Museum Theory. Группа авторов
in one space through the material objects they contain and the knowledge associated with them (Foucault 1998a, 182). In so doing, they constitute themselves outside of time, “protected from its erosion” (182). In this way, the museum becomes both a product of modernity and also immune from its conditions of change and flux, and this allows for the uncertainties of the modern world to be measured against them.
Bennett’s brief use of heterotopia in relation to the museum at the opening of his Birth of the Museum (1995, 1) draws out Foucault’s suggestion that museums, which accumulate all times, stand in contrast to spaces of festival, like fairs, in which time is fleeting. He goes on to see this approach to time within the museum’s exhibitionary complex and approach to spectacle as part of its disciplinary power, which contrasts with the temporality and form of exhibition in the undisciplined fair. But there is another reading. What Foucault also says at the outset of this essay is that the second principle of thermodynamics, entropy, is the engine of nineteenth-century time-focused thought, out of which institutions like the museum emerge (1998a, 175). As Donato (1979) has pointed out, the fear of stasis and decadence haunted the nineteenth-century imagination, and ideas about progress and improvement, which were very much articulated by the great nineteenth-century museums, were used to stave off the fear that modern society was in a state of decay. Foucault sees museums and their approach to time as a mirror in which society can see itself. He doesn’t say whether what it sees in the museum is good or bad, though he recognizes that all heterotopia, including the museum, have a utopian function (see also Marin 1984).
In terms of Deleuze’s articulation of the question of saying and seeing, we can use these fragments of Foucault’s on the museum, alongside his observations on the surface of emergence to suggest that he poses the problem of the modern museum thus: the premise of the museum is that it is able to say new things in the space of the already seen. In that sense, it is set up as a surface of emergence for new discursive objects, new discourses and new disciplines, and potentialities of knowledge (see, e.g., Whitehead 2009). The promise of the museum is the promise of the emergence of new discourse amid the display of the already read and of the endless development and progress in knowledge. The other side of the museum is that the mirror reflects back: it is also a space in which new things come to be seen in a space of the already said (see Hetherington 1997b). It thus unsettles existing knowledge and brings it into doubt, thereby threatening to make visible the prospect of stasis, undermine serious collections and make them appear nothing but bric-a-brac (see Donato 1979; Saisselin 1985; Crimp 1993). The relationship is one of irresolvable tension between establishing an impossible primacy between the discursive and the nondiscursive, and in the interplay between the discursive and the figural (see Lyotard 1984). That is perhaps what the self-referential nature of Flaubert’s and Manet’s art is all about – an ironic statement of opportunity and disappointment in the project of the museum to realize encyclopedic understanding that will also endlessly offer up new ways of seeing things within its monadic yet endless capacity. In this dual sense, a surface of emergence is both the beginning of the establishment of relations of power through a process and also the space of the outside of power that is their unravelling (see Hetherington 1997b; 2014).
Conclusion: Seeing in the space of the already said
We have, then, three models of the museum in Foucault’s work: the abstract space of changing discourse (Hooper-Greenhill); the disciplinary space of the “open prison” (Bennett); and the space of the infinite and yet monadic archive, which is ambiguously open to both possibility and doubt in its truth claims. Foucault himself was never explicit on any of these positions; he invited all three and perhaps others besides. If the first of these positions, following Deleuze’s criticisms, can be said to place too much emphasis on the formation of discourse in the making of truth at the expense of an understanding of the role of the nondiscursive (materialities) in relations of power, then the second, associated with Discipline and Punish, can be said to rectify that; but it does it in a way that limits the possible diagrammatic expressions of power that do not map neatly onto the panopticon model. Despite Bennett’s extended efforts to persuade us of the nuanced disciplinary effects of the museum (see Chapter 1 in this volume), there is still a reductionism to this function that surely precludes too many other dimensions of the museum’s role within society. The third position, based on a few fragments surrounding Foucault’s “failed” archaeology /archive project (see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982), suggests more open possibilities (on previous attempts to reconstruct these fragments, see Donato 1979; Crimp 1993; Shapiro 2003). Foucault offers us neither the utopian promise of the museum’s own self-belief nor a model of another carceral institution that shows how it is just another institutionalization of discursive power within the cultural field. Was it lack of interest or an inability to resolve the ambiguous relation between saying and seeing within these spaces that led him to abandon his approach to the cultural institutions of modern art? We shall never know, but we do know that he subsequently sought certainty in the operation of the visual technology of power in the much less ambiguous space of the prison in the work that followed in the early 1970s.
What Foucault offers us instead is another space of power, one defined by an irresolvable tension between establishing the truth in discursive and nondiscursive forms, in which discourses have the opportunity to be both made and unmade by how we see in the realm of discursive power. That he never established a clear position, that he perhaps vacillated in his appreciation of both aspects of the museum and did not articulate a clear understanding of the spaces of culture as he did with madness, health, and prisons, is perhaps because of its inherent ambivalence. As a diagram of power the museum’s lines are never clearly drawn (see Hetherington 1997b). It is even less clear now that it is just a space in which discourses are made or where discipline takes place. It is a space that captures time as history only to see it shift and morph into something else: colonial splendour into slavery, civilization into Orientalism and conquest, Western primacy into doubt, conservation into decay, display into storage. It is an understanding of this movement, and the uncertainty associated with it, that Foucault’s work offers to the study of the museum, resulting in a much more fluid understanding of the shaping of power, in a space of continual emergence, and subjectivity.
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