architectural principles of spectacle in their need to make publicly manifest the sovereign power of the people-nation. They also operated like the institutions of discipline, but in relation to their publics rather than to enclosed populations, providing a means of shaping conduct by so arranging the lines of sight that the museum’s public, in being made visible to itself, would also be able to monitor itself. The museum, then, as a place for the transformation of the crowd into a well-regulated public, where a citizenry watches over and regulates itself via architectural arrangements which – prior to CCTV – brought each visitor under the controlling gaze of other visitors.
Limitations of the exhibitionary complex
In summary, then, the concept of the exhibitionary complex was proposed as a means of thinking through a series of transformations in the relations between the practices of exhibition and the modalities of power that accompanied the development of the public museum. The concept has attracted a fair range of discussion (see, for example, Witcomb 2003; Hall 2006; and Henning 2006) and I have, in the foregoing, responded to some of the criticisms that have been leveled against it by trying to clarify its historical limits. It has other limits too: it cannot be applied indiscriminately or with equal force to every institution to which the term “museum” might be attached. The arguments regarding the architectural forms of the exhibitionary complex do not apply to museums, like the British Museum, that are located in pre-nineteenth-century buildings. The arguments about publicness and openness similarly do not apply to museums, like Chicago’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, designed for the private contemplation of their owners and selected guests. The principles of curiosity continued to inform many museum displays, particularly those of local museums, and often cheek by jowl with the evolutionary orientations of the exhibitionary disciplines. And so on … There are many exceptions that might be cited; the status of the concept is more that of a Weberian ideal type which illuminates a set of interconnected tendencies albeit that no single exemplar unites these entirely.
It should also be clear that the political rationality I attributed to the museum arises from a historically particular set of its relations to the exhibitionary disciplines. These have, for example, clearly been transformed in the context of the various critiques to which the museum has been subjected in the last half century, and the revisions and additions to the exhibitionary disciplines that these have given rise to. Rather than calling the validity of the concept into question, however, this prompts an inquiry into the new forms of political rationality produced by the contemporary relations between exhibitionary disciplines and apparatuses. While I have suggested some directions that such investigations might take (Bennett 2006), Wendy Brown’s (2006) conception of tolerance as a new and distinctive form of governmentality offers a better overarching framework for such investigations. Brown’s argument depends on a distinction between two historical forms taken by Western discourses and practices of tolerance. In their original forms these constituted an aspect of the deconfessionalization of politics that accompanied the development of the modern state. As such, they subordinated religious factionalism to the sovereign power of the state by making the state (to varying degrees) indifferent to religious differences so far as the distribution of civic rights and entitlements were concerned. The post-World War II broadening of this historical discourse of tolerance beyond its application to divisions within Christianity to more generalized forms operating across racial, ethnic, sexual, and multifaith religious boundaries has, Brown argues, been accompanied by a significant shift in the agents of tolerance. “Once limited to edicts or policies administered by church and state,” she writes, “tolerance now circulates through a multitude of sites in civil society – schools, museums, neighborhood associations, secular civic groups, and religious organizations” (Brown 2006, 37). This shift, she contends, reflects a transformation from the functioning of tolerance as “an element in the arsenal of sovereign power to a mode of governmentality” (37) in which it operates as “a complex supplement to liberal equality, making up for and covering over limitations in liberal practices of equality” (36) by managing the demands for recognition and difference of marginal groups in ways that leave intact the forces that marginalize them.
This, then, offers a framework within which many of the proposals for “retooling” museums – from their conception as instruments for a critical cosmopolitanism, as “differencing machines” promoting new forms of cultural hybridity, or, in James Clifford’s terms, as contact zones (1997) – might be located as variant formulations of contemporary reorderings of the relations between museums and liberal forms of governmentality. Recognition of this does not entail a departure from the analytical principles underlying the concept of the exhibitionary complex. It requires merely their redirection
