(see Chapter 1 in this volume), there is still a reductionism to this function that surely precludes too many other dimensions of the museum’s role within society. The third position, based on a few fragments surrounding Foucault’s “failed” archaeology /archive project (see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982), suggests more open possibilities (on previous attempts to reconstruct these fragments, see Donato 1979; Crimp 1993; Shapiro 2003). Foucault offers us neither the utopian promise of the museum’s own self-belief nor a model of another carceral institution that shows how it is just another institutionalization of discursive power within the cultural field. Was it lack of interest or an inability to resolve the ambiguous relation between saying and seeing within these spaces that led him to abandon his approach to the cultural institutions of modern art? We shall never know, but we do know that he subsequently sought certainty in the operation of the visual technology of power in the much less ambiguous space of the prison in the work that followed in the early 1970s.
What Foucault offers us instead is another space of power, one defined by an irresolvable tension between establishing the truth in discursive and nondiscursive forms, in which discourses have the opportunity to be both made and unmade by how we see in the realm of discursive power. That he never established a clear position, that he perhaps vacillated in his appreciation of both aspects of the museum and did not articulate a clear understanding of the spaces of culture as he did with madness, health, and prisons, is perhaps because of its inherent ambivalence. As a diagram of power the museum’s lines are never clearly drawn (see Hetherington 1997b). It is even less clear now that it is just a space in which discourses are made or where discipline takes place. It is a space that captures time as history only to see it shift and morph into something else: colonial splendour into slavery, civilization into Orientalism and conquest, Western primacy into doubt, conservation into decay, display into storage. It is an understanding of this movement, and the uncertainty associated with it, that Foucault’s work offers to the study of the museum, resulting in a much more fluid understanding of the shaping of power, in a space of continual emergence, and subjectivity.
References
1 Adorno, T. 1967. “Valéry Proust Museum.” In Prisms, pp. 173–185. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2 Altick, R. 1978. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
3 Bacon, F. 1974. The Advancement of Learning. Oxford: Clarendon.
4 Bann, S. 1995. “Shrines, Curiosities and the Rhetoric of Display.” In Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances, edited by L. Cook and P. Wollen, pp. 14–29. Seattle: Bay Press.
5 Bazin, G. 1967. The Museum Age. Brussels: Desoer.
6 Benjamin, W. (1934) 1973. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, pp. 211–244. London: Fontana.
7 Bennett, T. 1988. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4: 73–102.
8 Bennett, T. 1995. The Birth of the Museum. London: Routledge.
9 Bennett, T. 2004a. Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London: Routledge.
10 Bennett, T. 2004b. “Exhibition, Difference and the Logic of Culture.” In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, edited by I. Karp et al., pp. 46–69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
11 Bennett, T. 2013. Making Culture, Changing Society. London: Routledge.
12 Blanchot, M. 1997. “The Museum, Art and Time.” In Friendship, pp. 12–40. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
13 Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
14 Bourdieu, P., and A. Darbel. 1997. The Love of Art. Cambridge: Polity.
15 Crimp, D. 1993. On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
16 Deleuze, G. 1988. Foucault. London: Athlone.
17 Donato, E. 1979. “The Museum’s Furnace: Notes towards a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet.” In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-structuralist Criticism, edited by J.Harari, pp. 213–238. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
18 Dreyfus, H., and P. Rabinow. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester.
19 Dncan, C. 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge.
20 Duncan, C., and A. Wallach. 1980. “The Universal Survey Museum.” Art History 3: 447–469.
21 Elden, S. 2001. Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. New York: Continuum.
22 Foucault, M. (1966) 1989. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock/Routledge.
23 Foucault, M. 1974. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.
24 Foucault, M. (1975) 1977. Discipline and Punish. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
25 Foucault, M. (1978) 2001. “Governmentality.” In The Essential Works, vol. 3, Power, edited by J. Faubion, pp. 201–222. London: Allen Lane.
26 Foucault, M. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16(1): 22–27.
27 Foucault, M. 1990. “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside.” In Foucault/Blanchot, pp. 7–58. New York: Zone.
28 Foucault, M. 1998a. “Different Spaces.” In The Essential Works, vol. 2, Aesthetics, edited by J. Faubion, pp. 175–185. London: Allen Lane.
29 Foucault, M. 1998b. “Afterword to The Temptation of Saint Anthony.” In The Essential Works, vol. 2, Aesthetics, edited by J. Faubion, pp. 103–122. London: Allen Lane.
30 Foucault, M. 1998c. “The Thought of the Outside.” In The Essential Works, vol. 2, Aesthetics, edited by J. Faubion, pp. 147–169. London: Allen Lane.
31 Foucault, M. 2009. Manet and the Object of Painting. London: Tate.
32 Heidegger, M. 1977. “The Age of the World Picture.” In The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated and with an introduction by W. Lovitt, pp. 115–154. New York: Garland.
33 Hetherington, K. 1997a. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge.
34 Hetherington, K. 1997b. “Museum Topology and the Will to Connect.” Journal of Material Culture 2(2): 199–218.
35 Hetherington, K. 1999. “From Blindness to Blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject.” In Actor-Network Theory and After, edited by J. Law and J. Hassard, pp. 51–73. Oxford: Blackwell.
36 Hetherington, K. 2011. “Foucault, the Museum and the Diagram.” Sociological Review 59(3): 457–475.
37 Hetherington, K. 2014. “Museums and the ‘Death of Experience’: Singularity, Interiority and the Outside.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20(1): 72–85.
38 Hooper-Greenhill, E. 1989. “The Museum in a Disciplinary Society.” In Museum Studies in Material Culture, edited by S. Pearce, pp. 61–72. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
39 Hooper-Greenhill,
