The Birth of the Museum

History, Theory, Politics

Tony Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136115240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare nell'arte

In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors.

Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture.

Using Foucaltian perspectives The Birth of the Museum explores how the public museum should be understood not just as a place of instruction, but as a reformatory of manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances take place.

This invigorating study enriches and challenges the understanding of the museum, and places it at the centre of modern relations between culture and government. For students of museum, cultural and sociology studies, this will be an asset to their reading list.

Part I

HISTORY AND THEORY

1

THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM

In 1849, James Silk Buckingham, a prominent English social reformer, published a plan for a model town. In extolling the virtues of his proposals he drew attention to their capacity to prepare all members of the community for ‘a higher state of existence, instead of merely vegetating like millions in the present state of society, who are far less cared for, and far less happy, than the brutes that perish’ (Buckingham 1849: 224). Buckingham was insistent, however, that such a transformation could be wrought solely by the application of, as he called them, ‘practical remedies’. It is worth quoting in full the passage in which he argues with himself on this question:

It is constantly contended that mankind are not to be improved by mere mechanical arrangements, and that their reformation must first begin within. But there is surely no reason why both should not be called into operation. A person who is well fed, well clad, cheerfully because agreeably occupied, living in a clean house, in an open and well ventilated Town, free from the intemperate, dissolute, and vicious associations of our existing cities and villages – with ready access to Libraries, Lectures, Galleries of Art, Public Worship, with many objects of architectural beauty, fountains, statues, and colonnades, around him, instead of rags, filth, drunkenness, and prostitution, with blasphemous oaths or dissolute conversation defiling his ears, would at least be more likely to be accessible to moral sentiments, generous feelings, and religious and devout convictions and conduct, than in the teeming hives of iniquity, with which most of our large cities and towns abound. Inward regeneration will sometimes occur in spite of all these obstacles, and burst through every barrier, but these are the exceptions, and not the rules; and the conduct pursued by all good parents towards their children, in keeping them away as much as possible from evil associations, and surrounding them by the best examples and incentives to virtue, is sufficient proof of the almost universal conviction, that the circumstances in which individuals are placed, and the kind of training and education they receive, have a great influence in the formation of their character, and materially assist at least the development of the noblest faculties of the mind and heart.

(Buckingham 1849: 224–5)

The passage echoes a characteristic trait of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of the tasks of government. In the formulations of the science of police that were produced over this period, Foucault has argued, it was the family that typically served as the model for a form of government which, in concerning itself with ‘the wealth and behaviour of each and all’, aspired to subject the population of the state to ‘a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods’ (Foucault 1978: 92). ‘The People’, as Patrick Colquhoun put it, ‘are to the Legislature what a child is to a parent’ (Colquhoun 1796: 242–3). Just as remarkable, however, is Buckingham's persistence in maintaining that the exercise of such surveillance and control need not be thought of as any different in principle, when applied to the moral or cultural well being of the population, from its application to the field of physical health. Both are a matter of making the appropriate ‘mechanical arrangements’. Libraries, public lectures and art galleries thus present themselves as instruments capable of improving ‘man's’ inner life just as well laid out spaces can improve the physical health of the population. If, in this way, culture is brought within the province of government, its conception is on a par with other regions of government. The reform of the self – of theinner life – is just as much dependent on the provision of appropriate technologies for this purpose as is the achievement of desired ends in any other area of social administration.

There is no shortage of schemes, plans and proposals cast in a similar vein. In 1876, Benjamin Ward Richardson, in his plan for Hygeia, a city of health, set himself the task of outlining sanitary arrangements that would result in ‘the co-existence of the lowest possible general mortality with the highest possible individual longevity’ (Richardson 1876: 11). However, he felt obliged to break off from detailing these to advise the reader that his model town would, of course, be ‘well furnished with baths, swimming baths, Turkish baths, playgrounds, gymnasia, libraries, board schools, fine art schools, lecture halls, and places of instructive amusement’ (ibid.: 39). The museum's early historians had a similar conception of the museum's place in the new schemes of urban life. Thus, as Thomas Greenwood saw it, ‘a Museum and Free Library are as necessary for the mental and moral health of the citizens as good sanitary arrangements, water supply and street lighting are for their physical health and comfort’ (Greenwood 1888: 389). Indeed, for Greenwood, these provisions tended to go hand-in-hand and could serve as an index of the development of a sense of civic duty and self-reliance in different towns and cities. For it is, he says, no accident that the municipalities in which ‘the most has been done for the education of the people, either in the way of Board Schools, Museums, or Free Libraries’ should also be the ones with ‘the best street lighting and street cleansing arrangements’ (ibid.: 18).

