Discipline and Punish too restrictive and overdetermining (Bennett 1995, 61). At this time Bennett retains an interest in the operation of power outside of discourses associated with class interests, drawn from a Gramscian perspective and used to consider the combined effects of discourse and ideology within power relations embedded within civil society and the development of the state. However, what is notable in Bennett’s early work on the museum is an attempt to understand the relations of power that Foucauldian insights bring to bear on such social institutions.
For Bennett, the museum is not a carceral institution per se but, along with other forms of exhibition, a more disciplined form of spectacle in which the once excluded unruly mob is regulated into the more orderly public or audience of modern civil society (see Chapter 1 by Bennett in this volume). His core argument is that the unruly spectacle of the fair is regulated, first through exhibitions such as that in London in 1851, and later in a range of nineteenth-century museums that became the model space for displaying culture to a population of educated citizens. For Bennett, the museum is about exhibition rather than confinement, and it articulates a liberal understanding of the social/cultural and the disciplinary idea of citizenship as an expression of governmental discourse. By the nineteenth century the museum was a space that had shed its earlier associations with the private collection and its invited visitors and had come to be premised on the idea of openness to the wider public. It is also a space in which spectacle is the organizing principle and in which visitors are constituted as citizens who self-identify with a project of state-sponsored public instruction.
In some respects Bennett seeks to contrast the museum with the panoptic prison. Whereas in the panopticon example earlier forms of punishment as spectacle (as in public execution) give way to surveillance and the public element of punishment becomes closed within the prison, for Bennett the museum instead expresses its disciplinary intent through the opposites of public spectacle and accessibility. It is around these functions that Bennett comes to define the operation of what he calls the exhibitionary complex:
The formation of the exhibitionary complex involved a break with both [private ownership and restricted access] in effecting the transfer of significant quantities of cultural and scientific property from private into public ownership where they were housed within institutions administered by the state for the benefit of an extended general public. (1995, 73)
For Bennett, the museum has an ordering, regulating, and disciplinary mission that is nonetheless comparable to the carceral institutions of Discipline and Punish, but museums operate through different – softer and less coercive – techniques to subdue disorderly forms of popular culture (public spectacles, fairs, carnivals: see also Altick 1978) and thereby harness spectacle to the liberal state project of an orderly and disciplined society of citizens. In later writing, often in response to criticism of this earlier work, Bennett has been at pains to rightly point out that he never treated the museum as operating in the same manner as the panopticon (see Chapter 1 in this volume). Nonetheless, it retains for him a disciplinary emphasis as the means through which citizens as subject become the subjects of a liberal polity. A summary of his position might be that the functioning of a museum can be understood through a Foucauldian approach to the operation of disciplinary power and subject formation but one which does not follow the totalizing example of the prison in its effects:
Thus, if the museum supplanted the scene of punishment in taking on the function of displaying power to the populace, the rhetorical economy of the power that was displayed was significantly altered. Rather than embodying an alien and coercive principle of power which aimed to cow the people into submission, the museum – addressing the people as a public, as citizens – aimed to inveigle the general populace into complicity with power by placing them on this side of power which it represented to it as its own. (Bennett 1995, 95)
Foucault’s view of power is here softened with Gramsci’s view on hegemonic acceptance. What Bennett gets from Foucault is not, then, his novel philosophical approach to power itself (or subjectivity) but, rather, an example of a particular operationalization of power – through disciplinary techniques associated with visual display – that people come to identify themselves with the nineteenth-century formation of the liberal state and its civil society. That doesn’t take place, for Bennett, in the coercive space of the prison but in the more open, publically engaging space of the museum as an exemplar space of how modern culture is organized. It needs to be said, though, that what interests Foucault in Discipline and Punish is the visual technology of power – not the discourse of penality as such but, more specifically, its articulation with nondiscursive visual technologies used for exercising power, notably the panopticon. Bennett still adopts this as a model, albeit in its softer form, for his approach to the museum in his work on the exhibitionary complex.
In his later work, Bennett himself is critical of some elements of his earlier approach, notably the way he situated the discursive practices and apparatuses of the museum within a broader ideological field in which underlying social relations of class are played out through political and cultural practices (2004a, 5–6). Ideology disappears from his later analysis to be replaced by the notion of governmentality which, as a Foucauldian concept, sits more easily with Foucault’s approach to discourse than a Gramscian perspective does. He also moves away from a focus on the museum as a site of governance through exhibition, notably in the colonial context, where indigenous people are not treated in the same manner by museums and European audiences. His focus on Foucault, therefore, shifts from an interest in what he has to say about the operation of power in Discipline and Punish and its relationship to exhibition to Foucault’s now well-known later essay on governmentality (Foucault [1978] 2001). In his two more recent books (Bennett 2004a; 2013) it is liberal governance rather than the ideological operation of power per se that is Bennett’s main focus. What remains as its defining function, though, is a core understanding of the disciplinary function of the museum. That is the means through which subjects come to engage with the discourses of liberal governance.
In this more recent work, Bennett is interested in the ways that museums as more multiple and less certain assemblages are linked into cultural strategies of governmentality. In this, Bennett remains interested in forms of self-regulation (this, for Foucault, is what distinguishes governmentality from more coercive forms of government) that are as much a part of a liberal civil society as they are the apparatus of the state. Extending his interest in the museum from its European heartland to the colonial terrain of Australia, Bennett aims to show how the reach of liberal forms of governmentality expressed through discourses about race and evolution are articulated with the museum project. Museums become civic laboratories (Bennett 2013) for the practices of liberal governmentality and visitors subject themselves to its self-regulating expectations around civic (and civil) conduct defined through a white European norm.
While Bennett sees Gramsci as no longer needed because Foucault alone, through his later writings, provides the tools for understanding the state, the legacy of the idea of the ethical state as a way of understanding liberal governmentality, and of the museum as one of its major projects, remains intact as the governing way in which Bennett seeks to understand the dominant project of the museum. State power remains the central interest in this perspective on the museum and it is defined through the relationship of how people understand themselves in relation to the discourse that is articulated through what they see in the exhibitionary space, as well as in its wider operations and the stories it tells about society.
Museum fragments and the space between saying and seeing
Hooper-Greenhill’s and Bennett’s contemporary interest in developing a Foucauldian perspective on the museum draws, then, on work from the different ends of Foucault’s career. As we have seen, Hooper-Greenhill is mainly interested in the position around discourse that emerges from Foucault’s early work, culminating in The Order of Things, whereas Bennett is interested in the operations of power and governmentality that Foucault articulates most clearly in
