3 = AQ of the Museum e history,THE BIRTH OF THE MUSEUM What is the cultural function of the museum? How did modern museums evolve? Tony Bennett’s invigorating study enriches and challenges our understanding of the museum, placing it at the centre of modern relations of culture and government, Bennett argues that the public museum should be understood not just as a place of instruction but as a reformatory of manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances take place. Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, he sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture. In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britain, Australia and North America, Bennett investigates how nincteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organised their collections, and their visitors. His use of Foucaultian perspectives and his consideration of museums in relation to other cultural institutions of display provides a distinctive perspective on contemporary museum policies and politics. Tony Bennett is Professor of Cultural Studies and Foundation Director of the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Griffith University, Australia, He is the author of Formalism and Marxism, Outside Literature and (with Janet Woollacott) Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero.CULTURE: POLICIES AND POLITICS Series editors: Tony Bennett, Jennifer Craik, Ian Hunter, Colin Mercer and Dugald Williamson What are the relations between cultural policies and cultural politics? Too often, none at all, In the history of cultural studies so far, there has been no shortage of discussion of cultural politics. Only rarely, however, have such discussions taken account of the policy instruments through which cultural activities and institutions are funded and regulated in the mundane politics of bureaucratic and corporate life. Culture: Policies and Politics addresses this imbalance. The books in this series interrogate the role of culture in the organization of social relations of power, including those of class, nation, ethnicity and gender. They also explore the ways in which political agendas in these areas are related to, and shaped by, policy processes and outcomes. In its commitment to the need for a fuller and clearer policy calculus in the cultural sphere, Culture; Policies and Politics aims to promote a significant transformation in the political ambit and orientation of cultural studies and related fields. ROCK AND POPULAR MUSIC politics, policies, institutions Edited by: Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd, Graeme Turner GAMBLING CULTURES Edited by: Jan McMillen FILM POLICY Edited by: Albert Moran | i i i THE BIRTH OF THE MUSEUM History, theory, politics Tony Bennett i Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORKTo Tanya, Oliver and James for liking fairs and tolerating museums First published 1995 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Reprinted 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 (twice) Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 1995 Tony Bennett Typeset in Times by Ponting-Green Publishing Services, Chesham, Bucks Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ. International Ltd, Padstow, Cormwall Ail rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-415-05387-0 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-05388-9 (pbk) : we a CONTENTS List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction Part I History and theory HE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM Museums and the public sphere The reordering of things Transparency and social regulation THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX Discipline, surveillance, spectacle Seeing things The exhibitionary disciplines The exhibitionary apparatuses Conclusion ‘THR POLITICAL RATIONALITY OF THE MUSEUM The birth of the museum An order of things and peoples The museum and public manners The political-discursive space of the museum Part II Policies and politics MUSEUMS AND ‘THE PEOPLE’ A countryside of the mind: Beamish Peopling the past: Scandinavian and American forerunners Other peoples, other pasts Questions of framework vii viii 109 110 115 120 126eee ero wv a x °° © CONTENTS OUT OF WHICH PAST? Perspectives on the past The formation of an Australian past: contours of a history The shape of the past ART AND THEORY: THE POLITICS OF THE INVISIBLE Part III Technologies of progress MUSEUMS AND PROGRESS: NARRATIVE, IDEOLOGY, PERFORMANCE Organized walking as evolutionary practice Progress and its performances Selective affinities Evolutionary automata One sex at a time THE SHAPING OF THINGS TO COME: EXPO ’88 Evolutionary exercises Civic calisthenics A THOUSAND AND ONE TROUBLES: BLACKPOOL PLEASURE BEACH Modernity and respectability The Pleasure Beach and Blackpool A site of pleasures A world turned upside down? Notes Bibliography Index Vi 128 128 135 146 163 177 179 186 189 195 201 209 213 219 229 230 236 237 246 256 270 1 | | FIGURES Perspective view of Victoria Festival of Labour, the Familistére, 1872 Cleveland Arcade, 1888-90 The Bon Marché Bethnal Green Museum, 1876 The Industrial Gallery, Birmingham Section drawing of Sir John Soane’s Museum, 1827 Elevated promenade at Luna Park Observation tower at Luna Park Southwark Fair, 1733 Bullock’s Museum of Natural Curiosities The Metallotheca of Michele Mercati, 1719 The Great Exhibition, 1851 ‘The South Kensington Museum, 1876 Ferrante Imperato’s museum in Naples, 1599 ‘The Crystal Palace ‘The Chicago Columbian Exposition, 1893 Map of Beamish Open Air Museum Beamish Museum: demonstrators at the pit cottages Site map of World Expo 88, Brisbane The ‘Rainbowsphere’ Annexing national time to the multinational corporation Advertisement for the Queensland Cuitural Centre ‘The nineteenth-century gypsy encampment, Blackpool Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Faster 1913 The ‘white knuckle’ rides, Blackpool viiACKNOWLEDGEMENTS owe a good deal to many people for their help in making this book possible. First, I am grateful to Bronwyn Hammond for her skilled and enthusiastic research assistance over a number of years. Apart from helping to keep the book a live prospect in the midst of other commitments, Bronwyn’s love for sleuthing in the archives proved invaluable in locating material which I doubt T should otherwise have found. Jennifer Craik and Ian Hunter offered very helpful editorial suggestions at the final stage of assembling the book. I am grateful to both of them for the pains they went to in leaving no sentence unturned. While, no doubt, there is still room for improvement, my arguments are a good deal more economical and more clearly formulated as a