The public museum, as is well known, acquired its modern form during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The process of its formation was as complex as it was protracted, involving, most obviously and immediately, a transformation of the practices of earlier collecting institutions and the creative adaptation of aspects of other new institutions – the international exhibition and the department store, for example – which developed alongside the museum. However, the museum's formation – whether understood as a developmental process or as an achieved form – cannot be adequately understood unless viewed in the light of a more general set of developments through which culture, in coming to be thought of as useful for governing, was fashioned as a vehicle for the exercise of new forms of power.

In what did this enlistment of culture for the purposes of governing consist? And how was the topography of the sphere of government to which it gave rise organized?¹ On the one hand, culture – in so far as it referred to the habits, morals, manners and beliefs of the subordinate classes – was targeted as an object of government, as something in need of both transformation and regulation. This had clearly been viewed as a part of the proper concern of the state in earlier formulations of the functions of police. In his Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, first published in 1795, Patrick Colquhoun had thus argued:

And it is no inconsiderable feature in the science of Police to encourage, protect, and control such as tend to innocent recreation, to preserve the good humour of the Public, and to give the minds of the people a right bias…. Since recreation is necessary to Civilised Society, all Public Exhibitions should be rendered subservient to improvement of morals, and to the means of infusing into the mind a love of the Constitution, and a reverence and respect for the Laws…. How superior this to the odious practice of besotting themselves in Ale houses, hatching seditious and treasonable designs, or engaging in pursuits of vilest profligacy, destructive to health and morals.

(Colquhoun 1806: 347–8)

It is, however, only later – in the mid to late nineteenth century – that the relations between culture and government come to be thought of and organized in a distinctively modern way via the conception that the works, forms and institutions of high culture might be enlisted for this governmental task in being assigned the purpose of civilizing the population as a whole. It was, appropriately enough, James Silk Buckingham who first introduced such a conception of culture's role into the practical agendas of reforming politics in early Victorian England. In the wake of the report of the 1834 Select Committee on Drunkenness, whose establishment he had prompted and which he had chaired, Buckingham brought three bills before parliament proposing that local committees be empowered to levy rates to establish walks, paths, playgrounds, halls, theatres, libraries, museums and art galleries so as ‘to draw off by innocent pleasurable recreation and instruction, all who can be weaned from habits of drinking’ (Buckingham, cited in Turner 1934: 305). The bills were not successful, although the principles they enunciated were eventually adapted in the legislation through which, some two decades later, local authorities were enabled to establish municipal museums and libraries.

What matters rather more, however, is the capacity that is attributed to high culture to so transform the inner lives of the population as to alter their forms of life and behaviour. It is this that marks the distinction between earlier conceptions of government and the emerging notions of liberal government which Buckingham helped articulate. There is scarcely a glimmer of this in Colquhoun's understanding of the means by which the morals and manners of the population might be improved. These, for Colquhoun, focus on the need to increase the regulatory capacities of the state in relation to those sites and institutions in which refractory bodies might be expected to assemble: public houses, friendly societies, and the sex-segregated asylums and places of industry provided for men and women released from gaol with no employment.

For Buckingham and other advocates of ‘rational recreations’, by contrast, the capacity to effect an inner transformation that is attributed to culture reflects a different problematic of government, one which, rather than increasing the formal regulatory powers of the state, aims to ‘work at a distance’, achieving its objectives by inscribing these within the self-activating and self-regulating capacities of individuals. For Colquhoun, the ale-house was a space to be regulated as closely as possible; for Buckingham, new forms of government proceeding by cultural means, while not obviating the need for such regulation, would go further in producing individuals who did not want to besot themselves in ale-houses.

