Читать книгу Museum Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 30

Steven Conn has, rightly I think, taken issue with applications of Foucauldian perspectives to museums which interpret them as institutions of discipline and confinement, as though they were parts of the carceral archipelago (Conn 2010, 5–6). While generously exempting my work from this assessment, my suggestion that we should consider the role that museums have played in orchestrating “the break between what must live and what must die” (Foucault 2003, 254) might suggest that this generosity is misplaced. But I think not. The argument is a particular one, applicable to a particular set of museums in a specific set of historical circumstances rather than to “the museum” as such. Indeed, it rests on a perspective in which the museum as such disappears as a possible object of analysis. What any particular museum is, what it does, what it is possible for it to do, who it can act on, how it can do so: these are not matters that are given by some invariant form of the museum. Rather, the questions which now need most to be attended to in both thinking about and thinking with museums concerns the respects in which museums exist and act only through their dispersal across the assemblages they are connected to.