consequence. Both also helped with their comments on the substance of the argument in particular chapters. Many others have contributed to the book in this way. Those whose advice has proved especially helpful in this regard include Colin Mercer, whose unfailing friendship and collegiality I have enjoyed for many years now, and David Saunders who can always be counted on for pointed but constructive criticism — and for much more. Iam also grateful to Pat Buckridge, David Carter and John Hutchinson for their comments on Chapter 8. As is always the case, I have learned a good deal from the points made in criticism and debate in the discussions that have followed the various seminars at which I have presented the ideas and arguments brought together here. l especially valued the points made by Wayne Hudson in his comments on an early draft of the arguments of Chapter | when I presented these at a seminar in the School of Cultural and Historical Studies at Griffith Univer- sity. I also learned a good deal from the discussion which followed a similar presentation to the Department of English at the University of Queensland. Chapter 3 was first presented at the conference ‘Cultural Studies and Communication Studies: Convergences and Divergences’ organized by the Centre for Research on Culture and Society at Carleton University in 1989. Tam grateful to the conference organizers, Ian Taylor, John Shepherd and Valda Blundell, for inviting me to take part in the conference and for their hospitality during the period I was in Ottawa. viii | ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS However, perhaps my greatest debt of this kind is to the colleagues and students involved in two courses — ‘Knowledge and Power’ and ‘Australian Cultural Policies’ — in which many of the arguments presented here were first developed. So far as the first course is concerned, I learned much from working alongside Jeffrey Minson and Ian Hunter; with regard to the second, [especially valued the inputs of Mark Finnane and Stephen Garton. I doubt that the book would ever have been completed but for a period of extended study-leave granted me by Griffith University. I am grateful to the University for its generosity and support in this matter. | am also grateful to the Department of English at the University of Queensland for offering me the facilities of a Visiting Scholar over this period. I especially valued the opportunity this gave me for extended discussions with John Frow and Graeme Turner: I benefited much from their friendship and advice over this period. I am similarly grateful to St Peter's College, Oxford University, for the hospitality it extended me when I visited Oxford to consult the resources of the Bodleian Library ~ whose assistance I should also like to gratefully acknowledge. Some of this book was written during the period that I was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Griffith University. The assistance lent me over this period by Teresa Iwinska, the Faculty Manager, was a real help in allowing me to divert my energies to the joys of the study from time to time. Jam also grateful to the staff of the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies for their help and support over a number of years, and often with particular reference to work undertaken for this book. Barbara Johnstone provided much valued research assistance in relation to some of the earlier phases of the work; Sharon Clifford has provided expert administrative support; and Glenda Donovan and Bev Jeppeson have helped at various stages in preparing the text. Robyn Pratten and Karen Yarrow have also assisted in this. I am grateful to ali of them. Some of the chapters have been published previously in other contexts. Chapter 2 was first published in New Formations (no. 4, 1988) while Chapter 3 was first published in Continwum (vol. 3, no. 1, 1989). Chapter 4 initially appeared in Robert Lumley (ed.) The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display (Routledge, 1988), while Chapter 6 was included in Jody Berland and Will Straw (eds) Theory Rules (University of Toronte Press, 1993), Chapter 8 first appeared in Cultural Studies (vol. 5, no. 1, 1991) while Chapter 9 was first published in Formations of Pleasure (Routledge, 1982). All of these are reprinted here without any substantial variation. Chapter 5 is a shortened version of an occasional paper published by the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies. Some aspects of Chapter 1 were rehearsed in an article published under the title ‘Museums, government, culture’ in Sites (no. 25, 1992). However, the formulations published here are substantially revised and extended, Jam grateful to Beamish Museum for its permission to use the illustrations ixACKNOWLEDGEMENTS companying Chapter 4, and to Brisbane’s South Bank Corporation, Selcom, IBM Australia’ Ltd for their permission in relation to the illustrations accompanying Chapter 8. I am indebted to Steve Palmer and to Blackpool asure Beach Ltd for their help in locating the illustrations for Chapter 9. + It’s hard to say why, but, as a matter of convention, partners seem always to get the:last mention in acknowledgements although they contribute most. Sue is'no exception ~ so thanks, yet again, for helping me through this ene in ways too numerous to mention. / | | | | | INTRODUCTION In his essay ‘Of other spaces’, Michel Foucault defines heterotopias as places in which ‘all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultancously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Foucault 1986: 24). As such, he argues that the museum and the library — both ‘heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time’ — are peculiar to, and characteristic of, nineteenth-century Western culture: the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organising in this a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. (Foucault 1986: 26) Ranged against the museum and the library, Foucault argues, are those heterotopias which, far from being linked to the accumulation of time, are linked to time ‘in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival’ (ibid.: 26). As his paradigm example of such spaces, Foucault cites ‘the fairgrounds, these marvellous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snake-women, fortune-tellers, and so forth’ (ibid.: 26). The terms of the opposition are familiar. Indeed, they formed a part of the discursive co-ordinates through which the muscum, in its nineteenth-century form, was thought into being via a process of double differentiation, For the process of fashioning a new space of representation for the modern public museum was, at the same time, one of constructing and defending