is where a chain of signifiers is established and where connections between them allow for truths to be established. Along with Foucault, Hooper-Greenhill identifies four forms of similitude: convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathy (1992, 14). These describe ways of relating signs together to produce a sense of order based on an idea of resemblances. The world as a whole (and the key notion of the time was the Renaissance idea of the great chain of being) was made up and understood through the order of these resemblances established by similitude. Relations between things (such as in a collection) are not apparent in the things themselves but, rather, derive from the ability to decipher the hidden meanings in the relationships between things. Hooper-Greenhill looks in detail at this Renaissance way of thinking that was expressed in the ways in which collections operated. She highlights some of its key features, in particular: an understanding of the universe as animate, associated with which are a belief in supernatural power, an importance given to comparing the present with the classical past, and a quickening sense of the present moving in time. She suggests that these are all critical to this particular épistème and its collections (Hooper-Greenhill 1992, 23ff.). The princely collection gives a sense of order to that world in terms of these issues and is seen to be synonymous with the princely collector who occupied the privileged position of being able to oversee it and to shape its interpretation (see Hetherington 1999). Hooper-Greenhill goes on to suggest that such a way of knowing is an expression of power, notably the power of the prince with his “museum” collection closed off to all but important invited guests to his palace which housed it. The overriding form of resemblance established by such a collection is that of an abundance of nature and this is mirrored in the collection by the abundance of wealth on display and the ability of the prince to exert power through patronage and around command of his collection (see also Rotman 1993).
A break with this Renaissance épistème occurs when a reliance on an understanding of the world starts to move away from the principles of similitude to those of representation. One of the ways in which this became most visible in the seventeenth century was in relation to the status of freaks of nature and other anomalies that were a product mainly of global exploration. The Renaissance way of thinking would have had no such conception of the anomalous. It would have found a way of interpreting oddities in terms of the relations of similitude. Very much a fascination of the baroque age, these heteroclites, to use Francis Bacon’s term (1974), came to be seen as anomalies that created a breach in understanding known orders and, as such, came to mark out the boundaries of knowledge. Every gentleman in his large house at this time would have a cabinet where he kept his treasures, and such anomalous objects would have been prominent within them (see Impey and McGreggor 1985). The arrival of many exotic species from travels in the New World was the source of much of this interest. Housing examples in a scientific collection within a cabinet became a fashionable pursuit among the aristocracy and the emerging gentry class.
A shift then occurred in the classical or baroque épistème, whereby the social significance of the palace and the prince was replaced by the classifying table/cabinet of curiosities of the gentry. Anomalies broke the continuum of resemblances that had been the basis of the regime of truth in Renaissance thinking. They became objects apart, something to be subject to scrutiny and placed in relation to the continuum of what exists on an imaginary classifying table (Foucault [1966] 1989). This opened up new claims to truth and new forms of discourse. For Hooper-Greenhill, the cabinet of curiosities is an example of a classifying table upon which the known world can be subsequently ordered and classified. No longer interested in understanding the world through forms of similitude, this period sees a transitional form of knowledge shaped by the emergence of interest in mathesis (the measurement of order and its representation) as the main ordering logic (Foucault [1966] 1989; Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Laid out on an imaginary table, the known world is classified and ordered into knowable schema. In this “age of the world picture” (see Heidegger 1977), the cabinet of curiosities sought to bring together the known world as a representation so that its ordering could be established and fully understood (see Hooper-Greenhill 1992, 90). That mode of representation relied, in particular, on the principle of comparison rather than on resemblances. It instituted a different set of truth claims and a more empiricist and scientific mode of inquiry into the order of things that was focused on a fascination with the heterogeneous and anomalous and their relation to one another.
It was the modern era from around the mid-eighteenth century that saw the emergence of the museum as we would understand it today, as well as a more fully articulated emphasis on the powers of representation to establish the truth. For Hooper-Greenhill, modern museums, often founded on overgrown private cabinet collections, illustrate the new forms of truth. This period saw the museum emerge alongside the discourse of man and a representationalist mode of ordering based on a clear, established classification system. The key shift from the classical to the modern era saw the anomalous disappear as an object of inquiry, becoming simply a problem of finding a place for it within a classification of all that is known. As an agent of representation, the human subject (the scientist-collector-aesthete) was able to do that work of classification through the pure gaze of disinterested investigation.
Across these different épistèmes and their associated forms of collection, Hooper-Greenhill follows Foucault in emphasizing how the ordering work is a product of the discourse of a particular épistème. That discourse changes over time, not through some continuous, linear flow of ideas, but through disjunctures in the ways of speaking about objects that become both visible and problematic to established knowledge. This is then reflected in new ways of seeing. Seeing very much follows speaking in this period of Foucault’s work. Despite his earlier analysis of the asylum and the clinic, according to Deleuze (1988), he had yet to fully develop an understanding of the role of the nondiscursive (i.e., the visible, the figural) in the shaping of knowledge and power. Hooper-Greenhill’s analysis echoes such an approach in that museum collecting is seen as an outcome of the discourse that shapes ways of seeing and knowing. Bennett’s use of Foucault’s later work to understand the museum provides a contrasting approach to this, even though the issue of discourse and the shaping of knowledge remains a key part of his analysis.
Seeing and the power of the museum
Along with Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1989; 1992), and to some degree Douglas Crimp (1993), Tony Bennett’s work on museums is most closely associated with an attempt to understand them from a Foucauldian perspective (Bennett 1995; 2004a). First, through a direct engagement with the ideas of disciplinary power associated with Discipline and Punish in his essays on the exhibitionary complex (Bennett 1988; 1995), and later through his work on evolution and museums which draws on the later Foucauldian theory of governmentality (Bennett 2004a; 2013), Bennett aims to understand the museum through a critical engagement with Foucault’s concepts and approach to subjectivity and visual technologies of governmental power.
Bennett is by no means a straightforward adopter of a Foucauldian approach. Unlike Hooper-Greenhill (1992), who seeks to apply Foucault’s thought to the field of the museum in an uncritical way, Bennett has throughout nearly three decades of writing on the museum tended to adopt a more syncretist approach to theorizing culture, and in his analysis has used Foucault as something of a constant supplement to others: early on Gramsci (Bennett 1995), later Bourdieu (Bennett 2004a), and most recently actor network theory (Bennett 2013). While Hooper-Greenhill derives her analysis from Foucault’s early work around discourse and épistème, it is the later work on power that is of most interest to Bennett. Starting with Foucault’s understanding of power in Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1977) as operationalized through a visual technology that shapes subjects through self-discipline, Bennett’s interest throughout has been with the constitution of liberal forms of power and governance and their articulation through cultural forms of exhibition and spectacle, notably in the context of the museum. What he wants to know is how modern subjects are formed through their relationship to a mode of liberal cultural organization.
In his earliest work on museums Bennett finds Foucault’s overall approach to power and surveillance as set
