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A common criticism of the concept of the exhibitionary complex is that it offers a top-down view of power in interpreting museums as a part of the set of relations between state and society encapsulated in Foucault’s notion of the disciplinary society. The criticism is a curiously inattentive one. For, while it is true that I placed the development of the modern public museum alongside that of the penitentiary, I did so precisely in order to distinguish their historical trajectories and the forms of power that they constitute and exercise. Far from aligning museums with the institutions comprising Foucault’s “carceral archipelago” (the penitentiary, the asylum, the monitorial school), I argued that they should be aligned with a quite different set of institutions or apparatuses (international exhibitions, dioramas and panoramas, arcades, department stores). If the institutions that make up the exhibitionary complex are like those of the carceral archipelago in constituting a set of custom-built settings in which particular kinds of power/knowledge relations are produced and brought to bear on those who visit or who are contained within them, the forms of power/knowledge relations involved and their modus operandi are quite distinct. The knowledges that are deployed within the exhibitionary complex do not have the individualizing focus of the psychological disciplines that were brought to bear on the inmates of the asylum or penitentiary, or on the luckless pupils of monitorial schooling, with a view to regulating their conduct. Rather, the exhibitionary disciplines of history, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and natural history were deployed in the new open setting of the public museum where they worked through mechanisms of pedagogy and entertainment to recruit the support of extended citizenries for the bourgeois democratic economic, social, and political order.

My chief contention, then, was not that museums should be approached as sites for the exercise of a set of disciplinary knowledge/power relations but as sites for knowledge/power relations whose field of application was that of free subjects and whose modus operandi was oriented toward the production of a population that would not only be governable but would freely assent to its governance. I drew, for this purpose, on Gramsci’s conception of the ethical state, presenting the role this accords cultural and educative institutions in the production of consent as a counter to Foucault’s account of discipline. I thus concluded the essay by conjuring up an image of the museum as an alternative to Foucault’s depiction of the sealed walls of the penitentiary as the “figure, at once material and symbolic, of the power to punish” (Foucault 1977, 116) that loomed over the nineteenth-century city:

Museums were also typically located at the centre of cities where they stood as embodiments, both material and symbolic, of a power to “show and tell” which, in being deployed in a newly constituted open and public space, sought rhetorically to incorporate the people within the processes of the state. If the museum and the penitentiary thus represented the Janus face of power, there was nonetheless – at least symbolically – an economy of effort between them. For those who failed to adopt the tutelary relation to the self promoted by popular schooling or whose hearts and minds failed to be won in the new pedagogic relations between state and people symbolised by the open doors of the museum, the closed walls of the penitentiary threatened a sterner instruction in the lessons of power. Where instruction and rhetoric failed, punishment began. (Bennett 1998, 99–100)

It is now clear that there was no need to draw on Gramsci in this way to provide a counter to Foucault owing to the respects in which Foucault’s later work on liberal government – not widely available in English at that time – placed clear limits on his conception of the disciplinary society.² Foucault does not pay specific attention to the role of cultural institutions in general, or of museums in particular, in his account of liberal government. Yet it is clear that they are implicated in the historically novel set of relations between rulers and ruled that this account posits. Far from serving as its opposite, Foucault argues, freedom is, in liberal forms of government, a mechanism through which government operates. Rather than something that is pre-given to power as a limit and check on its exercise, freedom is a quality that is produced in varying forms, distributed differentially through the social body, and consumed via the very processes through which the activity of governing is organized.

The concept of liberal government, in short, provides a resource within Foucault’s work through which to think about the role played by the public museum in the development of a distinctive set of power/knowledge relations, which parallel the development of the disciplinary archipelago but are informed by quite different principles. The significance of this shift of perspective for museum theory is brought into sharper focus when considered in the light of Foucault’s account of the relations between sovereign, disciplinary, and governmental forms of power (Foucault 1991). While I have taken these aspects of Foucault’s work into account in my discussion of the governmental logic of evolutionary museums (Bennett 2004), I draw attention to them here to highlight the two main arguments which the exhibitionary complex proposes regarding the social, cultural, and political logics that shaped public museums over the first 150 years or so of their history.