that space of representation as a rational and scientific one, fully capable of bearing the didactic burden placed upon it, by differentiating it from the disorder that was imputed to competing exhibitionary institutions. This was, in part, a matter of distinguishing the museum from its predecessors. It was thus quite common, toward the end of the nineteenth century, for the museum's early historians ~ or, perhaps more accurately, its rhapsodists — to contrast its 1INTRODUCTION achieved order and rationality with the jumbled incongruity which now seemed to characterize the cabinets of curiosity which, in its own lights, the museum had supplanted and surpassed. Those who would visit the local ntseums in Britain's smaller towns, Thomas Greenwood warned in 1888, should be prepared to find ‘dust and disorder reigning supreme’. And wors: The orderly soul of the Museum student will quake at the sight of a Chinese lady's boot encircled by a necklace made of sharks’s teeth, or a helmet of one of Cromwell’s soldiers grouped with some Roman remains. Another corner may reveal an Egyptian mummy placed in a mediaeval chest, and in more than one instance the curious visitor might be startled to find the cups won by a crack cricketer of the county in the collection, or even the stuffed relics of a pet pug dog. (Greenwood 1888: 4) By contrast, where new museums had been established under the Museums or Public Library Acts, Greenwood asserts that ‘order and system is coming out of chaos’ owing to the constraints placed on ‘fossilism or foolish proceedings’ by the democratic composition of the bodies responsible for governing those museums. This attribution of a rationalizing effect to the democratic influence of a citizenry was, in truth, somewhat rare, especially in the British context.! For it was more usually science that was held responsible for having subjected museum displays to the influence of reason. Indeed, the story, as it was customarily told, of the museum’s development from chaos to order was, simultaneously, that of science’s progress from error to truth. Thus, for David Murray, the distinguishing features of the modern museum were the prin- ciples of ‘specialisation and classification’ (Murray 1904: 231): that is, the development of a range of specialist museum types (of geology, natural history, art, etc.) within each of which objects were arranged in a manner calculated to make intelligible a scientific view of the world. In comparison with this educational intent, Murray argued, pre-modern museums were more concerned to create surprise or provoke wonder, This entailed a focus on the rare and exceptional, an interest in objects for their singular qualities rather than for their typicality, and encouraged principles of display aimed at a sensational rather than a rational and pedagogic effect. For Murray, the moralized skeletons found in early anatomical collections thus achieved such a sensational effect only at the price of an incongruity which nullified their educational potential. For example, the anatomical collection at Dresden was arranged like a pleasure garden. Skeletons were interwoven with branches of trees in the form of hedges so as to form vistas. Anatomical subjects were difficult to come by, and when they were got, the most was made of them. At Leyden they had the skeleton of an ass upon which sat a 2 INTRODUCTION woman that killed her daughter; the skeleton of a man, sitting upon an ox, executed for stealing cattle; a young thief hanged, being the Bridegroom whose Bride stood under the gallows. . . (Murray 1904: 208) Yet similar incongruities persisted into the present where, in commercial exhibitions of natural and artificial wonders, in travelling menageries and the circus and, above all, at the fair, they formed a part of the surrounding cultural environs from whicli the museum sought constantly to extricate itself. For the fair of which Foucault speaks did not merely relate to time in a different way from the museum. Nor did it simply occupy space differently, tempor- arily taking up residence on the city’s outskirts rather than being permanently located in its centre. The fair also confronted — and affronted — the museum as a still extant embodiment of the ‘irrational’ and ‘chaotic’ disorder that had characterized the museum’s precursors. It was, so to speak, the museum’s own pre-history come to haunt it, The anxiety exhibited by the National Museum of Victoria in the stress it placed, in its founding years (the 1850s), on its intention to display ‘small and ugly creatures’ as well as ‘showy’ ones — to display, that is, objects for their instructional rather than for their curiosity or ornamental yalue — thus related as much to the need to differentiate it from contemporary popular exhibitions as to that of demonstrating its historical surpassing of the cabinet of curiosities. The opening of the National Museum of Victoria coincided with Melbourne’s acquisition of its first permanent menagerie, an estab- lishment housed in a commercial amusement park which — just as much as the menagerie it contained — was given over to the principles of the fabulous and the amazing. Whereas the menagerie stressed the exotic qualities of animals, so the accent in the surrounding entertainments comprising the amusement park was on the marvellous and fantastic: ‘Juan Fernandez, who nightly put his head into a lion’s mouth, a Fat Boy, a Bearded Woman, some Ethiopians, Wizards, as well as Billiards, Shooting Galleries, Punch and Judy Shows and Bowling Saloons’ (Goodman 1990: 28). If, then, as Goodman puts it, the National Museum of Victoria represented itself to its public as a ‘classifying house’, emphasizing its scientific and instructional qualities, this was as much a way of declaring that it was not a circus or a fair as it was a means of stressing its differences from earlier collections of curiosities. Yet, however much the museum and the fair were thought of and functioned as contraries to one another, the opposition Foucault posits between the two is, perhaps, too starkly stated. It is also insufficiently historical. Of course, Foucault is fully alert to the historical novelty of those relations which, in the early nineteenth century, saw the museum and the fair emerge as contraries, Yet he is not equally attentive to the historical processes which have subsequently worked to undermine the terms of that opposition. The emergence, in the late nineteenth century, of another ‘other space’ — the 3INTRODUCTION fixed-site amusement park — was especially significant in this respect in view ofthe ‘degree to which the amusement park occupied a point somewhere between the opposing values Foucault attributes to the museum and the