Museums, Power, Knowledge
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Museums, Power, Knowledge

Selected Essays

Tony Bennett

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eBook - ePub

Museums, Power, Knowledge

Selected Essays

Tony Bennett

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About This Book

Few perspectives have invigorated the development of critical museum studies over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as much as Foucault's account of the relations between knowledge and power and their role in processes of governing. Within this literature, Tony Bennett's work stands out as having marked a series of strategic engagements with Foucault's work to offer a critical genealogy of the public museum, offering an account of its nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century development that has been constantly alert to the politics of museums in the present.

Museums, Power, Knowledge brings together new research with a set of essays initially published in diverse contexts, making available for the first time the full range of Bennett's critical museology. Ranging across natural history, anthropological art, geological and history museums and their precursors in earlier collecting institutions, and spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries in discussing museum practices in Britain, Australia, the USA, France and Japan, it offers a compelling account of the shifting political logics of museums over the modern period.

As a collectionthat aims to bring together the 'signature' work of a museum theorist and historian whose work has long occupied a distinctive place in museum/society debates, Museums, Power, Knowledge will be of interest to researchers, teachers and students working in the fields of museum and heritage studies, cultural history, cultural studies and sociology, as well as museum professionals and museum visitors.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781317198093
Subtopic
Archéologie
Edition
1

Part I
Civic engines

As I have already indicated, my title for this section takes its bearings from the widespread tendency, in mid- to late nineteenth-century Anglophone settings, for the culture of reform to draw on the vocabularies of engineering in articulating new conceptions of the role of museums as instruments for acting on and shaping the civic attributes of their newly extended publics. If the scripts of museums were thus increasingly fashioned to accord with those new forms of power that Foucault called governmental, this did not mean that the earlier scripts of sovereign power or, indeed, of pastoral power were entirely jettisoned. To the contrary, these have remained significant aspects of museum practice, albeit ones that are in some degree of tension with one another as the principles of sovereignty, shifted from the monarch to the people-nation, have vied with the transnational force of imperial, colonial and religious imaginaries. These, then, are the questions that the chapters in Part 1 engage with alongside a consideration of the relations between the early development of public museums and the institutions and practices of disciplinary power.
In what has proved to be an influential argument, ‘The exhibitionary complex’ examines the rise of the public museum alongside a parallel series of exhibition apparatuses, particularly international exhibitions. These jointly comprised a complex distinguished by a particular set of knowledge/power relations which provided a counterpoint to those informing the operations of Foucault’s disciplinary archipelago. There are three main aspects to the discussion. First, the reformatory orientation of the exhibitionary complex is contrasted to that of the institutions of discipline as one which sought to induct free publics into voluntary programmes of self-reform. Second, the specific qualities of the knowledges involved in late nineteenth-century exhibition practices are explored via an examination of the transition from Enlightenment systems of classification to the evolutionary ordering of things and peoples, and their connections to classed, gendered and racial hierarchies, effected by the exhibitionary disciplines of geology, archaeology, biology and art history. Third, the architectural forms of public museums and international exhibitions are considered with regard to the principles of self-watching they developed as a means of banishing the spectre of the crowd by transforming it into a self-monitoring and self-regulating public.
The second chapter, ‘The multiplication of culture’s utility,’ takes its title from William Stanley Jevons, who sought to give the emerging discipline of economics a public inflection in urging the need for the development of public museums, alongside public libraries and public sanitation, as a means of multiplying the utility of what would otherwise remain under-used private collections of art and books. Tracing the connections between this conception and those of Sir Henry Cole’s earlier advocacy of public art museums and the later programmes of such museum administrators as Thomas Greenwood and, in the USA, George Brown Goode and John Cotton Dana, it examines how the development of the public art museum worked with and transformed the legacy of the earlier tradition of civic humanism in re-programming art collections so that they might function – as Jevons put it – as engines for acting on the poorer part of the population. The discussion ranges across the foundation and development of the South Kensington Museum, the influence of Goode’s ‘new museum idea’ in America, and Dana’s Newark Gallery. It concludes with an assessment of the respects in which these instances of the ‘bureaucratisation of art’ provide a counter to those accounts of the art museum – instanced by aspects of Theodor Adorno’s and Walter Benjamin’s work – which interpret the placing of art in public collections as a fall from the meaning that was vouchsafed them so long as they remained in personal collections.
The final chapter in Part 1, ‘Museums, nations, empires, religions,’ takes its initial bearings from Benedict Anderson’s conception of nations as imagined communities whose trajectories, in being presented as emerging from a distant past and being projected into a limitless future, encompass a territorially defined population into an essential unity, a people-nation. In contrasting such forms of imagining to those of both imperial and religious transnational communities, Anderson’s work has provided an influential framework for narrating the relations between the rise of the modern museum and that of the nation-state. While there can be no doubting the closeness of the museum/nation connection, it is also one which, on further inspection, proves to be more fragile than many accounts suggest. This is especially true of the relations between museums and nations in Europe which, if it provided the initial incubation for the museum/nation relationship, has also seen that relationship either unpicked or over-determined by other relations: those of a succession of intra-European empires – Napoleonic, Tsarist, Austro-Hungarian, Soviet, Nazi – which have subordinated the national repertoires of museums to larger transnational imaginaries. At the same time, the national museums of a number of European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Britain) have attached national histories and imaginaries to global colonialisms. The relations between museums and nations have thus been subject to constant mutations in the light of the unstable relations between nations and transnational flows (of people and things) and imaginaries. The same is true of the relations between museums and religions. At a time when increasing diasporic flows have lent an increasingly religious inflection to questions of cultural diversity, it is becoming clear that the imaginary community of the nation has never displaced the transnational imaginary communities of different religions, and that the museum has always been engaged in complex negotiations – varying from one country to another – between the civic and secular space of the national and the rival claims of religions, initially mainly Christian but now insistently multi-faith. In examining these questions, the chapter draws on Foucault’s account of pastoral power to illuminate the respects in which contemporary museums are caught in the cross-fire between pastoral and governmental forms of power.

