Читать книгу Museum Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 37

Hooper-Greenhill’s and Bennett’s contemporary interest in developing a Foucauldian perspective on the museum draws, then, on work from the different ends of Foucault’s career. As we have seen, Hooper-Greenhill is mainly interested in the position around discourse that emerges from Foucault’s early work, culminating in The Order of Things, whereas Bennett is interested in the operations of power and governmentality that Foucault articulates most clearly in Discipline and Punish and later work. The focus of interest marks not simply a shift from language and discourse to power and vision but, more fundamentally, from around the ways in which Foucault understands the key relationship between saying and seeing in the shaping of power-knowledge (see Deleuze 1988).

According to Deleuze, Foucault’s early work is principally concerned with issues of saying and with the emergence of discourse from speech as something independent of the speaking subject. To try to summarize his position: discourse becomes the “outside” of speech that is other to the speaking subject while being at the same time the space in which subjectivity is itself defined as such (Foucault 1990). In many respects, Hooper-Greenhill’s analysis of the changing épistème in relation to the museum is also an analysis of the changing face of subjectivity constituted through the varying museum discourses of the three épistèmes she describes (see also Hetherington 1999). What this approach of Foucault’s to power and subjectivity leaves out, Deleuze argues, is an understanding of the operation of the nondiscursive, notably with what is made visible and knowable through the operations of power which, he suggests, haunts all of Foucault’s work (Deleuze 1988, 32). This is still the terrain of discourse, but of discourse operating not through texts but through the materialities and figures or technologies of power.

The interest in the nondiscursive, with the nondiscursive environment (what others have subsequently called materiality), is very much the preoccupation of Discipline and Punish. In employing the example of the prison (rather than the school, factory, or other institutionalized apparatus of power), Foucault was simply making use of the most obvious and extreme “diagram” of a disciplining institution, in which the nondiscursive operation of power on subjects can be most clearly seen (on diagram, see Deleuze 1988, and in this context Hetherington 2011). In this respect, Bennett is right to observe that the museum does not operate in the same way as a prison: it isn’t a carceral institution in the same manner. And yet, by employing the idea of the technology of power derived from Foucault’s reading of the diagram of the panopticon with its central focus of discipline, Bennett still uses it to inform our understanding of the museum’s foremost function as disciplining institution. It is not, I would argue, that Bennett is wrong in his reading of the museum but that, in drawing as he does on this aspect of Foucault’s work from his later work, he transforms one element of the operation of the museum – its disciplinary function – into a definition of the museum project as a whole. Museums may have had such a function but, I would argue, they operate in other, less clearly defined, ways too (see also Witcomb 2003). If Hooper-Greenhill, following the early Foucault, overemphasizes the articulation of discourse in the shaping of knowledge, then Bennett, following the later Foucault, can be said to overemphasize the technologies of vision and the operation of disciplinary power through a delimited nondiscursive terrain.

If we want to find an alternative take on the museum, one that retains a recognition of the key observations around discourse and power from both of these eras of Foucault’s work (and the subsequent readings they have influenced) but which offers different readings and possibilities, we need to seek it in the missing and more transitional period in Foucault’s writing – the time where he did, albeit fleetingly, speak of the museum himself (see Hetherington 2011; 2014). Of course, there is no book by Foucault on the museum in the way there is on the asylum, the clinic, or the prison. There are, however, two places where Foucault speaks directly on museums, both from essays written in 1967 when he was just beginning his ill-fated and unrealized study of the painter Édouard Manet and thinking about the relationship of modern art to knowledge constituted within the gallery (see Foucault 2009; Shapiro 2003). What we can add, though, is that there is a book on the archive, from the same period as these museum fragments, that contains suggestive ideas on how Foucault might be usefully applied to the museum in relation to his comments on it from this period – The Archaeology of Knowledge (1974).

Before turning to that, it is important to see first what Foucault did have to say about the museum. The first 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 statement about the archive: museums – and he also includes libraries – endlessly accumulate times 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).