travelling fair. The formative developments here were American. From the mid-1890s a succession of amusement parks at Coney Island served as the prototypes for this new ‘heterotopia’. While retaining some elements of the travelling fair, the parks mixed and merged these with elements derived, indirectly, from the programme of the public museum, In their carnival aspects, amusement parks thus retained a commitment to ‘time in the mode of the festival’ in providing for the relaxation or inversion of normal standards of behaviour. However, while initially tolerant of traditional fairground side-shows — Foucault’s wrestlers, snake-women and fortune-tellers — this tolerance was always selective and, as the form developed, more stringent as amusement parks, modelling their aspirations on those of the public parks movement, sought to dissociate themselves from anything which might detract from an atmosphere of wholesome family entertainment. Moreover, such side-shows increasingly clashed with the amusement park’s ethos of modernity and its commitment, like the meseum, to an accumulating time, to the unstoppable momentum of progress which, in its characteristic forms of ‘hailing’ (accenting ‘the new’ and ‘the latest’) and entertainments (mechanical rides), the amusement park claimed both to represent and to harness to the cause of popular pleasure. Their positions within the evolutionary time of progress were, of course, different, as were the ways in which they provided their visitors with opportunities to enact this time by building it into the performative regimes which regulated their itineraries. However, by the end of the century, both the museum and the amusement park participated in elaborating and diffusing related (although rarely identical) conceptions of time. This was not without consequence for travelling fairs which came to feature the new mechanical rides alongside wrestlers, snake-women and fortune-tellers, thereby encompassing a clash of times rather than a singular, fleeting time that could be simply opposed to the accumulating time of modernity. Tf, then, unlike the traditional travelling fair, fixed-site amusement parks gave a specific embodiment to modernity, they were also unlike their itinerant predecessors in the regulated and ordered manner of their functioning. In the Jate eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the fair had served as the very emblem for the disorderly forms of conduct associated with all sites of popular assembly. By contrast, early sociological assessments of the cultural significance of the amusement park judged that it had succeeded in pacifying the conduct of the crowd to a much greater degree than had the public or benevolent provision of improving or rational recreations.? By the end of the nineteenth century, then, the emergence of the amusement park had weakened that sense of a rigorous duality between two heterotopias 4 | | | | INTRODUCTION — the museum and the fair — viewed as embodying antithetical orderings of time and space. However, this situation had been prepared for in the earlier history of international exhibitions which, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, provided for a zone of interaction between the museum and the fair which, while not undoing their separate identities, undermined their seemingly inherent contrariness in involving them, indirectly, in an incessant and multifaceted set of exchanges with one another. If the most immediate inspiration for Coney Island’s amusement parks was thus the Midway (or popular fair zone) at Chicago’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893, it is no less true that the Chicago Midway was profoundly influenced by museum practices. The role accorded museum anthropology in harmonizing the representa- tional horizons of the Midway with the ideological theme of progress was especially significant in this respect, albeit that, in the event, traditions of popular showmanship often eclipsed the scientific pretensions of anthropo- logy’s claims to rank civilizations in an evolutionary hierarchy. There were, however, many other ways in which (in spite of the efforts to keep them clearly separated) the activities of fairs, muscums and exhibitions interacted with one another: the founding collections of many of today’s major metropolitan museums were bequeathed by international exhibitions; tech- niques of crowd control developed in exhibitions influenced the design and layout of amusement parks; and nineteenth-century natural history museums throughout Europe and North America owed many of their specimens to the network of animal collecting agencies through which P.T. Barnum provided live species for his various circuses, menageries and dime museums. The organizing focus for my concerns in this study is provided by the museum. Indeed, my purpose — or at least a good part of it — has been to provide a politically focused genealogy for the modern’ public museum. By ‘genealogy’, I mean an account of the museum’s formation and early development that will help to illuminate the co-ordinates within which questions of museum policies and politics have been, and continue to be, posed. As such, this account is envisaged as contributing to a shared enterprise, For there are, now, a number of such histories which aspire to provide accounts of the museum’s past that will prove more serviceable in relation to present-day museum debates and practices than those accounts — still dominant in the 1950s ~ cast in the whiggish mould of the museum's carly chroniclers.? Where, however, the account offered here most obviously differs from other such endeavours is in its diacritical conception of the tasks a genealogy of the museum might usefully address. Bilean Hooper-Greenhill, for example, proposes a genealogy of the museum which concerns itself mainly with transformations in those practices of classification and display — and of the associated changes in subject positions these implied — that are internal to the museum (Hooper-Greenhill 1988). By contrast, I shall argue 5INTRODUCTION that the museum’s formation needs also to be viewed in relation to the development of a range of collateral cultural institutions, including appar- ently alien and disconnected ones. The fair and the exhibition are not, of course, the only candidates for consideration in this respect. If the museum was conceived as distinct from and opposed to the fair, the same was (rue of the ways in which its relations to other places of popular assembly (and especially the public house) were envisaged. Equally, the museum has undoubtedly been influenced by its relations to cultural institutions which, like the museum itself and like the early international