relations between a particular set of knowledges and the apparatuses of the exhibitionary complex to account for their roles as parts of a new political rationality that has accompanied a significant historical mutation in liberal forms of government.
The limitations of “the exhibitionary complex” that strike me most in retrospect are of a different order. They concern the restricted framework that the concept places on our understanding of, first, the modalities of power that museums form a part of, and, second, the different kinds of power they enact as a consequence of the different networks and circuits they are connected to.5 There are three main reasons why this is so:
1 The concept suggests that the forms of power exercised by museums are limited to their exhibition functions and that, consequently, the role of the exhibitionary disciplines is exhausted by the part they play in organizing museum displays. This neglects the role that museum collections play as resources for research practices and, consequently, provides no means of engaging with the ways in which museological deployments of the exhibitionary disciplines circulate beyond the museum to connect with, and form parts of, power relations that are not dependent on exhibition practices.
2 Insofar as the concept proposes that museums constitute a form of governmental power, it limits the forms of action on populations they might exercise to those that they exert on the publics who go through their doors or the wider publics they reach via the circulation of representations based on their collections and activities through the institutions of the public sphere (newspapers and broadcasting, for example). This is a crucial limitation so far as the relations between museums and colonialism are concerned, owing to the respects in which colonized peoples who may never have heard of or visited museums, or been part of the public spheres though which their activities circulate, have nonetheless been profoundly affected by their activities.
3 The concept pays insufficient attention to the different forms and sources of agency that need to be taken into account in the analysis of both the determinations and repercussions of museum practices. It privileges the agency of curators/directors, education officers, architects, and the public over the varied forms of agency that are exerted along the diverse routes through which objects reach museums and enter their collections.
This last criticism applies equally to many of the approaches to the social and cultural roles of museums that were developed in the 1980s and 1990s. The shortcomings it gives rise to have become particularly evident in the light of the now widespread concern with the distinctive kinds of agency that can be attributed to objects (Edwards, Gosden, and Philips 2006). This needs to be combined with a readier appreciation of the respects in which museum practices are shaped by the positions museums occupy in relation to varied kinds of social and material networks. The consequences of these material and relational “turns” are nicely summarized in Chris Gosden and Frances Larson’s concept of “the relational museum”:
Museums emerge through thousands of relationships …; through the experiences of anthropological subjects, collectors, curators, lecturers, and administrators, among others, and these experiences have always been mediated and transformed by the material world, by artefacts, letters, trains, ships, furniture, computers, display labels, and so on. No one person or group of people can completely control the identity of a museum. Museums have multiple authors, who need not be aware of their role nor even necessarily of being willing contributors. But, however else each person’s involvement differs, all of their relationships cohere around things. It is objects that have drawn people together, helped to define their interactions, and made them relevant to the Museum. (Gosden and Larson 2007, 5)
This perspective has greatly enriched our knowledge of the processes and networks through which museum collections are assembled, just as it has brought into focus the consequential nature of varied forms of agency which escaped the attention of the “new museology” that had its roots in the social and cultural turns of the 1970s and 1980s. Sam Alberti (2009), for example, has chronicled the significance of the different ways in which museums acquire collections – by gift, purchase, fieldwork, transfer, or loan – for the ways in which their collections are arranged and how visitors are able to interact with them. Related work on “object biographies” tracing the complex routes through which objects finally reach museums, often through an extended series of intermediary stages, has similarly shown how museum collections have been shaped by the agency of often quite distant actors. This has had particularly significant consequences in revising our understanding of how indigenous peoples shaped the collections of colonial museums in deciding what they would give, and what they would withhold, from exchanges across the colonial frontier (Jones 2007; Harrison, Byrne, and Clarke 2013).
The more general significance of these intellectual orientations, however, is that of presenting the museum as a point of intersection between a range of dispersed networks and relations which flow into and shape its practices. One consequence of this is to approximate the “death of the author,” which characterized poststructuralist debates in literary studies, in that the traditional authors of museum displays – directors and curators – have now to be conceptualized as points within the sociomaterial networks that constitute the museum rather than as the sources of a singular and controlling vision. Another consequence is to open up questions concerning how museums act on the social to more varied forms of analysis. This has been a central concern of much of the recent literature that has brought the perspectives of the material and relational turns to bear on the concerns of museum studies. As a good deal of this literature has come from anthropologists and archaeologists, questions concerning the relations between museums and the varied sites from which their collections come have predominated. From the point of view of a concern with the relations between museums and governmentality theory, however, these perspectives equally suggest that, when considered in the context of the varied networks through which they connect with different populations, museums are implicated in practices of governance in ways that exceed their operations as exhibitionary apparatuses within public spheres.
It is with these considerations in view that I have looked to assemblage theory as a corrective to the limitations of the exhibitionary complex. I have done so particularly with a view to probing more closely the role that museums have played in the histories of colonialism. John MacKenzie has agued that, since museums in colonial settings rarely welcomed or engaged with indigenous populations as visitors in the early years of their development, indigenous peoples were not subjected to the forms of civic regulation and surveillance of the exhibitionary complex. When, much later, indigenous populations became active users of museums, he continues, they are more likely to have experienced them “as part of cultural liberation rather than suppression, an opportunity to reconnect with their own pasts” (MacKenzie 2009, 16). The early history of the relations between museums and indigenous peoples and museums is, however, more varied than MacKenzie allows.6 More worrying, though, is the supposition that it is only as visitors that indigenous peoples might have been affected by colonial museums. This neglects the significant impact that such museums had on indigenous peoples as a consequence of the ways in which their practices of collection were organized and the forms of interaction that these involved. It also neglects how the forms of ethnographic knowledge produced by the classification and ordering of indigenous collections within museums have been carried back to and acted on indigenous populations via their application through the networks and apparatuses of colonial administration. It is in relation to such questions that assemblage theory offers a means of going beyond a concern with how museums connect with the social via the production and circulation of representations within public spheres to consider the roles they have played in transforming the conditions of existence of indigenous peoples through their connections to the distinctive forms of governmental power that Foucault identified as biopower.
Museums as governmental assemblages
Assemblage theory is not, of course, a single tradition but has a number of branches and affiliations. I shall, however, neglect such intricacies to focus on three attributes that are generally shared by its Deleuzeian and Latourian versions and which bear most directly on its application