There is, first, the argument that the exhibitionary complex – particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century when both the public museum and international exhibitions became more generalized forms with a broad international currency – is governed by a distinctive set of knowledges, the exhibitionary disciplines, which had a quite different disposition from the individualizing orientation that Foucault attributes to the knowledges informing the development of the carceral archipelago. These disciplines aimed rather “at the representation of a type and its insertion in a developmental sequence for display to a public” (Bennett 1988, 88). Tracing the transition from the orders of classification that governed eighteenth-century natural history to the evolutionary ordering of the histories of the earth and of forms of life associated with mid-to late nineteenth-century developments in geology and biology, I connected these to the parallel emergence of a developmental disposition in the disciplines of art history, history, and archaeology and to the role of exhibitions of science and industry in depicting the history of industry and manufacture as “a series of progressive innovations leading up to the contemporary triumphs of industrial capitalism” (Bennett 1988, 90). The role of anthropology completed this account of the exhibitionary disciplines. By proposing a variety of frameworks for ordering the relations between peoples in evolutionary hierarchies leading from the primitive status attributed to colonized peoples to the subjects of metropolitan powers, it presented the latter as the heirs to, and as the summation of, the developmental dynamic that the exhibitionary disciplines inscribed in the entire course – natural, social, cultural, technological, scientific, and economic – of preceding history:

The space of representation constituted in the relations between the disciplinary knowledges deployed within the exhibitionary complex thus permitted the construction of a temporally organised order of things and peoples. Moreover, that order was a totalising one, metonymically encompassing all things and all peoples in their interactions through time. And an order which organised the implied public – the white citizenries of imperialist powers – into a unity, representationally effacing divisions within the body politic in constructing a “we” conceived as the realisation and therefore just beneficiaries of the processes of evolution and identified as a unity in opposition to the primitive otherness of conquered peoples. (Bennett 1988, 92)

The argument is a historical one. That is to say, it is an argument concerning the relations between the institutions and knowledges that constituted the exhibitionary complex at a particular phase in its development rather than one proposing a necessary and enduring set of such connections. I thus, in a further elaboration of the concept, argued that these connections constituted a historically specific political rationality which, like all such rationalities, generated its own internal contradictions and counterdynamics.³ Foucault argued that the prison was governed by a political rationality, which meant that it generated a demand for the reform of the offender that it could never meet, thus subjecting it to a perpetual criticism for failing to meet its objectives. Similarly, I argued, the exhibitionary complex’s evolutionary ordering of things and peoples generated a demand that it should offer a universally inclusive depiction of the history of Man as the culmination of the history of life on earth which it, too, proved unable to meet owing to the fact that the position of Man it constructed was always occupied by historically exclusive examples – usually white, bourgeois, male, and European or North American:

Similarly, demands based on the principle of representational adequacy are produced and sustained by the fact that, in purporting to tell the story of Man, the space of representation shaped into being in association with the formation of the modern public museum embodies a principle of general human universality in relation to which, whether on the basis of the gendered, racial, class or other social patterns of its exclusions and biases, any particular museum display can be held to be inadequate and therefore in need of supplementation. (Bennett 1995, 91)

The suggestion here, then, is that the organizing rhetorics of the exhibitionary disciplines open the museum up to an insatiable discourse of reform, as it has been called on to correct the social, cultural, and political partialities that inform the particular ways in which museums instantiate the position of Man. This has generated an incessant demand that this position be deconstructed and reconstructed so as to achieve a greater degree of representational adequacy in relation to the norms of universality that the exhibitionary disciplines construct by including, on equal terms, the various histories, groups, or cultures that have been excluded from this position: the histories of women, of indigenous peoples, of racial and ethnic minorities, of subordinate classes, of non-Western religions, and so on. While these aspects of the museum’s political rationality were particularly in evidence in the sociological, feminist, and indigenous critiques of the 1970s and 1980s, they have a longer history in earlier twentieth-century democratizing and reforming moments: the Musée de l’Homme’s (equivocal) criticisms of racialized conceptions of cultural difference in the context of the politics of the Popular Front, for example (Conklin 2008).