exhibitions, had a rational and improving orientation: libraries and public parks, for example. None the less, a number of character- istics set the museum, international exhibitions and modern fairs apart as a distinctive grouping. Each of these institutions is involved in the practice of ‘showing and telling’: that is, of exhibiting artefacts and/or persons in a manner calculated to embody and communicate specific cultural meanings and values. They are also institutions which, in being open to all-comers, have shown a similar concern to devise ways of regulating the conduct of their visitors, and to do so, ideally, in ways that are both unobtrusive and self- perpetuating. Finally, in their recognition of the fact that their visitors? experiences are realized via their physical movement through an exhibition- ary space, all three institutions have shared a concern to regulate the performative aspects of their visitors’ conduct. Overcoming mind/body dualities in treating their visitors as, essentially, ‘minds on legs’, each, in its different way, is a place for ‘organized walking’ in which an intended message is communicated in the form of a (more or less) directed itinerary, None the less, for all their distinctiveness, the changes that can be traced within the practices of these exhibitionary institutions need also to be viewed in their relations to broader developments affecting related cultural institu- tions. In this regard, my account of the ‘birth of the museum’ is one in which the focus on the relations between museums, fairs and exhibitions is meant to serve as a device for a broader historical argument whose concern is 4 transformation in the arrangement of the cultural field over the course of the nineteenth century. ‘These are the issues engaged with in the chapters comprising Part I. Three questions stand to the fore here. The first concerns the respects in which the public museum exemplified the development of a new ‘governmental’ relation to culture in which works of high culture were treated as instruments that could be enlisted in new ways for new tasks of social management. This will involve a consideration of the manner in which the museum, in providing a new setting for works of culture, also functioned as a technological environment which allowed cultural artefacts to be refashioned in ways that would facilitate their deployment for new purposes as parts of governmental programmes aimed at reshaping general norms of social behaviour. In being thus conceived as instruments capable of ‘lifting’ the cultural level 6 INTRODUCTION of the population, nineteenth-century museums were faced with a new problem: how to regulate the conduct of their visitors. Similar difficulties were faced by other nineteenth-century institutions whose function required that they freely admit an undifferentiated mass public: railways, exhibitions, and department stores, for example. The problems of behaviour management this posed drew forth a variety of architectural and technological solutions which, while having their origins in specific institutions, often then migrated to others, The second strand of analysis in Part I thus considers how techniques of behaviour management, developed in museums, exhibitions, and department stores, were later incorporated in amusement parks whose design aimed to transform the fair into a sphere of regulation. ‘The third set of questions focuses on the space of representation associated with the public museum and on the politics it generates. In The Order of Things, Foucault refers to the ambiguous role played by the ‘empirico- transcendental doublet of man’ in the human sciences: man functions as an object made visible by those sciences while also doubling as the subject of the knowledges they make available. Man, as Foucault puts it, ‘appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows; enslaved sovereign, observed spectator’ (Foucault 1970: 312). The museum, it wil] be argued, also constructs man (and the gendered form is, as we shall see, historically appropriate) in a relation of both subject and object to the knowledge it organizes. Its space of representation, constituted in the relations between the disciplines which organize the display frameworks of different types of museum (geology, archaeology, anthropology, etc), posits man ~ the outcome of evolution ~- as the object of knowledge. At the same time, this mode of representation constructs for the visitor a position of achieved humanity, situated at the end of evolutionary development, from which man’s development, and the subsidiary evolutionary series it sub- sumes, can be rendered intelligible. There is, however, a tension within this space of representation between the apparent universality of the subject and object of knowledge (man) which it constructs, and the always socially partial and particular ways in which this universality is realized and embodied in museum displays. This tension, it will be suggested, has supplied — and continues to supply - the discursive co-ordinates for the emergence of contemporary museum policies and politics oriented to securing parity of representation for different groups and cultures within the exhibitionary practices of the museum. If this demand constitutes one of the distinctive aspects of modern political debates relating to the museum, a second consists in the now more or less normative requirement (although one more honoured in theory than in practice) that public museums should be equally accessible to all sections of the population. While this demand is partly inscribed in the conception of the modern museum as a public museum, its status has been, and remains, somewhat ambivalent. For it can be asserted in the form of an expectation 7INTRODUCTION that the museum’s benevolent and improving influence ought, in the interests of the state or society as a whole, to reach all sections of the population. Or it can be asserted as an inviolable cultural right which all citizens in a democracy are entitled to claim. Something of the tension between these two conceptions is visible in the history of museum visitor statistics. Crude visitor statistics were available from as early as the 1830s, but only in a form which allowed gross visitor numbers to be correlated with days of the week or times of the year. The earliest political use of these figures was to demonstrate the increased numbers visiting in the evenings, bank holidays and - when Sunday opening was permitted — Sundays, Reformers like Francis Place and, later, Thomas Greenwood seized on such figures as evidence of the museum’s capacity to carry the improving force of culture to the working classes. This concern with measuring the