Museum Theory. Группа авторов
the interest that governmental power has in operating through the consciousness of individual members of the population and its more distinctive tactics and techniques in which “the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, but it is also the object in the hands of the government, aware, vis-à-vis the government, of what it wants, but ignorant of what is being done to it” (1991, 100). I shall return to the broader considerations this passage prompts shortly. I draw attention to it here by way of briefly identifying how the public museum also instantiated a form of governmental power which – drawing on aspects of disciplinary power – operated through mechanisms that bypassed the consciousness of the museum’s visitors. These concern the respects in which the museum constituted a machinery for the transformation of public manners, one among many mechanisms for altering the dress, comportment, and behavior of the new mass publics they admitted. This was in part a matter of rules and regulations, of the operation of the museum as space for emulation in which a newly culturally enfranchised working class could observe and copy how middle-class visitors conducted themselves within the museum space, and in part a matter of the disciplinary gaze of museum guards, and the regulatory functions of tour guides and, later, of docents. But it was also, I suggested, an aspect of the architectural layout of museums and exhibitions. Museums certainly continued to be informed by the architectural principles of spectacle in their need to make publicly manifest the sovereign power of the people-nation. They also operated like the institutions of discipline, but in relation to their publics rather than to enclosed populations, providing a means of shaping conduct by so arranging the lines of sight that the museum’s public, in being made visible to itself, would also be able to monitor itself. The museum, then, as a place for the transformation of the crowd into a well-regulated public, where a citizenry watches over and regulates itself via architectural arrangements which – prior to CCTV – brought each visitor under the controlling gaze of other visitors.
Limitations of the exhibitionary complex
In summary, then, the concept of the exhibitionary complex was proposed as a means of thinking through a series of transformations in the relations between the practices of exhibition and the modalities of power that accompanied the development of the public museum. The concept has attracted a fair range of discussion (see, for example, Witcomb 2003; Hall 2006; and Henning 2006) and I have, in the foregoing, responded to some of the criticisms that have been leveled against it by trying to clarify its historical limits. It has other limits too: it cannot be applied indiscriminately or with equal force to every institution to which the term “museum” might be attached. The arguments regarding the architectural forms of the exhibitionary complex do not apply to museums, like the British Museum, that are located in pre-nineteenth-century buildings. The arguments about publicness and openness similarly do not apply to museums, like Chicago’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, designed for the private contemplation of their owners and selected guests. The principles of curiosity continued to inform many museum displays, particularly those of local museums, and often cheek by jowl with the evolutionary orientations of the exhibitionary disciplines. And so on … There are many exceptions that might be cited; the status of the concept is more that of a Weberian ideal type which illuminates a set of interconnected tendencies albeit that no single exemplar unites these entirely.
It should also be clear that the political rationality I attributed to the museum arises from a historically particular set of its relations to the exhibitionary disciplines. These have, for example, clearly been transformed in the context of the various critiques to which the museum has been subjected in the last half century, and the revisions and additions to the exhibitionary disciplines that these have given rise to. Rather than calling the validity of the concept into question, however, this prompts an inquiry into the new forms of political rationality produced by the contemporary relations between exhibitionary disciplines and apparatuses. While I have suggested some directions that such investigations might take (Bennett 2006), Wendy Brown’s (2006) conception of tolerance as a new and distinctive form of governmentality offers a better overarching framework for such investigations. Brown’s argument depends on a distinction between two historical forms taken by Western discourses and practices of tolerance. In their original forms these constituted an aspect of the deconfessionalization of politics that accompanied the development of the modern state. As such, they subordinated religious factionalism to the sovereign power of the state by making the state (to varying degrees) indifferent to religious differences so far as the distribution of civic rights and entitlements were concerned. The post-World War II broadening of this historical discourse of tolerance beyond its application to divisions within Christianity to more generalized forms operating across racial, ethnic, sexual, and multifaith religious boundaries has, Brown argues, been accompanied by a significant shift in the agents of tolerance. “Once limited to edicts or policies administered by church and state,” she writes, “tolerance now circulates through a multitude of sites in civil society – schools, museums, neighborhood associations, secular civic groups, and religious organizations” (Brown 2006, 37). This shift, she contends, reflects a transformation from the functioning of tolerance as “an element in the arsenal of sovereign power to a mode of governmentality” (37) in which it operates as “a complex supplement to liberal equality, making up for and covering over limitations in liberal practices of equality” (36) by managing the demands for recognition and difference of marginal groups in ways that leave intact the forces that marginalize them.
This, then, offers a framework within which many of the proposals for “retooling” museums – from their conception as instruments for a critical cosmopolitanism, as “differencing machines” promoting new forms of cultural hybridity, or, in James Clifford’s terms, as contact zones (1997) – might be located as variant formulations of contemporary reorderings of the relations between museums and liberal forms of governmentality. Recognition of this does not entail a departure from the analytical principles underlying the concept of the exhibitionary complex. It requires merely their redirection in order to engage with a rearticulation of the relations between a particular set of knowledges and the apparatuses of the exhibitionary complex to account for their roles as parts of a new political rationality that has accompanied a significant historical mutation in liberal forms of government.
The limitations of “the exhibitionary complex” that strike me most in retrospect are of a different order. They concern the restricted framework that the concept places on our understanding of, first, the modalities of power that museums form a part of, and, second, the different kinds of power they enact as a consequence of the different networks and circuits they are connected to.5 There are three main reasons why this is so:
1 The concept suggests that the forms of power exercised by museums are limited to their exhibition functions and that, consequently, the role of the exhibitionary disciplines is exhausted by the part they play in organizing museum displays. This neglects the role that museum collections play as resources for research practices and, consequently, provides no means of engaging with the ways in which museological deployments of the exhibitionary disciplines circulate beyond the museum to connect with, and form parts of, power relations that are not dependent on exhibition practices.
2 Insofar as the concept proposes that museums constitute a form of governmental power, it limits the forms of action on populations they might exercise to those that they exert on the publics who go through their doors or the wider publics they reach via the circulation of representations based on their collections and activities through the institutions of the public sphere (newspapers and broadcasting, for example). This is a crucial limitation so far as the relations between museums and colonialism are concerned, owing to the respects in which colonized peoples who may never have heard of or visited museums, or been part of the public spheres though which their activities circulate, have nonetheless been profoundly affected by their activities.
3 The concept pays insufficient attention to the different forms and sources of agency that need to be taken into account in the analysis of both the determinations and repercussions of museum practices. It privileges the agency of curators/directors, education officers, architects, and the public over the varied forms of agency that are exerted along the diverse routes through which objects reach museums and enter their collections.