1
The exhibitionary complex
*

In reviewing Foucault on the asylum, the clinic, and the prison as institutional articulations of power and knowledge relations, Douglas Crimp suggests that there ‘is another such institution of confinement ripe for analysis in Foucault’s terms – the museum – and another discipline – art history’ (Crimp, 1985: 45). Crimp is no doubt right, although the terms of his proposal are misleadingly restrictive. For the emergence of the art museum was closely related to that of a wider range of institutions – history and natural science museums, dioramas and panoramas, national and, later, international exhibitions, arcades and department stores – which served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision. Furthermore, while these comprised an intersecting set of institutional and disciplinary relations which might be productively analysed as particular articulations of power and knowledge, the suggestion that they should be construed as institutions of confinement is curious. It seems to imply that works of art had previously wandered through the streets of Europe like the Ships of Fools in Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation; or that geological and natural history specimens had been displayed before the world, like the condemned on the scaffold, rather than being withheld from public gaze, secreted in the studiolo of princes, or made accessible only to the limited gaze of high society in the cabinets des curieux of the aristocracy (Figure 1.1). Museums may have enclosed objects within walls, but the nineteenth century saw their doors opened to the general public – witnesses whose presence was just as essential to a display of power as had been that of the people before the spectacle of punishment in the eighteenth century.
Institutions, then, not of confinement but of exhibition, forming a complex of disciplinary and power relations whose development might more fruitfully be juxtaposed to, rather than aligned with, the formation of Foucault’s ‘carceral archipelago’. For the movement Foucault traces in Discipline and
Figure 1.1 The cabinet of curiosities: the Metallotheca of Michele Mercati in the Vatican, 1719
Figure 1.1 The cabinet of curiosities: the Metallotheca of Michele Mercati in the Vatican, 1719
Source: Impey and MacGregor (1985).
Punish is one in which objects and bodies – the scaffold and the body of the condemned – which had previously formed a part of the public display of power were withdrawn from the public gaze as punishment increasingly took the form of incarceration. No longer inscribed within a public drama-turgy of power, the body of the condemned comes to be caught up within an inward-looking web of power relations. Subjected to omnipresent forms of surveillance through which the message of power was carried directly to it so as to render it docile, the body no longer served as the surface on which, through the system of retaliatory marks inflicted on it in the name of the sovereign, the lessons of power were written for others to read:
The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifest force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchised structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.
(Foucault, 1977: 115–16)
The institutions comprising ‘the exhibitionary complex’, by contrast, were involved in the transfer of objects and bodies from the enclosed and private domains in which they had previously been displayed (but to a restricted public) into progressively more open and public arenas where, through the representations to which they were subjected, they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power (but of a different type) throughout society.
Two different sets of institutions and their accompanying knowledge/power relations, then, whose histories, in these respects, run in opposing directions. Yet they are also parallel histories. The exhibitionary complex and the carceral archipelago develop over roughly the same period – the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century – and achieve developed articulations of the new principles they embodied within a decade or so of one another. Foucault regards the opening of the new prison at Mettray in 1840 as a key moment in the development of the carceral system. Why Mettray? Because, Foucault argues, ‘it is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive technologies of behaviour previously found in the cloister, prison, school or regiment and which, in being brought together in one place, served as a guide for the future development of carceral institutions’ (Foucault, 1977: 293). In Britain, the opening of Pentonville Model Prison in 1842 is often viewed in a similar light. Less than a decade later the Great Exhibition of 1851 (see Figure 1.2) brought together an ensemble of disciplines and techniques of display that had been developed within the previous histories of museums, panoramas, Mechanics’ Institute exhibitions, art galleries, and arcades. In doing so, it translated these into exhibitionary forms which, in simultaneously ordering objects for public inspection and ordering the public that inspected, were to have a profound and lasting influence on the subsequent development of museums, art galleries, expositions, and department stores.
Nor are these entirely separate histories. At certain points they overlap, often with a transfer of meanings and effects between them. To understand their interrelations, however, it will be necessary, in borrowing from Foucault, to qualify the terms he proposes for investigating the development of power/knowledge relations during the formation of the modern period. For the set of such relations associated with the development of the exhibitionary complex serves as a check to the generalizing conclusions Foucault derives from his examination of the carceral system. In particular, it calls into question his suggestion that the penitentiary merely perfected the individualizing and normalizing technologies associated with a veritable swarming of forms of surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms which came to suffuse society with a new – and all pervasive – political economy of power. This is not to suggest that technologies of surveillance had no place in the exhibitionary complex but rather that their intrication with new forms of spectacle produced a more complex and nuanced set of relations through which power was exercised and relayed to – and, in part, through and by – the populace than the Foucaultian account allows.
Figure 1.2 The Great Exhibition, 1851: the Western, or British, Nave, looking East
Figure 1.2 The Great Exhibition, 1851: the Western, or British, Nave, looking East
Source: Plate by H. Owen and M. Ferrier.
Foucault’s primary concern, of course, is with the problem of order. He conceives the development of new forms of discipline and surveillance, as Jeffrey Minson puts it, as an ‘attempt to reduce an ungovernable populace to a multiply differentiated population’, parts of ‘an historical movement aimed at transforming highly disruptive economic conflicts and political forms of disorder into quasi-technical or moral problems for social administration’. These mechanisms assumed, Minson continues, ‘that the key to the populace’s social and political unruliness and also the means of combating it lies in the “opacity” of the populace to the forces of order’ (Minson, 1985: 24). The exhibitionary complex was also a response to the problem of order, but one which worked differently in seeking to transform that problem into one of culture – a question of winning hearts and minds as well as the disciplining and training of bodies. As such, its constituent institutions reversed the orientations of the disciplinary apparatuses in seeking to render the forces and principles of order visible to the populace – transformed, here, into a people, a citizenry – rather than vice versa. They sought not to map the social body in order to know the populace by rendering it visible to power. Instead, through the provision of object lessons in power – the power to command and arrange things and bodies for public display – they sought to allow the people, and en masse rather than individually, to know rather than be known, to become the subjects rather than the objects of knowledge. Yet, ideally, they sought also to allow the people to know and thence to regulate themselves; to become, in seeing themselves from the side of power, both the subjects and the objects of knowledge, knowing power and what power knows, and knowing themselves as (ideally) known by power, interiorizing its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance and, hence, self-regulation.
It is, then, as a set of cultural technologies concerned to organize a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry that I propose to examine the formation of the exhibitionary complex. In doing so, I shall draw on the Gramscian perspective of the ethical and educative function of the modern state to account for the relations of this complex to the development of the bourgeois democratic polity. Yet, while wishing to resist a tendency in Foucault towards misplaced generalizations, it is to Foucault’s work that I shall look to unravel the relations between knowledge and power effected by the technologies of vision embodied in the architectural forms of the exhibitionary complex.