civilizing influence of the museum is both related to and yet also distinct from a concern with improving access to museums on the grounds of cultural rights - an issue which did not emerge until much later when studies of the demographic profiles of museum visitors demon- strated socially differentiated patterns of use. More to the point, perhaps, if developments in adjacent fields are anything to go by, is that powerful ideological factors militated against the acquisition of information of this type. Edward Edwards, one of the major figures in the public library movement in Britain, thus sternly chastized local public libraries for obtain- ing information regarding the occupations of their users as being both unauthorized and irrelevant to their purpose.4 An adequate account of the history of museum visitor studies has yet to be written, It seems clear, however, that the development of clearly articulated demands for making museums accessible to all sections of the population has been closely related to the development of statistical surveys which have made visible the social composition of the visiting public. The provenance of such studies is, at the earliest, in the 1920s and, for the most part, belongs to the post-war period.’ Be this as it may, cultural rights principles are now strongly enshrined in relation to public muscums and, although dependent on external monitoring devices for their implementation, they have clearly also been fuelled by the internal dynamics of the museum form in its establishment of a public space in which rights are supposed to be universal and un- differentiated. These, then, are the main issues reviewed in the first part of this study. While each of the three chapters grouped together here has something to say about each of these questions, they differ in their stress and emphasis as well as in their angle of theoretical approach. In the first chapter, “The Formation of the Museum’, the primary theoretical co-ordinates are supplied by Foucault’s concept of liberal government. This is drawn on to outline the ways in which museums formed a part of new strategies of governing aimed at producing a citizeary which, rather than needing to be externally and coercively directed, would increasingly monitor and regulate its own conduct. 8 | | | | INTRODUCTION In the second chapter, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, the stress falls rather on Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary power in its application to museums and on the ways in which the insights this generates might usefully be moderated by the perspectives on the rhetorical strategies of power suggested by Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. The final chapier in Part I, “The Political Rationality of the Museum’, looks primarily to Foucault again, although to another aspect of his work. Here, Foucault’s writings on the prison are treated as a model for an account of the respects in which many aspects of contemporary museum policies and politics have been generated out of the discursive co-ordinates which have governed the museum’s formation. There are, I have suggested, two distinctive political demands that have been generated in relation to the modern museum: the demand that there should be parity of representation for all groups and cultures within the collecting, exhibition and conservation activities of museums, and the demand that the members of all social groups should have equal practical as well theoretical rights of access to museums. More detailed and specific examples of the kinds of issues generated by these political demands form the subject matter of the second part of this study. If, in Part 1, my concern is to trace the conditions which have allowed modern museum policies and politics to emerge and take the shape that they have, the focus in the second part moves to specific engagements with particular contemporary political and policy issues from within the perspectives of what I have called the museum’s ‘political rationality’. There is, however, a broadening of focus in this part of the book in that my attention is no longer limited exclusively to public museums. In Chapter 4, ‘Museums and “the People”’, I consider the competing and contradictory ways in which ‘the people’ might be represented in the display practices of a broad variety of different types of museum. For the purpose of demon- strating some effective contrasts, my discussion here ranges across the romantic populism that is often associated with the open-air museum form to the social-democratic conceptions of ‘the people’ which govern many contemporary Australian museum installations. F also evaluate the more radical socialist and feminist conceptions of the forms in which ‘the people” might most appropriately be represented by considering the example of Glasgow's peerless People’s Palace. The next chapter, ‘Out of Which Past?’, broadens the scope of the discussion. It considers the respects in which the demand for forms of representing the past that are appropriate to the interests and values of different groups in the community can be extended beyond the public museum. This demand can encompass heritage sites just as it can be applied to the picture of the past that emerges from the entire array of museums and heritage sites in a particular society. In the final chapter in Part II, however, the focus returns to the public museum, especially the public art gallery. 9INTRODUCTION Drawing on the arguments of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Art and Theory: The Politics of the Invisible” explores the relationship between the display practices of art ealleries and the patterns of their social usage. Art galleries, it is suggested, remain the least publicly accessible of ali public collecting institutions. This is largely because of their continuing commitment to display principles which entail that the order subtending the art on display remains invisible and unintelligible to those not already equipped with the appropriate cultural skills. Such an entrenched position now seems increasingly wilful as notions of access and equity come to permeate all domains of culture and to legitimate public expenditure in such domains. In the final part of the book, my attention returns to museums, fairs and exhibitions, and to the relations between them. These, however, are now broached from a different perspective. Here, I consider the different ways in which, in their late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century formation, museums, fairs and exhibitions functioned as. technologies of progress. The notion is not a new one. Indeed, it was quite common at the time for museums and the like to