It was the modern era from around the mid-eighteenth century that saw the emergence of the museum as we would understand it today, as well as a more fully articulated emphasis on the powers of representation to establish the truth. For Hooper-Greenhill, modern museums, often founded on overgrown private cabinet collections, illustrate the new forms of truth. This period saw the museum emerge alongside the discourse of man and a representationalist mode of ordering based on a clear, established classification system. The key shift from the classical to the modern era saw the anomalous disappear as an object of inquiry, becoming simply a problem of finding a place for it within a classification of all that is known. As an agent of representation, the human subject (the scientist-collector-aesthete) was able to do that work of classification through the pure gaze of disinterested investigation.
Across these different épistèmes and their associated forms of collection, Hooper-Greenhill follows Foucault in emphasizing how the ordering work is a product of the discourse of a particular épistème. That discourse changes over time, not through some continuous, linear flow of ideas, but through disjunctures in the ways of speaking about objects that become both visible and problematic to established knowledge. This is then reflected in new ways of seeing. Seeing very much follows speaking in this period of Foucault’s work. Despite his earlier analysis of the asylum and the clinic, according to Deleuze (1988), he had yet to fully develop an understanding of the role of the nondiscursive (i.e., the visible, the figural) in the shaping of knowledge and power. Hooper-Greenhill’s analysis echoes such an approach in that museum collecting is seen as an outcome of the discourse that shapes ways of seeing and knowing. Bennett’s use of Foucault’s later work to understand the museum provides a contrasting approach to this, even though the issue of discourse and the shaping of knowledge remains a key part of his analysis.
Seeing and the power of the museum
Along with Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1989; 1992), and to some degree Douglas Crimp (1993), Tony Bennett’s work on museums is most closely associated with an attempt to understand them from a Foucauldian perspective (Bennett 1995; 2004a). First, through a direct engagement with the ideas of disciplinary power associated with Discipline and Punish in his essays on the exhibitionary complex (Bennett 1988; 1995), and later through his work on evolution and museums which draws on the later Foucauldian theory of governmentality (Bennett 2004a; 2013), Bennett aims to understand the museum through a critical engagement with Foucault’s concepts and approach to subjectivity and visual technologies of governmental power.
Bennett is by no means a straightforward adopter of a Foucauldian approach. Unlike Hooper-Greenhill (1992), who seeks to apply Foucault’s thought to the field of the museum in an uncritical way, Bennett has throughout nearly three decades of writing on the museum tended to adopt a more syncretist approach to theorizing culture, and in his analysis has used Foucault as something of a constant supplement to others: early on Gramsci (Bennett 1995), later Bourdieu (Bennett 2004a), and most recently actor network theory (Bennett 2013). While Hooper-Greenhill derives her analysis from Foucault’s early work around discourse and épistème, it is the later work on power that is of most interest to Bennett. Starting with Foucault’s understanding of power in Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1977) as operationalized through a visual technology that shapes subjects through self-discipline, Bennett’s interest throughout has been with the constitution of liberal forms of power and governance and their articulation through cultural forms of exhibition and spectacle, notably in the context of the museum. What he wants to know is how modern subjects are formed through their relationship to a mode of liberal cultural organization.
In his earliest work on museums Bennett finds Foucault’s overall approach to power and surveillance as set out in the example of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish too restrictive and overdetermining (Bennett 1995, 61). At this time Bennett retains an interest in the operation of power outside of discourses associated with class interests, drawn from a Gramscian perspective and used to consider the combined effects of discourse and ideology within power relations embedded within civil society and the development of the state. However, what is notable in Bennett’s early work on the museum is an attempt to understand the relations of power that Foucauldian insights bring to bear on such social institutions.
For Bennett, the museum is not a carceral institution per se but, along with other forms of exhibition, a more disciplined form of spectacle in which the once excluded unruly mob is regulated into the more orderly public or audience of modern civil society (see Chapter 1 by Bennett in this volume). His core argument is that the unruly spectacle of the fair is regulated, first through exhibitions such as that in London in 1851, and later in a range of nineteenth-century museums that became the model space for displaying culture to a population of educated citizens. For Bennett, the museum is about exhibition rather than confinement, and it articulates a liberal understanding of the social/cultural and the disciplinary idea of citizenship as an expression of governmental discourse. By the nineteenth century the museum was a space that had shed its earlier associations with the private collection and its invited visitors and had come to be premised on the idea of openness to the wider public. It is also a space in which spectacle is the organizing principle and in which visitors are constituted as citizens who self-identify with a project of state-sponsored public instruction.
In some respects Bennett seeks to contrast the museum with the panoptic prison. Whereas in the panopticon example earlier forms of punishment as spectacle (as in public execution) give way to surveillance and the public element of punishment becomes closed within the prison, for Bennett the museum instead expresses its disciplinary intent through the opposites of public spectacle and accessibility. It is around these functions that Bennett comes to define the operation of what he calls the exhibitionary complex:
The formation of the exhibitionary complex involved a break with both [private ownership and restricted access] in effecting the transfer of significant quantities of cultural and scientific property from private into public ownership where they were housed within institutions administered by the state for the benefit of an extended general public. (1995, 73)
For Bennett, the museum has an ordering, regulating, and disciplinary mission that is nonetheless comparable to the carceral institutions of Discipline and Punish, but museums operate through different – softer and less coercive – techniques to subdue disorderly forms of popular culture (public spectacles, fairs, carnivals: see also Altick 1978) and thereby harness spectacle to the liberal state project of an orderly and disciplined society of citizens. In later writing, often in response to criticism of this earlier work, Bennett has been at pains to rightly point out that he never treated the museum as operating in the same manner as the panopticon (see Chapter 1 in this volume). Nonetheless, it retains for him a disciplinary emphasis as the means through which citizens as subject become the subjects of a liberal polity. A summary of his position might be that the functioning of a museum can be understood through a Foucauldian approach to the operation of disciplinary power and subject formation but one which does not follow the totalizing example of the prison in its effects:
Thus, if the museum supplanted the scene of punishment in taking on the function of displaying power to the populace, the rhetorical economy of the power that was displayed was significantly altered. Rather than embodying an alien and coercive principle of power which aimed to cow the people into submission, the museum – addressing the people as a public, as citizens – aimed to