Foucault and the Museum

AbstractThis chapter looks at Michel Foucault's influence on the study of museums over the past three decades. While his own observations on museums are limited to a few talks and essays, others have taken a lead from his work in trying to understand the role and nature of museums as a source of power‐knowledge established through a relationship between saying (discourse) and seeing (visual technologies). Despite saying very little himself, in the development of the new museology Foucault, along with Bourdieu, has been one of the leading theoretical voices. This chapter identifies three periods in his work associated with differing interpretations of the museum which can be understood either directly from his own work or from subsequent readings of it. The first period, up to and including the publication ofThe Order of Thingsin 1966, relates to a time when Foucault was interested in establishing an understanding of the power of discourse. Within this work the dominant theme is establishing the primacy of issues of saying and the separation of discourse from speech in the shaping of knowledge. In approaching the museum in these terms, a lead has been provided by the work of Eilean Hooper‐Greenhill which looks at the emergence of the modern museum in relation to different discourses andépistèmeand which challenges an earlier developmental approach. A third period emerges after the publication ofDiscipline and Punishin 1975 and in related work around the issue of governmentality. While discourse does not disappear, this work is more interested in the visual technologies of power and their operation on disciplined subjects. Within museum studies Tony Bennett's work has led this approach. This chapter sees strengths and weakness in both these approaches but seeks a better, if less certain, understanding of the museum, found in a “missing” second period (associated withThe Archaeology of Knowledgeand several papers from the late 1960s) in which an understanding of museums is established around the shaping of museum power‐knowledge through a productive tension between forms of saying and forms of seeing in which neither is dominant. In focusing on this middle period when Foucault addresses the museum directly through his work on heterotopia, Manet, and libraries, the aim is to open up debate around how Foucault's work might be used to further understand museum institutions, their practices, and their visitors. It suggests a more fluid reading of museums in relation to questions of power and knowledge than we have seen up to now.