of government assemblages, Foucault’s later work, after Discipline and Punish, has been used to understand the role of museums in helping to self-discipline subjects in relation to the modes of governance that define modern society (see Chapter 1 by Tony Bennett in this volume).
Noteworthy, however, is that Foucault himself does not speak of museums directly in either of these periods of his work. Where he does so is in the mid-phase of his work in the later 1960s, where his interests were mainly with the project of archaeology and the constitution of the modern archive (Foucault 1974). It is within this period that we find his museum comments in the St. Anthony, Manet, and heterotopia fragments (see Donato 1979; Crimp 1993; Shapiro 2003; Hetherington 2011). For some, notably Deleuze (1988), this phase, of which the major statement is his book The Archaeology of Knowledge (1974), is transitional in the way Foucault engages with the philosophical themes of seeing and saying and their relationship in the shaping of modern society. In his early work Foucault is principally interested in the discourses of power that emerge from speech (saying). In his later work he is more interested in the visibilities and technologies of power as expressions of discourse (seeing). In between these two phases in his work he is struggling in a move from the former to the latter and his comments on the museum should be seen in that context, as that is where they appear. I want to suggest that the ambivalence of this period, not least around what he has to say or, more accurately, imply about the museum – rather than a deficiency, as Deleuze sees it – is suggestive of how we might now choose to approach it.
In this chapter, therefore, I set out what Foucault has to tell us about museums through each of these different phases of his work and I shall do so by drawing on its reception within museum studies. In the first and third periods of his work, this means discussing the work of the leading authors, Hooper-Greenhill and Bennett, alongside Foucault’s own general analysis rather than analyzing what Foucault himself says. The aim in doing this is not merely to illustrate their accounts but to suggest important elements that we can draw from both as well as some departures we might want to make from them. My central argument, however, guided by Deleuze’s (1988) influential reading of Foucault, will be that the absence of an understanding of the middle fragmentary phase diminishes these extant Foucauldian-influenced understandings of museums in contemporary museology. While there has been some analysis of this period of Foucault’s work in the context of the museum, notably in Gary Shapiro’s Archaeologies of Vision (2003), further analysis is required to allow us to develop a more systematic way of approaching museums through Foucault’s work (see also Hetherington 1999; 2011). I want to spend some time looking at what he does say there about the archival monadism of museums (and libraries), as the position is somewhat different from that posed in both his earlier and his later works.
The argument that I will set out is that the first period of Foucault’s work is principally concerned with the shaping of discourse and its relation to different forms of museum knowledge over the last 500 years. The third period, if it can be summarized, is concerned with the visibilities of power and their role in shaping subjects through practices of self-discipline and governmentality. The common theme that runs throughout Foucault’s work, as Gilles Deleuze has pointed out, is that it is concerned with the operation of power through attention to the relations between seeing and saying, or between the nondiscursive and discourse. It is the relations between the two as problematic that I argue is most apparent in the fragmentary middle phase of his work. His early work can be characterized as being principally concerned with how discourse emerges and becomes independent from speech. His later work is more interested in the visibilities and technologies of power, and emphasizes the operation of power through nondiscursive practices. This emphasis on either saying or seeing in the different periods of Foucault’s work is also echoed in the approaches to museums that draw on his work. By highlighting the importance of this neglected middle period, we can begin to reconstruct a more nuanced sense of the relation between discourses and techniques of vision and to develop, I would argue, a better understanding of the operation and significance of the museum to modern society, and not least Foucault’s own understanding of them.
The discourse of the museum
Hooper-Greenhill’s (1992) influential use of Foucault’s early arguments around discourse largely amounts to a mapping of his three épistèmes, identified in The Order of Things, the Renaissance, the classical age (baroque), and the modern age, onto the history of the museum. Through that she seeks to challenge earlier accounts of the museum’s history as one of the Whiggish development of a single institution (see, e.g., Bazin 1967) and to focus instead on how different epistemic positions in the shaping of knowledge are caught up with the emergence and ordering of different types of collecting practice. The Renaissance produced collections of treasure associated with the princely palace where they were housed; the classical/baroque age is very much associated with the gentleman’s cabinet of curiosities; while it is only with modernity, beginning with institutions derived from earlier collections like the British Museum and the Louvre, that we see the emergence of the museum as we know it today (see also Duncan and Wallach 1980; Duncan 1995).
In The Order of Things and associated essays from the mid-1960s Foucault had sought to identify the beginnings of the discourse of Man that had come to shape our modern humanist way of thinking. A key part of Foucault’s argument, which was somewhat influenced by structuralist approaches of that time, is that discourse – which is not the same as speech – emerges from the speaking subject but has an independence from the speaker as a space outside, in which subjectivity is itself understood. This early work is preoccupied with understanding the effects of discourse in shaping not only subjects but also the idea of subjectivity as we understand it today (Foucault [1966] 1989; 1990; 1998c). Discourse produces ways of knowing the truth, a truth which takes on the appearance of universality but is, in fact, specific to particular time-bound ways of knowing and ways of organizing that knowledge at different points in history. In such an approach Man is not seen as a universal but as the product of a particular set of discourses at a particular time. Foucault uses the idea of an épistème to understand time-bound regimes of truth and knowledge associated with particular societies at particular times, and highlights the European periods of the Renaissance, the classical/baroque age, and the modern era as his model. He sets this out, in particular, by charting the epistemic development of the discourses of biology, linguistics, and economics, all of them critical to shaping the modern discourse of Man.
The significance of Hooper-Greenhill’s work within museum studies is that she takes this theory of discourse and the shaping of knowledge through épistème as a starting point for her understanding of the development of the institution that we have come to know as the museum. While collections existed in classical times and were a prominent feature, in the form of the reliquary, of the medieval Christian church (see Bann 1995), Hooper-Greenhill takes a particular épistème reflected in the princely collections of the Renaissance, such as those of the Medici, as her starting point. Different ways of knowing and understanding the truth expressed through a particular discourse are replicated, Hooper-Greenhill suggests, in the modes of knowledge associated with the main form of collecting found within each different épistème. In effect, the collection is a space in which the truth claims of a particular discourse are established (see also Hetherington 1999; Lord 2006). The collection comes to illustrate, through this approach, one of the main sites of the enunciation of a discursive formation. Changes within that formation are mirrored in changes in the character and mode of ordering collections (and of their spaces) over time. How things are known, their ordering within discourse as objects, and the way that such orderings shape an understanding of the known world (and the position of the human subject in relation to it) is a key theme of this work and of Hooper-Greenhill’s understanding of the significance of the development of the museum.
She goes to some length to map the different discursive formations of the different épistèmes that Foucault identifies onto the changing character of the museum collection. For example, during the Renaissance, she argues, truth claims and a sense of the order of things were established through forms of similitude
