fragment on the museum is in an essay, written as an afterword, on Flaubert’s novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Foucault 1998b). In it Foucault makes reference to two leading nineteenth-century French artists, the novelist Gustave Flaubert and the painter Édouard Manet, and how they have produced novels and paintings that are both directly engaged with the nineteenth-century project of the archive – the library in Flaubert’s case and the museum in Manet’s. A key passage on the function of museums is worth repeating here (for other discussions see Donato 1979; Crimp 1993; Shapiro 2003):
Dejeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia were perhaps the first “museum” paintings, the first paintings in European art that were less a response to the achievement of Giorgione, Raphael and Velasquez than an acknowledgement … of the new and substantial relationship of painting to itself, as a manifestation of the existence of museums and the particular reality and interdependence that paintings acquire in museums … Flaubert is to the library what Edouard Manet is to the museum. They both produced works in a self-conscious relationship to earlier paintings or texts – or rather to the aspect in painting or writing that remains in definitely open. (Foucault 1998b: 107)
This suggests a particular kind of space in which things become visible and around which the discourses of art and literature are formed. As Gary Shapiro (2003, 223ff.) has suggested, Foucault’s thoughts on the museum here were probably influenced by one of the leading commentators on museums within French society after World War II, André Malraux. Malraux was very much a celebrator of the museum both as a universal space in which all cultures from all times could be brought together, and as out of time, for the sake of learning and appreciation (Malraux 1978). He also thought that such an idea could be extended beyond the physical space of a museum through the ability to mechanically reproduce images of art through the use of photographs in art books. In a manner not dissimilar to Walter Benjamin’s essay on the impact of the mechanically reproduced image on the aura of museum art ([1934] 1973), Malraux, writing in 1947, was therefore a champion of the museum project, very much against the grain of over a century of French critique from Quatremère de Quincy to Paul Valéry (see Adorno 1967; for an overview see Maleuvre 1999). Malraux believed that the ability to reproduce artworks in print made them accessible to all. For him, the reproduction of images also universalized the museum principle as a musée imaginaire, or “museum without walls,” allowing people to experience art from across space and time in a single imaginary space that provided opportunity for comparison and new insights into the universal creativity and cultural understanding of Man (sic) across the ages (Malraux 1978).
Foucault would unquestionably have been an opponent of Malraux’s humanism, given the themes of his then major work, The Order of Things ([1966] 1989). He is also far more ambiguous than Malraux in his reception of the museum. However, his vision in this fragment of the modern library as an enclosed but infinite archival space in which objects can be seen diversely in relation to each other, certainly bears at least a passing resemblance to Malraux’s model of the musée imaginaire, at least in formal terms.
Writing some 20 years before Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, one of the key inspirations on his thought at this time (see Foucault 1990), had made a similar, albeit more critical, point about the museum space, in direct response to Malraux’s celebration of the open museum principle. Rather than a space without walls, Blanchot suggested, the museum (and he used the art museum as his model, as does Foucault) is a “monad without windows” (1997, 22). For Blanchot, the museum makes art accessible but it does so in a way that allows art to lose its radical alterity to tell us something different about the world. What art does in the museum, he suggests, is tell us the story of museum art (schools, styles, traditions, developments, etc.). Foucault is less overtly pessimistic than Blanchot on the stultifying effect of the museum on the art that it houses but, for him, it is nonetheless an enclosed archival space of power. The question is how it might operate.
Deleuze suggests that this period of Foucault’s work is still dominated by an interest in the discursive at the expense of the nondiscursive, as in his earlier writings. He singles out The Archaeology of Knowledge to make this point (Deleuze 1988, 32). However, in this fragment on the museum we see Foucault trying precisely to grasp the significance of a visual technology of power in the library/museum in relation to the discourses articulated there in cultural form. The model for the library/museum is not the prison but the archive, that visual space in which all discourse is housed and made available.
Despite what Deleuze has to say about this period in his work (and it is true that there is no understanding of the visual technology that surrounds the nondiscursive operation of power, as there is in Discipline and Punish), there is in the Archaeology a key section where Foucault does try to understand precisely the relationship between saying and seeing. It is to be found in the section where he introduces us to the idea of a surface of emergence (1974, 41ff.; see also Elden 2001 on this theme in Foucault’s work). In the section where he discusses the formation of discursive objects Foucault suggests that there are three practices that need to be identified in the making of any understandable discourse around a discursive object: surface of emergence, authorities of delimitation, and grids of specification (Foucault 1974, 41–42). In the first, surface of emergence, Foucault is interested in the space in which otherwise diverse things first become visible and knowable as a common set of discursive objects. They may have been seen before but they haven’t been known together before this emergence became apparent. The second, authorities of delimitation, relates to the professional individuals who assume the authority to speak about the objects that have emerged and who shape the discourse around those objects. The third, grids of specification, are the forms of discursive knowledge that these professionals use to order and classify the discursive object over which they have claimed authority.
Foucault’s own example to illustrate this understanding of a visual apparatus surrounding the formation of a discursive object is that of madness in relation to the clinic and psychiatry in the nineteenth century: the surface of emergence, in this case, refers to the visible manifestation of different conditions of insanity in the clinic; the authorities of delimitation are those in the medical profession who are able to speak and write about what they observe; and the grids of specification are the ways in which they order, classify, and understand different kinds of madness as claims of truth about them. This is very different from the museum in terms of its discursive object, but the process of ordering and classifying in order to make truth claims about phenomena could be said to reflect the key functions of the modern museum quite clearly: it makes visible a set of things that, when brought together, can have apparent familiarity (pace Malraux); this discourse has a series of professional curators, conservations, and catalogers who together shape it around what has come to be seen; and it has forms of knowledge relating to such things as style, school, period, epoch, genus, and so on through which we come to understand the world and its past through its varied forms of material culture (organic or inorganic). The formation of such discourses takes place, Foucault suggests, in self-enclosed interior spaces (1974, 76). The model here is not the prison or the clinic but the archive.
What Foucault is principally interested in here is the process of making knowable what is already visible. If we read the Saint Anthony fragment in light of the position developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge, we get a glimpse of how the museum might be said to function as a surface of emergence, within a specific delimited field (and the museum has many, from the universal to the highly specific, natural as well as cultural).
It is around this theme of emergence that we might finally begin to understand what Foucault meant in the other fragment where he speaks of a museum as a heterotopia (1986; 1998a; see also Bennett 1995; Hetherington 1997a; 2011; Lord 2006). Originally given as a talk and never developed systematically (see Johnson 2006), his examples of heterotopia (other places/places of otherness/emplacements of the other – it is never fully made clear which, and there are elements of each interpretation in this unfinished essay) are diverse, ranging from brothels to old people’s homes to asylums. Among them he includes the museum as an example of a type of heterotopia that he calls a heterochronia – a space that brings into view the otherness of time all in one place in contradistinction to the flux of time in modernity (1998a, 182). What he says about museums here is also a general