Foucault’s view of power is here softened with Gramsci’s view on hegemonic acceptance. What Bennett gets from Foucault is not, then, his novel philosophical approach to power itself (or subjectivity) but, rather, an example of a particular operationalization of power – through disciplinary techniques associated with visual display – that people come to identify themselves with the nineteenth-century formation of the liberal state and its civil society. That doesn’t take place, for Bennett, in the coercive space of the prison but in the more open, publically engaging space of the museum as an exemplar space of how modern culture is organized. It needs to be said, though, that what interests Foucault in Discipline and Punish is the visual technology of power – not the discourse of penality as such but, more specifically, its articulation with nondiscursive visual technologies used for exercising power, notably the panopticon. Bennett still adopts this as a model, albeit in its softer form, for his approach to the museum in his work on the exhibitionary complex.
In his later work, Bennett himself is critical of some elements of his earlier approach, notably the way he situated the discursive practices and apparatuses of the museum within a broader ideological field in which underlying social relations of class are played out through political and cultural practices (2004a, 5–6). Ideology disappears from his later analysis to be replaced by the notion of governmentality which, as a Foucauldian concept, sits more easily with Foucault’s approach to discourse than a Gramscian perspective does. He also moves away from a focus on the museum as a site of governance through exhibition, notably in the colonial context, where indigenous people are not treated in the same manner by museums and European audiences. His focus on Foucault, therefore, shifts from an interest in what he has to say about the operation of power in Discipline and Punish and its relationship to exhibition to Foucault’s now well-known later essay on governmentality (Foucault [1978] 2001). In his two more recent books (Bennett 2004a; 2013) it is liberal governance rather than the ideological operation of power per se that is Bennett’s main focus. What remains as its defining function, though, is a core understanding of the disciplinary function of the museum. That is the means through which subjects come to engage with the discourses of liberal governance.
In this more recent work, Bennett is interested in the ways that museums as more multiple and less certain assemblages are linked into cultural strategies of governmentality. In this, Bennett remains interested in forms of self-regulation (this, for Foucault, is what distinguishes governmentality from more coercive forms of government) that are as much a part of a liberal civil society as they are the apparatus of the state. Extending his interest in the museum from its European heartland to the colonial terrain of Australia, Bennett aims to show how the reach of liberal forms of governmentality expressed through discourses about race and evolution are articulated with the museum project. Museums become civic laboratories (Bennett 2013) for the practices of liberal governmentality and visitors subject themselves to its self-regulating expectations around civic (and civil) conduct defined through a white European norm.
While Bennett sees Gramsci as no longer needed because Foucault alone, through his later writings, provides the tools for understanding the state, the legacy of the idea of the ethical state as a way of understanding liberal governmentality, and of the museum as one of its major projects, remains intact as the governing way in which Bennett seeks to understand the dominant project of the museum. State power remains the central interest in this perspective on the museum and it is defined through the relationship of how people understand themselves in relation to the discourse that is articulated through what they see in the exhibitionary space, as well as in its wider operations and the stories it tells about society.
Museum fragments and the space between saying and seeing
Hooper-Greenhill’s and Bennett’s contemporary interest in developing a Foucauldian perspective on the museum draws, then, on work from the different ends of Foucault’s career. As we have seen, Hooper-Greenhill is mainly interested in the position around discourse that emerges from Foucault’s early work, culminating in The Order of Things, whereas Bennett is interested in the operations of power and governmentality that Foucault articulates most clearly in Discipline and Punish and later work. The focus of interest marks not simply a shift from language and discourse to power and vision but, more fundamentally, from around the ways in which Foucault understands the key relationship between saying and seeing in the shaping of power-knowledge (see Deleuze 1988).
According to Deleuze, Foucault’s early work is principally concerned with issues of saying and with the emergence of discourse from speech as something independent of the speaking subject. To try to summarize his position: discourse becomes the “outside” of speech that is other to the speaking subject while being at the same time the space in which subjectivity is itself defined as such (Foucault 1990). In many respects, Hooper-Greenhill’s analysis of the changing épistème in relation to the museum is also an analysis of the changing face of subjectivity constituted through the varying museum discourses of the three épistèmes she describes (see also Hetherington 1999). What this approach of Foucault’s to power and subjectivity leaves out, Deleuze argues, is an understanding of the operation of the nondiscursive, notably with what is made visible and knowable through the operations of power which, he suggests, haunts all of Foucault’s work (Deleuze 1988, 32). This is still the terrain of discourse, but of discourse operating not through texts but through the materialities and figures or technologies of power.
The interest in the nondiscursive, with the nondiscursive environment (what others have subsequently called materiality), is very much the preoccupation of Discipline and Punish. In employing the example of the prison (rather than the school, factory, or other institutionalized apparatus of power), Foucault was simply making use of the most obvious and extreme “diagram” of a disciplining institution, in which the nondiscursive operation of power on subjects can be most clearly seen (on diagram, see Deleuze 1988, and in this context Hetherington 2011). In this respect, Bennett is right to observe that the museum does not operate in the same way as a prison: it isn’t a carceral institution in the same manner. And yet, by employing the idea of the technology of power derived from Foucault’s reading of the diagram of the panopticon with its central focus of discipline, Bennett still uses it to inform our understanding of the museum’s foremost function as disciplining institution. It is not, I would argue, that Bennett is wrong in his reading of the museum but that, in drawing as he does on this aspect of Foucault’s work from his later work, he transforms one element of the operation of the museum – its disciplinary function – into a definition of the museum project as a whole. Museums may have had such a function but, I would argue, they operate in other, less clearly defined, ways too (see also Witcomb 2003). If Hooper-Greenhill, following the early Foucault, overemphasizes the articulation of discourse in the shaping of knowledge, then Bennett, following the later Foucault, can be said to overemphasize the technologies of vision and the operation of disciplinary power through a delimited nondiscursive terrain.
If we want to find an alternative take on the museum, one that retains a recognition of the key observations around discourse and power from both of these eras of Foucault’s work (and the subsequent readings they have influenced) but which offers different readings and possibilities, we need to seek it in the missing and more transitional period in Foucault’s writing – the time where he did, albeit fleetingly, speak of the museum himself (see Hetherington 2011; 2014). Of course, there is no book by Foucault on the museum in the way there is on the asylum, the clinic, or the prison. There are, however, two places where Foucault speaks directly on museums, both from essays written in 1967 when he was just beginning his ill-fated and unrealized study of the painter Édouard Manet and thinking about the relationship of modern art to knowledge constituted within the gallery (see Foucault 2009; Shapiro 2003). What we can add, though, is that there is a book on the archive, from the same period as these museum fragments, that contains suggestive ideas on how Foucault might be usefully applied to the museum in relation to his comments on it from this period – The Archaeology of Knowledge (1974).
Before turning to that, it is important to see first