be referred to as ‘machines for progress’. Such metaphors, { Shall argue, were by no means misplaced. Viewed as cultural technologies which achieve their effectiveness through the articulated combination of the Tepresentations, routines and regulations of which they are comprised, museums, fairs and exhibitions do indeed have a machine-like aspect to their conception and functioning. The elaboration of this argument, however, invoives a shift of perspective. It requires that we consider not merely how Progress is represented in each of these institutions ~ for this is fairly familiar ground — but also the different ways in which those representations were organized as performative resources which programmed visitors’ behaviour as well as their cognitive horizons. This will involve viewing such repres- entations of progress as props which the visitor might utilize! for particular forins of self-development — evolutionary exercises of the self — rather than solely as parts of textual regimes whose influence is of a thetorical or ideological nature, Chapter 7, ‘Museums and Progress: Narrative, Ideology, Performance’ Opens the argument in reviewing a variety of the different ways in which the layout of late nineteenth-century natural history, ethnology and anatomy collections was calculated so as to allow the visitor to retread the paths of evolutionary development which led from simple to more complex forms of life. This argument is exemplified by considering how the Pitt-Rivers typological system for the display of ‘savage’ peoples and their artefacts Constituted a ‘progressive machinery’ which, in secking to promote progress, sought also to limit and direct it. There then follows a consideration of the respects in which the evolutionary narratives and itineraries of nineteenth- century muscums were gendered in their structure as well as in the performat- ive possibilities to which they gave rise. ‘The next chapter, “The Shaping of Things to Come: Expo °88°, considers 10 INTRODUCTION how the form of the international exhibition has developed to provide an environment in which the visitor is invited to undertake an incessant updating or modernizing of the self, In applying this perspective to Brisbane’s Expo °88, this chapter also considers the ways in which rhetorics of progress combined with those of the nation and of the city to provide a complexly organized environment that was open to — indeed, designed for — many different kinds of social performance. Finally, in Chapter 9, ‘A Thousand and One Troubles: Blackpool Pleasure Beach’, my attention turns to the ways in “which rhetorics of progress can saturate the environment of a whole town, but paying special regard to Blackpool’s fair — the Pleasure Beach — where progress is encoded into the pleasurable performances that the fairgoer is --expected to undertake. However, this detailed case-study of a modern amusement park serves a further purpose in graphically iHustrating the respects in which the modernization and streamlining of pleasure associated with the contemporary fair draw on the modernizing rhetorics and techno- logies of museums and exhibitions. This final chapter also introduces a qualification which it might be useful to mention at the outset. My concern in this book is largely with museums, fairs and exhibitions as envisaged in the plans and projections of theit advocates, designers, directors and managers, The degree to which such plans and projections were and are successful in organizing and framing the experience of the visitor or, to the contrary, the degree to which such planned effects are evaded, side-stepped or simply not noticed raises different questions which, important though they are, I have not addressed here. Thave already mentioned some of the theoretical sources I have drawn on in preparing this study. The work of Foucault, in its various forms and interpretations, has been important to me as has been that of Gramsci, although I have been aware ~ and have not sought to disguise — the often awkward and uneasy tension that exists between these. It is perhaps worth adding that, as it has developed, the tendency of my work in this area has inclined more towards the Foucaultian than the Gramscian paradigm. Pierre Bourdieu’s work has also been invaluable for the light it throws on the contradictory dynamics of the museum, and especially the art gallery. While the gallery is theoretically a public institution open to all, it has typically been appropriated by ruling elites as a key symbolic site for those performances of ‘distinction’ through which the cognoscenti differentiate themselves from ‘the masses’. Jurgen Habermas’s historical arguments regarding the formation of the bourgeois public sphere have been helpful, too, although I have been careful to extricate these from Habermas's dialectical expectation that such a public sphere anticipates a more ideal speech situation into which history has yet to deliver us. Equally important, if not more so, have been the significant feminist re-thinkings ofthe notion of the public sphere, and of the publicprivate divide more generally, offered by Joan Landes, Carole Pateman and Mary Ryan. Finally, Krzysztof Pornian’s a4INTRODUCTION work has been helpful in suggesting how collections might usefully be distinguished from one another in terms of the different kinds of contract they establish between the spheres of the visible and invisible. My use of this fairly diverse set of theoretical resources has been largely pragmatic in orientation. While I have not sought to deny or repress important theoretical differences where these have been relevant to my concerns, resolving such questions has not been my purpose in this book. For the most part, I have simply drawn selectively on different aspects of these theoretical traditions as has seemed most appropriate in relation to the specific issues under discussion. For ali that this is an academic book motivated by a particular set of intellectual interests, I doubt that I should have finished it had I not had a fairly strong personal interest in its subject matter. While biographical factors are usually best left unsaid, there may be some point, in this case, in dwelling briefly on the personal interests and investments which have helped to sustain my interests in the issues this book explores. In The Sacred Grove, Dillon Ripley informs the reader that his philosophy of museums was established when, at the age of ten, he spent a winter in Paris: One of the advantages of playing in the Tuileries Gardens as a child was that at any one moment one could be riding the carousel, hoping against hope to catch the ring. The next instant one might be off wandering the paths among