The argument is a historical one. That is to say, it is an argument concerning the relations between the institutions and knowledges that constituted the exhibitionary complex at a particular phase in its development rather than one proposing a necessary and enduring set of such connections. I thus, in a further elaboration of the concept, argued that these connections constituted a historically specific political rationality which, like all such rationalities, generated its own internal contradictions and counterdynamics.3 Foucault argued that the prison was governed by a political rationality, which meant that it generated a demand for the reform of the offender that it could never meet, thus subjecting it to a perpetual criticism for failing to meet its objectives. Similarly, I argued, the exhibitionary complex’s evolutionary ordering of things and peoples generated a demand that it should offer a universally inclusive depiction of the history of Man as the culmination of the history of life on earth which it, too, proved unable to meet owing to the fact that the position of Man it constructed was always occupied by historically exclusive examples – usually white, bourgeois, male, and European or North American:
Similarly, demands based on the principle of representational adequacy are produced and sustained by the fact that, in purporting to tell the story of Man, the space of representation shaped into being in association with the formation of the modern public museum embodies a principle of general human universality in relation to which, whether on the basis of the gendered, racial, class or other social patterns of its exclusions and biases, any particular museum display can be held to be inadequate and therefore in need of supplementation. (Bennett 1995, 91)
The suggestion here, then, is that the organizing rhetorics of the exhibitionary disciplines open the museum up to an insatiable discourse of reform, as it has been called on to correct the social, cultural, and political partialities that inform the particular ways in which museums instantiate the position of Man. This has generated an incessant demand that this position be deconstructed and reconstructed so as to achieve a greater degree of representational adequacy in relation to the norms of universality that the exhibitionary disciplines construct by including, on equal terms, the various histories, groups, or cultures that have been excluded from this position: the histories of women, of indigenous peoples, of racial and ethnic minorities, of subordinate classes, of non-Western religions, and so on. While these aspects of the museum’s political rationality were particularly in evidence in the sociological, feminist, and indigenous critiques of the 1970s and 1980s, they have a longer history in earlier twentieth-century democratizing and reforming moments: the Musée de l’Homme’s (equivocal) criticisms of racialized conceptions of cultural difference in the context of the politics of the Popular Front, for example (Conklin 2008).
There is another aspect to the political rationality of the museum which, like this first one, depends on a contrast with earlier exhibition forms. Where, as in the case of absolutist royal collections, exhibition served the purpose of making royal power manifest and where, accordingly, the pinnacle of representation governing the ordering of things was occupied by the prince or monarch, there could be no question of generating a principle of general inclusiveness from within such a representational regime. Nor, since such demonstrations of power were usually directed more to the court than to the general populace, was there any question of a democratic right of access to them. This principle, symbolized by the seizure of the Louvre, although it only achieved more generalizable and significantly modified forms in the mid-nineteenth century, generated a further contradiction between the conception of museums as instruments for the education of a democratic citizenry and the consequences of their functioning as instruments for the reform of public manners.
While the former requires that they should address an undifferentiated public made up of free and formal equals, the latter, in giving rise to the development of various technologies for regulating or screening out the forms of behaviour associated with popular assemblies, has meant that they have functioned as a powerful means for differentiating populations. (Bennett 1995, 90–91)
This formulation draws on Bourdieu’s arguments concerning the tension between the obligation he places on the art museum to make the heritage of universal culture universally available to all and the actual patterns of its use as a means of enacting and publicly symbolizing middle-class distinction from the working and other subordinate classes (Bourdieu 1996). My purpose in inserting these arguments within a Foucauldian framework was to make a more general point concerning the respects in which the development of the public museum has been written over by multiple scripts of power. The relations between these are brought into useful focus by the distinction Foucault proposes between sovereign, governmental, and disciplinary forms of power which, he insisted, have to be understood in accordance with a principle of historical accumulation rather than one of historical succession. Sovereign power, that is, is not eclipsed by the later development of governmental and disciplinary forms of power but continues in operation alongside them just as they coexist as different ways of operating on conduct that apply to different sections of the population in different ways in different circumstances.
I thus argued, with regard to the principle of spectacle that informed the logic of royal palaces and other demonstrations of royal power through the public enactment of the scene of punishment or the public rituals of royalty, that spectacle did not, as Foucault suggested, disappear as punishment came to be secreted behind the closed walls of the penitentiary. Rather, as collections moved from the closed and private domains of royal and aristocratic households, or of literary, scientific, and philosophical associations, to become increasingly open and public, and as, particularly after 1851, the genre of the international exhibition developed into the most significant form of public entertainment/instruction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so the principle of spectacle migrated to this developing exhibitionary complex. In doing so it was articulated to two new principles of power: to the power of the commodity and of technology as the most potent public symbols of industrial capitalism; and to the power of the people-nation as the heir to the principle of sovereignty. If the first of these was most manifest in international exhibitions, the second was most evident in the development of national museums which, in the public symbolisms of their architectures just as much as in the thematic organization of their exhibits, embodied a new democratic conception of the principle of sovereignty in making the power of the people-nation publicly manifest to itself. This was not, however, the power of an alien, external force – not the power of an absolutism resting on dynastic or imperial principles4 – but a power arising out of, and related back to, the citizenries of the people-nations in whose name sovereign power was now exercised in ways that remained, and remain, equally marked by what Foucault characterized as the main principle of sovereign power, its circularity: that is, that it pursues itself and its own increase as an end in itself.
At the same time, however, the public museum also became a significant cultural site for the exercise of the new form of power that Foucault called governmental, in which the activity of governing is directed toward “the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.” (Foucault 1991, 100). This is not, it is important to add, a form of power that springs forth from public museums as an entirely unheralded set of practices. To the contrary, it was preceded, in the British context, by the activities of a whole host of private and civic agencies, ranging from literary, philosophical, and scientific societies, through societies for the improvement of public knowledge to mechanics’ institutes, in which the practice of exhibition was connected to various projects of public education and improvement. As an instance of the process Foucault refers to as the “governmentalization of the state,” such ways of acting on the population via exhibitions of public housing and public health campaigns became early features of the exhibitionary complex. The same logic informs their current roles as significant sites for AIDS education, for lessons in tolerance and intercultural dialogue, or, more recently, for campaigns related to climate change (Cameron 2010).
There