Paris, it contributed to the training of colonial administrators in the context of a political rationality of colonial rule which treated France’s colonial populations as an economic resource whose capacities, given the absence of any public sphere, were to be improved by direct forms of administrative action on the colonial milieu. The fieldwork expeditions into central Australia that Baldwin Spencer organized from the National Museum of Victoria, by contrast, added a sense of an absolute and unbridgeable racial difference to earlier evolutionary conceptions of the relations between Australia’s white settlers and its indigenous populations. The dissemination of such conceptions through the museum’s exhibitions and the other institutions of Melbourne’s and Australia’s public sphere played a significant role in diminishing public support for earlier civilizing programs that had earlier sought to assimilate Aborigines into Australian society by cultural and educative means. At the same time, the connections between the museum and the emergence of new forms of administrative intervention into Aboriginal communities formed part of a new governmental rationality that characterized the first years of Australia’s establishment as a (relatively) independent nation state. Informed by the logic of settler colonialism in which indigenous populations are not an economic resource to be developed but a barrier to the colonial expropriation of their land, these new forms of intervention into the milieus of Aboriginal populations aimed to disperse them to managed stations where the race was expected, eventually, to die out.
Conclusion
Steven Conn has, rightly I think, taken issue with applications of Foucauldian perspectives to museums which interpret them as institutions of discipline and confinement, as though they were parts of the carceral archipelago (Conn 2010, 5–6). While generously exempting my work from this assessment, my suggestion that we should consider the role that museums have played in orchestrating “the break between what must live and what must die” (Foucault 2003, 254) might suggest that this generosity is misplaced. But I think not. The argument is a particular one, applicable to a particular set of museums in a specific set of historical circumstances rather than to “the museum” as such. Indeed, it rests on a perspective in which the museum as such disappears as a possible object of analysis. What any particular museum is, what it does, what it is possible for it to do, who it can act on, how it can do so: these are not matters that are given by some invariant form of the museum. Rather, the questions which now need most to be attended to in both thinking about and thinking with museums concerns the respects in which museums exist and act only through their dispersal across the assemblages they are connected to.
Notes
1 1 See, on the exhibitionary complex, Bennett (1988), also published in Bennett (1995), and, on museums as governmental assemblages, Bennett (2009; also in Bennett 2010 and 2013a and in Bennett and Healy 2011).
2 2 See in particular Foucault (2008).
3 3 See Bennett (1990), also in Bennett (1995).
4 4 The relationship between museums and nations has, however, proved to be more per meable and, at times, less secure than these formulations suggest, as they have been overridden by various forms of dynastic or political imperialism.
5 5 I draw here on criticisms of the concept I have already aired in Bennett (2012; 2013b).
6 6 Conal McCarthy (2007) demonstrates a very early history of engagement with muse ums as important spaces for Maori self-representation.
7 7 I draw here on my more detailed discussion of these questions in Bennett (2009).
8 8 I address the former in my discussion of the American Museum of Natural History in Bennett (2004), and Haidee Wasson (2005) discusses the latter in relation to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
9 9 The conception of museums as centers of calculation is derived from Latour (1987).
References
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