The discourse of the museum
Hooper-Greenhill’s (1992) influential use of Foucault’s early arguments around discourse largely amounts to a mapping of his three épistèmes, identified in The Order of Things, the Renaissance, the classical age (baroque), and the modern age, onto the history of the museum. Through that she seeks to challenge earlier accounts of the museum’s history as one of the Whiggish development of a single institution (see, e.g., Bazin 1967) and to focus instead on how different epistemic positions in the shaping of knowledge are caught up with the emergence and ordering of different types of collecting practice. The Renaissance produced collections of treasure associated with the princely palace where they were housed; the classical/baroque age is very much associated with the gentleman’s cabinet of curiosities; while it is only with modernity, beginning with institutions derived from earlier collections like the British Museum and the Louvre, that we see the emergence of the museum as we know it today (see also Duncan and Wallach 1980; Duncan 1995).
In The Order of Things and associated essays from the mid-1960s Foucault had sought to identify the beginnings of the discourse of Man that had come to shape our modern humanist way of thinking. A key part of Foucault’s argument, which was somewhat influenced by structuralist approaches of that time, is that discourse – which is not the same as speech – emerges from the speaking subject but has an independence from the speaker as a space outside, in which subjectivity is itself understood. This early work is preoccupied with understanding the effects of discourse in shaping not only subjects but also the idea of subjectivity as we understand it today (Foucault [1966] 1989; 1990; 1998c). Discourse produces ways of knowing the truth, a truth which takes on the appearance of universality but is, in fact, specific to particular time-bound ways of knowing and ways of organizing that knowledge at different points in history. In such an approach Man is not seen as a universal but as the product of a particular set of discourses at a particular time. Foucault uses the idea of an épistème to understand time-bound regimes of truth and knowledge associated with particular societies at particular times, and highlights the European periods of the Renaissance, the classical/baroque age, and the modern era as his model. He sets this out, in particular, by charting the epistemic development of the discourses of biology, linguistics, and economics, all of them critical to shaping the modern discourse of Man.
The significance of Hooper-Greenhill’s work within museum studies is that she takes this theory of discourse and the shaping of knowledge through épistème as a starting point for her understanding of the development of the institution that we have come to know as the museum. While collections existed in classical times and were a prominent feature, in the form of the reliquary, of the medieval Christian church (see Bann 1995), Hooper-Greenhill takes a particular épistème reflected in the princely collections of the Renaissance, such as those of the Medici, as her starting point. Different ways of knowing and understanding the truth expressed through a particular discourse are replicated, Hooper-Greenhill suggests, in the modes of knowledge associated with the main form of collecting found within each different épistème. In effect, the collection is a space in which the truth claims of a particular discourse are established (see also Hetherington 1999; Lord 2006). The collection comes to illustrate, through this approach, one of the main sites of the enunciation of a discursive formation. Changes within that formation are mirrored in changes in the character and mode of ordering collections (and of their spaces) over time. How things are known, their ordering within discourse as objects, and the way that such orderings shape an understanding of the known world (and the position of the human subject in relation to it) is a key theme of this work and of Hooper-Greenhill’s understanding of the significance of the development of the museum.
She goes to some length to map the different discursive formations of the different épistèmes that Foucault identifies onto the changing character of the museum collection. For example, during the Renaissance, she argues, truth claims and a sense of the order of things were established through forms of similitude rather than representation. Similitude is where a chain of signifiers is established and where connections between them allow for truths to be established. Along with Foucault, Hooper-Greenhill identifies four forms of similitude: convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathy (1992, 14). These describe ways of relating signs together to produce a sense of order based on an idea of resemblances. The world as a whole (and the key notion of the time was the Renaissance idea of the great chain of being) was made up and understood through the order of these resemblances established by similitude. Relations between things (such as in a collection) are not apparent in the things themselves but, rather, derive from the ability to decipher the hidden meanings in the relationships between things. Hooper-Greenhill looks in detail at this Renaissance way of thinking that was expressed in the ways in which collections operated. She highlights some of its key features, in particular: an understanding of the universe as animate, associated with which are a belief in supernatural power, an importance given to comparing the present with the classical past, and a quickening sense of the present moving in time. She suggests that these are all critical to this particular épistème and its collections (Hooper-Greenhill 1992, 23ff.). The princely collection gives a sense of order to that world in terms of these issues and is seen to be synonymous with the princely collector who occupied the privileged position of being able to oversee it and to shape its interpretation (see Hetherington 1999). Hooper-Greenhill goes on to suggest that such a way of knowing is an expression of power, notably the power of the prince with his “museum” collection closed off to all but important invited guests to his palace which housed it. The overriding form of resemblance established by such a collection is that of an abundance of nature and this is mirrored in the collection by the abundance of wealth on display and the ability of the prince to exert power through patronage and around command of his collection (see also Rotman 1993).
A break with this Renaissance épistème occurs when a reliance on an understanding of the world starts to move away from the principles of similitude to those of representation. One of the ways in which this became most visible in the seventeenth century was in relation to the status of freaks of nature and other anomalies that were a product mainly of global exploration. The Renaissance way of thinking would have had no such conception of the anomalous. It would have found a way of interpreting oddities in terms of the relations of similitude. Very much a fascination of the baroque age, these heteroclites, to use Francis Bacon’s term (1974), came to be seen as anomalies that created a breach in understanding known orders and, as such, came to mark out the boundaries of knowledge. Every gentleman in his large house at this time would have a cabinet where he kept his treasures, and such anomalous objects would have been prominent within them (see Impey and McGreggor 1985). The arrival of many exotic species from travels in the New World was the source of much of this interest. Housing examples in a scientific collection within a cabinet became a fashionable pursuit among the aristocracy and the emerging gentry class.
A shift then occurred in the classical or baroque épistème, whereby the social significance of the palace and the prince was replaced by the classifying table/cabinet of curiosities of the gentry. Anomalies broke the continuum of resemblances that had been the basis of the regime of truth in Renaissance thinking. They became objects apart, something to be subject to scrutiny and placed in relation to the continuum of what exists on an imaginary classifying table (Foucault [1966] 1989). This opened up new claims to truth and new forms of discourse. For Hooper-Greenhill, the cabinet of curiosities is an example of a classifying table upon which the known world can be subsequently ordered and classified. No longer interested in understanding the world through forms of similitude, this period sees a transitional form of knowledge shaped by the emergence of interest in mathesis (the measurement of order and its representation) as