Wheatsheaf.26 Foucault, M. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. New York: Picador.
27 Foucault, M. 2007. Security, Population, Territory: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
28 Foucault, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
29 Gosden, C., and F. Larson, with A. Petch. 2007. Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
30 Hall, M. 2006. “The Reappearance of the Authentic.” In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, edited by I. Karp, C. A. Kratz, T. Ybarra-Frausto, and L. Szwaja, pp. 70–101. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
31 Harrison, R., S. Byrne, and A. Clarke, eds. 2013. Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.
32 Henning, M. 2006. Museums, Media and Cultural Theory. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.
33 Jones, P. 2007. Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers. Kent Town, SA: Wakefield.
34 Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
35 MacKenzie, J. 2009. Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
36 McCarthy, C. 2007. Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display. Oxford: Berg.
37 Otter, C. 2008. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
38 Wasson, H. 2005. Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press.
39 Witcomb, A. 2003. Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London: Routledge.
Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. He is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Academy of the Social Sciences in the United Kingdom. His recent books include Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution Museums, Colonialism (Routledge, 2004), Critical Trajectories: Culture, Society, Intellectuals (Blackwell, 2007), Culture, Class, Distinction (coauthored; Routledge, 2009), Material Powers (coedited; Routledge, 2010), and Making Culture, Changing Society (Routledge, 2013).
2
FOUCAULT AND THE MUSEUM
Kevin Hetherington
Michel Foucault never wrote extensively about the institution of the museum. For someone whose philosophy is linked so firmly not just to uses of historical sources but to the whole project of the archive and archaeology/genealogy, this is somewhat surprising (Foucault 1974; see also Shapiro 2003). In fact, Foucault’s published comments in this area consist of just a few fragmentary remarks. But fragments can be revealing – not only in what they say but also in what they don’t. Most well known is his brief observation on museums in his often quoted piece on heterotopia (1986; 1998a; see also Bennett 1995). Another passing reflection can be found in an afterword he wrote for an edition of Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Foucault 1998b). That piece is more about libraries than museums but he does refer there to Manet’s art as museum art and treats both institutions in a similar light. Notably, we also know that he intended a detailed study of the work of Manet, in which museums might have figured, given his earlier observations, but other than a couple of talks, one of which has now been published as the basis of a short book (Foucault 2009), this was a project that he abandoned sometime around 1970 so that it remained a fragment too.
Despite the paucity of references, this has not stopped his work having a lasting influence on museum studies in recent years, notably in the body of critical analysis developed over the past 25 years that is associated with a sociological turn in museum studies which has come to be known as the new museology (Vergo 1989). Whereas the old museology was mainly interested in the academic study of the contents of museums (although see Bazin 1967; Duncan and Wallach 1980), this new museology has been more interested in the position of the museum as well as in museums (not the same thing – and I’m interested here in the former) within society, and that includes addressing some distinctly Foucauldian themes, such as the constitution of knowledge through museum discourse, the practices of power through the museum institution, and the shaping of viewing subjects through their relation to museum exhibitions. Along with Bourdieu, with his interest in issues of distinction, taste, and the reproduction of social class through cultural and educational institutions (e.g., Bourdieu 1984) and who wrote much more extensively on art institutions like museums (Bourdieu and Darbel 1997), Foucault can be seen as one of the two leading theoretical inspirations for critical museum studies since the 1980s (for an overview see Lai 2004).
While the small number of Foucault’s own comments on the museum have long been known (see Donato 1979; Crimp 1993; Bennett 1995; Shapiro 2003), it is in the broader issues from Foucault’s work applied to museums, rather than what he had to say about museums per se, that his influence, to date, can be seen. In particular, there are two principal themes taken from Foucault that have shaped the analysis of museums, and a third, less developed, one that also needs consideration and which I want to make visible and discuss more prominently here. These themes broadly equate to different periods in his work. The first of these has to do with the epistemic constitution of discourses of knowledge that relate to particular times and modes of understanding that Foucault identifies in The Order of Things ([1966] 1989). His association of épistèmes with particular recognized “ages” – the Renaissance, the seventeenth-century “classical” or baroque age, and the modern age – has been analyzed in relation to the seemingly corresponding history of the museum, notably by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill. In particular, she associates different modes of museum discourse and ordering with each of these epistemic constitutions of knowledge across the last 500 years (Hooper-Greenhill 1989; 1992). In this work the main interest is in the position that museums play within the constitution of discourses of knowledge and their relationship to understanding the order of things within society.
A second approach, while also interested in questions of historical development, takes its lead from Foucault’s later analysis of the operation of power and forms of governmentality rather than from the constitution of discourse per se. Tony Bennett’s work on museums has come to be most closely associated with this approach (Bennett 1995; 2004a; 2013). First, through a direct and critical engagement with the ideas of disciplinary power associated with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in his essays on the exhibitionary complex (Bennett 1995; 2004b), and later through his work on evolution and museums (2004a) and on the institutions of culture in general (2013), Bennett seeks to understand the museum through a critical engagement with Foucault’s concept of governmentality and how it informs an understanding of the visibilities of subjectivity as an object of government power in the era of liberalism.
If Hooper-Greenhill is mainly influenced by Foucault’s work up to about 1966, Bennett draws mainly on Foucault’s later work, notably from Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1977) and a key essay on governmentality ([1978] 2001). So, in the first instance we can see that some of Foucault’s early work, notably that associated with The Order of Things has influenced those working within museum studies to think about the museum’s role in the production of knowledge and discourses of scientific understanding. In the second, around