There is another aspect to the political rationality of the museum which, like this first one, depends on a contrast with earlier exhibition forms. Where, as in the case of absolutist royal collections, exhibition served the purpose of making royal power manifest and where, accordingly, the pinnacle of representation governing the ordering of things was occupied by the prince or monarch, there could be no question of generating a principle of general inclusiveness from within such a representational regime. Nor, since such demonstrations of power were usually directed more to the court than to the general populace, was there any question of a democratic right of access to them. This principle, symbolized by the seizure of the Louvre, although it only achieved more generalizable and significantly modified forms in the mid-nineteenth century, generated a further contradiction between the conception of museums as instruments for the education of a democratic citizenry and the consequences of their functioning as instruments for the reform of public manners.

While the former requires that they should address an undifferentiated public made up of free and formal equals, the latter, in giving rise to the development of various technologies for regulating or screening out the forms of behaviour associated with popular assemblies, has meant that they have functioned as a powerful means for differentiating populations. (Bennett 1995, 90–91)

This formulation draws on Bourdieu’s arguments concerning the tension between the obligation he places on the art museum to make the heritage of universal culture universally available to all and the actual patterns of its use as a means of enacting and publicly symbolizing middle-class distinction from the working and other subordinate classes (Bourdieu 1996). My purpose in inserting these arguments within a Foucauldian framework was to make a more general point concerning the respects in which the development of the public museum has been written over by multiple scripts of power. The relations between these are brought into useful focus by the distinction Foucault proposes between sovereign, governmental, and disciplinary forms of power which, he insisted, have to be understood in accordance with a principle of historical accumulation rather than one of historical succession. Sovereign power, that is, is not eclipsed by the later development of governmental and disciplinary forms of power but continues in operation alongside them just as they coexist as different ways of operating on conduct that apply to different sections of the population in different ways in different circumstances.

I thus argued, with regard to the principle of spectacle that informed the logic of royal palaces and other demonstrations of royal power through the public enactment of the scene of punishment or the public rituals of royalty, that spectacle did not, as Foucault suggested, disappear as punishment came to be secreted behind the closed walls of the penitentiary. Rather, as collections moved from the closed and private domains of royal and aristocratic households, or of literary, scientific, and philosophical associations, to become increasingly open and public, and as, particularly after 1851, the genre of the international exhibition developed into the most significant form of public entertainment/instruction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so the principle of spectacle migrated to this developing exhibitionary complex. In doing so it was articulated to two new principles of power: to the power of the commodity and of technology as the most potent public symbols of industrial capitalism; and to the power of the people-nation as the heir to the principle of sovereignty. If the first of these was most manifest in international exhibitions, the second was most evident in the development of national museums which, in the public symbolisms of their architectures just as much as in the thematic organization of their exhibits, embodied a new democratic conception of the principle of sovereignty in making the power of the people-nation publicly manifest to itself. This was not, however, the power of an alien, external force – not the power of an absolutism resting on dynastic or imperial principles⁴ – but a power arising out of, and related back to, the citizenries of the people-nations in whose name sovereign power was now exercised in ways that remained, and remain, equally marked by what Foucault characterized as the main principle of sovereign power, its circularity: that is, that it pursues itself and its own increase as an end in itself.

At the same time, however, the public museum also became a significant cultural site for the exercise of the new form of power that Foucault called governmental, in which the activity of governing is directed toward “the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.” (Foucault 1991, 100). This is not, it is important to add, a form of power that springs forth from public museums as an entirely unheralded set of practices. To the contrary, it was preceded, in the British context, by the activities of a whole host of private and civic agencies, ranging from literary, philosophical, and scientific societies, through societies for the improvement of public knowledge to mechanics’ institutes, in which the practice of exhibition was connected to various projects of public education and improvement. As an instance of the process Foucault refers to as the “governmentalization of the state,” such ways of acting on the population via exhibitions of public housing and public health campaigns became early features of the exhibitionary complex. The same logic informs their current roles as significant sites for AIDS education, for lessons in tolerance and intercultural dialogue, or, more recently, for campaigns related to climate change (Cameron 2010).

There is, however, a distinction that Foucault draws between 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.