2003). In fact, Foucault’s published comments in this area consist of just a few fragmentary remarks. But fragments can be revealing – not only in what they say but also in what they don’t. Most well known is his brief observation on museums in his often quoted piece on heterotopia (1986; 1998a; see also Bennett 1995). Another passing reflection can be found in an afterword he wrote for an edition of Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Foucault 1998b). That piece is more about libraries than museums but he does refer there to Manet’s art as museum art and treats both institutions in a similar light. Notably, we also know that he intended a detailed study of the work of Manet, in which museums might have figured, given his earlier observations, but other than a couple of talks, one of which has now been published as the basis of a short book (Foucault 2009), this was a project that he abandoned sometime around 1970 so that it remained a fragment too.
Despite the paucity of references, this has not stopped his work having a lasting influence on museum studies in recent years, notably in the body of critical analysis developed over the past 25 years that is associated with a sociological turn in museum studies which has come to be known as the new museology (Vergo 1989). Whereas the old museology was mainly interested in the academic study of the contents of museums (although see Bazin 1967; Duncan and Wallach 1980), this new museology has been more interested in the position of the museum as well as in museums (not the same thing – and I’m interested here in the former) within society, and that includes addressing some distinctly Foucauldian themes, such as the constitution of knowledge through museum discourse, the practices of power through the museum institution, and the shaping of viewing subjects through their relation to museum exhibitions. Along with Bourdieu, with his interest in issues of distinction, taste, and the reproduction of social class through cultural and educational institutions (e.g., Bourdieu 1984) and who wrote much more extensively on art institutions like museums (Bourdieu and Darbel 1997), Foucault can be seen as one of the two leading theoretical inspirations for critical museum studies since the 1980s (for an overview see Lai 2004).
While the small number of Foucault’s own comments on the museum have long been known (see Donato 1979; Crimp 1993; Bennett 1995; Shapiro 2003), it is in the broader issues from Foucault’s work applied to museums, rather than what he had to say about museums per se, that his influence, to date, can be seen. In particular, there are two principal themes taken from Foucault that have shaped the analysis of museums, and a third, less developed, one that also needs consideration and which I want to make visible and discuss more prominently here. These themes broadly equate to different periods in his work. The first of these has to do with the epistemic constitution of discourses of knowledge that relate to particular times and modes of understanding that Foucault identifies in The Order of Things ([1966] 1989). His association of épistèmes with particular recognized “ages” – the Renaissance, the seventeenth-century “classical” or baroque age, and the modern age – has been analyzed in relation to the seemingly corresponding history of the museum, notably by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill. In particular, she associates different modes of museum discourse and ordering with each of these epistemic constitutions of knowledge across the last 500 years (Hooper-Greenhill 1989; 1992). In this work the main interest is in the position that museums play within the constitution of discourses of knowledge and their relationship to understanding the order of things within society.
A second approach, while also interested in questions of historical development, takes its lead from Foucault’s later analysis of the operation of power and forms of governmentality rather than from the constitution of discourse per se. Tony Bennett’s work on museums has come to be most closely associated with this approach (Bennett 1995; 2004a; 2013). First, through a direct and critical engagement with the ideas of disciplinary power associated with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in his essays on the exhibitionary complex (Bennett 1995; 2004b), and later through his work on evolution and museums (2004a) and on the institutions of culture in general (2013), Bennett seeks to understand the museum through a critical engagement with Foucault’s concept of governmentality and how it informs an understanding of the visibilities of subjectivity as an object of government power in the era of liberalism.
If Hooper-Greenhill is mainly influenced by Foucault’s work up to about 1966, Bennett draws mainly on Foucault’s later work, notably from Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1977) and a key essay on governmentality ([1978] 2001). So, in the first instance we can see that some of Foucault’s early work, notably that associated with The Order of Things has influenced those working within museum studies to think about the museum’s role in the production of knowledge and discourses of scientific understanding. In the second, around a concept first of exhibitionary complexes and later of government assemblages, Foucault’s later work, after Discipline and Punish, has been used to understand the role of museums in helping to self-discipline subjects in relation to the modes of governance that define modern society (see Chapter 1 by Tony Bennett in this volume).
Noteworthy, however, is that Foucault himself does not speak of museums directly in either of these periods of his work. Where he does so is in the mid-phase of his work in the later 1960s, where his interests were mainly with the project of archaeology and the constitution of the modern archive (Foucault 1974). It is within this period that we find his museum comments in the St. Anthony, Manet, and heterotopia fragments (see Donato 1979; Crimp 1993; Shapiro 2003; Hetherington 2011). For some, notably Deleuze (1988), this phase, of which the major statement is his book The Archaeology of Knowledge (1974), is transitional in the way Foucault engages with the philosophical themes of seeing and saying and their relationship in the shaping of modern society. In his early work Foucault is principally interested in the discourses of power that emerge from speech (saying). In his later work he is more interested in the visibilities and technologies of power as expressions of discourse (seeing). In between these two phases in his work he is struggling in a move from the former to the latter and his comments on the museum should be seen in that context, as that is where they appear. I want to suggest that the ambivalence of this period, not least around what he has to say or, more accurately, imply about the museum – rather than a deficiency, as Deleuze sees it – is suggestive of how we might now choose to approach it.
In this chapter, therefore, I set out what Foucault has to tell us about museums through each of these different phases of his work and I shall do so by drawing on its reception within museum studies. In the first and third periods of his work, this means discussing the work of the leading authors, Hooper-Greenhill and Bennett, alongside Foucault’s own general analysis rather than analyzing what Foucault himself says. The aim in doing this is not merely to illustrate their accounts but to suggest important elements that we can draw from both as well as some departures we might want to make from them. My central argument, however, guided by Deleuze’s (1988) influential reading of Foucault, will be that the absence of an understanding of the middle fragmentary phase diminishes these extant Foucauldian-influenced understandings of museums in contemporary museology. While there has been some analysis of this period of Foucault’s work in the context of the museum, notably in Gary Shapiro’s Archaeologies of Vision (2003), further analysis is required to allow us to develop a more systematic way of approaching museums through Foucault’s work (see also Hetherington 1999; 2011). I want to spend some time looking at what he does say there about the archival monadism of museums (and libraries), as the position is somewhat different from that posed in both his earlier and his later works.
The argument that I will set out is that the first period of Foucault’s work is principally concerned with the shaping of discourse and its relation to different forms of museum knowledge over the last 500 years. The third period, if it can be summarized, is concerned with the visibilities of power and their role in shaping subjects through practices of self-discipline and governmentality. The common theme that runs throughout Foucault’s work, as Gilles Deleuze has pointed out, is that it is concerned with the operation of power through attention to the relations between seeing and saying, or between the nondiscursive and discourse. It is the relations between the two as problematic that I argue is most apparent in the fragmentary middle phase of his work. His early work can be characterized as being principally concerned with how discourse emerges and becomes independent from speech. His later work is more