Discipline, surveillance, spectacle

In discussing the proposals of late eighteenth-century penal reformers, Foucault remarks that punishment, while remaining a ‘legible lesson’ organized in relation to the body of the offended, was envisioned as ‘a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony’ (Foucault, 1977: 111). Hence, in schemes to use convict labour in public contexts, it was envisaged that the convict would repay society twice: once by the labour he provided, and a second time by the signs he produced, a focus of both profit and signification in serving as an ever-present reminder of the connection between crime and punishment:
Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays.
(Foucault, 1977: 111)
In the event, punishment took a different path with the development of the carceral system. Under both the ancien régime and the projects of the late eighteenth-century reformers, punishment had formed part of a public system of representation. Both regimes obeyed a logic according to which ‘secret punishment is a punishment half-wasted’ (Foucault, 1977: 111). With the development of the carceral system, by contrast, punishment was removed from the public gaze in being enacted behind the closed walls of the penitentiary, and had in view not the production of signs for society but the correction of the offender. No longer an art of public effects, punishment aimed at a calculated transformation in the behaviour of the convicted. The body of the offender, no longer a medium for the relay of signs of power, was zoned as the target for disciplinary technologies which sought to modify the behaviour through repetition.
The body and the soul, as principles of behaviour, form the element that is now proposed for punitive intervention. Rather than on an art of representation, this punitive intervention must rest on a studied manipulation of the individual…. As for the instruments used, these are no longer complexes of representation, reinforced and circulated, but forms of coercion, schemata of restraint, applied and repeated. Exercises, not signs …
(Foucault, 1977: 128)
It is not this account itself that is in question here but some of the more general claims Foucault elaborates on its basis. In his discussion of ‘the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms’, Foucault argues that the disciplinary technologies and forms of observation developed in the carceral system – and especially the principle of panopticism, rendering everything visible to the eye of power – display a tendency ‘to become “de-institutionalised”, to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a “free” state’ (Foucault, 1977: 211). These new systems of surveillance, mapping the social body so as to render it knowable and amenable to social regulation, mean, Foucault argues, that ‘one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society … that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social “quarrantine”, to an indefinitely generalisable mechanism ...

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