It is, then, in the view of high culture as a resource that might be used to regulate the field of social behaviour in endowing individuals with new capacities for self-monitoring and self-regulation that the field of culture and modern forms of liberal government most characteristically interrelate. This was what George Brown Goode, in elaborating his view of museums as ‘passionless reformers’, was to refer to as ‘the modern Museum idea’ in his influential Principles of Museum Administration (1895: 71). While this ‘idea’ had an international currency by the end of the century, Goode attributed its conception to the role initially envisaged for museums by such mid-nineteenth century British cultural reformers as Sir Henry Cole and Ruskin.² For Cole, for example, the museum would help the working man choose a life characterized by moral restraint as preferable to the temptations of both bed and the ale-house:

If you wish to vanquish Drunkenness and the Devil, make God's day of rest elevating and refining to the working man; don't leave him to find his recreation in bed first, and in the public house afterwards; attract him to church or chapel by the earnest and persuasive eloquence of the preacher, restrained with reasonable limits; … give him music in which he may take his part; show him pictures of beauty on the walls of churches and chapels; but, as we cannot live in church or chapel all Sunday, give him his park to walk in, with music in the air; give him that cricket ground which the martyr, Latimer, advocated; open all museums of Science and Art after the hours of Divine service; let the working man get his refreshment there in company with his wife and children, rather than leave him to booze away from them in the Public house and Gin Palace. The Museum will certainly lead him to wisdom and gentleness, and to Heaven, whilst the latter will lead him to brutality and perdition.

(Cole 1884, vol. 2: 368)

Of course, and as this passage clearly indicates, museums were not alone in being summoned to the task of the cultural governance of the populace. To the contrary, they were envisaged as functioning alongside a veritable battery of new cultural technologies designed for this purpose. For Goode, libraries, parks and reading-rooms were just as much ‘passionless reformers’ as museums. And if the forms and institutions of high culture now found themselves embroiled in the processes of governing – in the sense of being called on to help form and shape the moral, mental and behaviourial characteristics of the population – this was, depending on the writer, with a plurality of aims in view. Museums might help lift the level of popular taste and design; they might diminish the appeal of the tavern, thus increasing the sobriety and industriousness of the populace; they might help prevent riot and sedition.³ Whichever the case, the embroilment of the institutions and practices of high culture in such tasks entailed a profound transformation in their conception and in their relation to the exercise of social and political power.

This is not to say that, prior to their enlistment for governmental programmes directed at civilizing the population, such institutions had not already been closely entangled in the organisation of power and its exercise. By 1600, as Roy Strong puts it, ‘the art of festival was harnessed to the emergent modern state as an instrument of rule’ (Strong 1984: 19). And what was true of the festival was, or subsequently came to be, true of court masques, the ballet, theatre, and musical performances. By the late seven-teenth century all of these formed parts of an elaborate performance of power which, as Norbert Elias (1983) has shown, was concerned first and foremost with exhibiting and magnifying royal power before tout le monde – that is, the world of courtly society – and then, although only indirectly and secondarily, before the populace. If culture was thus caught up in the symbolization of power, the principal role available to the popular classes – and especially so far as secular forms of power were concerned – was as spectators of a display of power to which they remained external. This was also true of the position accorded them before the scaffold within the theatre of punishment. The people, so far as their relations to high cultural forms were concerned, were merely the witnesses of a power that was paraded before them.

In these respects, then, high cultural practices formed part of an apparatus of power whose conception and functioning were juridico-discursive: that is, as Foucault defines it, of a form of power which, emanating from a central source (the sovereign), deployed a range of legal and symbolic resources in order to exact obedience from the population.⁴ Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by contrast, these practices came to be inscribed in new modalities for the exercise of power which, at different times, Foucault has variously described as disciplinary or governmental power.⁵ Two aspects of these modalities of power are especially worthy of note from the point of view of my concerns here.

First, unlike power in the juridico-discursive mode, disciplinary or governmental power is not given over to a single function. In his discussion of Machiavellian conceptions of the art of governing, Foucault thus argues that the prince constitutes a transcendental principle which gives to the state and governing a singular and circular function such that all acts are dedicated to the exercise of sovereignty – to the maintenance and extension of the prince's power – as an end itself: ‘the end of sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty’ (Foucault 1978: 95). Governmental power, by contrast, is characterized by the multiplicity of objectives which it pursues, objectives which have their own authorization and rationality rather than being derived from the interests of some unifying central principle of power such as the sovereign or, in later formulations, the state. Whereas in these formulations the state or sovereign is its own finality, governmental power, in taking as its object the conditions of life of individuals and populations, can be harnessed to the pursuit of differentiated objectives whose authorization derives from outside the self-serving political calculus of juridico-discursive power. As Foucault puts it, ‘the finality of government resides in the things it manages and in the pursuit of the perfection and intensification of the processes which it directs’ (ibid.: 95). Nineteenth-century reformers thus typically sought to enlist high cultural practices for a diversity of ends: as an antidote to drunkenness; an alternative to riot, or an instrument for civilizing the morals and manners o...