the chestnuts and the plane trees, looking for the old woman who sold gaufres, those wonderful hot wafer-thin, wafficlike creations dusted over with powdered sugar. A third instant in time, and there was the Punch and Judy show, mirror of life, now comic, now sad. Another moment and one could wander into one of the galleries at the Louvre. ... Then out to the garden again where there was a patch of sand in a corner to build sand castles. Then back to the Louvre to wander through the Grand Gallery. Ripley 1978: 140) The philosophy Ripley derived from this experience was that there was, and should be, no essential differences between the learning environment of the museum and the world of fun and games; one should be able to move naturally between the two. For a bourgeois boy, such an effortless transition between the museum and a gentrified selection of fairground pleasures would, no doubt, have proved possible. My own experience — and I expect it is rather more typical — was different, For me, the fair came before the museum, and by a good many years. And the fair in all its forms: the travelling fairs that set up camp in Lancashire’s towns during their wakes-wecks holidays; Manchester’s permanent amusement park, Belle Vue, where my father taught me the white-knuckle art of riding the bone-shaking Bobs; and Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach which J visited many times as a child and as a teenager before returning to it later in life as an object of study. When, in my early adulthood, 12 INTRODUCTION { began to explore the world of museums and art galleries, it was not with a sense of an effortless transition such as Ripley describes; it was, to the contrary, part of a cultural itinerary, travelled with some reluctance, which > required a familiarity with a new habitus in order to feel in any way at home jn such institutions. Equally, however, for the reasons I have already alluded to, going to fairs and visiting museums or exhibitions have always struck me as in some way related activities. Writing this book, then, has served as a means of trying to account for the experience of ‘different but similar’ which I still have when visiting cither fairs or museums. Its ambition, however, is to explain these similarities and ‘differences in terms of historical processes of cultural formation rather than as than personal idiosyneracies.Part I HISTORY AND THEORYTHE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM “Jn 1849, James Silk Buckingham, a prominent English social reformer, published a plan for a model town. In extolling the virtues of his proposals _ he drew attention to their capacity to prepare all members of the community for ‘a higher state of existence, instead of merely vegetating like millions in the present state of society, who are far less cared for, and far less happy, ~ than the brutes that perish’ (Buckingham 1849: 224). Buckingham was insistent, however, that such a transformation could be wrought solely by the application of, as he called them, ‘practical remedies’. It is worth quoting in ~~ full the passage in which he argues with himself on this question: It is constantly contended that mankind are not to be improved by mere mechanical arrangements, and that their reformation must first begin within. But there is surely no reason why both should not be called into operation. A person who is well fed, well clad, cheerfully because agreeably occupied, living in a clean house, in an open and well ventilated Town, free from the intemperate, dissolute, and vicious associations of our existing cities and villages — with ready access to Libraries, Lectures, Galleries of Art, Public Worship, with many objects. of architectural beauty, fountains, statues, and colonnades, around him, instead of rags, filth, drunkenness, and prostitution, with blasphemous oaths or dissolute conversation defiling his ears, would at least be more likely to be accessible to moral sentiments, generous feelings, and religious and devout convictions and conduct, than in the teeming hives of iniquity, with which most of our large cities and towns abound, Inward regeneration will sometimes occur in spite of all these obstacles, and burst through every barrier, but these are the exceptions, and not the rules; and the conduct pursued by all good parents towards their children, in keeping them away as much as possible from evil associ- ations, and surrounding them by the best examples and incentives to virtue, is sufficient proof of the almost universal conviction, that the circumstances in which individuals are placed, and the kind of training and education they receive, have a great influence in the formation of 17HISTORY AND THEORY their character, and materially assist at least the development of the noblest faculties of the mind and heart. (Buckingham 1849: 224-5) ‘The passage echoes a characteristic trait of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of the tasks of government. In the formula- tions of the science of police that were produced over this period, Foucault has argued, it was the family that typically served as the model for a form of, government which, in concerning itself with ‘the wealth and behaviour of each and ail’, aspired to subject the population of the state to ‘a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods’ (Foucault 1978: 92). ‘The People’, as Patrick Colquhoun put it, ‘are to the Legislature what a child is to a parent’ (Colquhoun 1796: 242-3). Just as remarkable, however, is Buckingham’s persistence in maintaining that the exercise of such surveillance and control need not be thought of as any different in principle, when applied to the moral, or cultural well being of the population, from its application to the field of physical health. Both are a matter of making the appropriate ‘mechanical arrangements’. Libraries, public lectures and art galleries thus present themselves as instruments capable of improving ‘man’s’ inner life just as well laid out spaces can improve the physical health of the population. If, in this way, culture is brought within the province of government, its conception is on a par with other regions of government, The reform of the self — of the inner life — is just as much dependent on the provision of appropriate technologies for this purpose as is the achievement of desired ends in any other area of social administration. There is no shortage of schemes, plans and proposals cast ina similar vein. In 1876, Benjamin Ward Richardson, in his plan for Hygeia, a city of health, set himself the task of outlining sanitary arrangements that would result in ‘the co-existence of the lowest possible general mortality with the highest possible individual longevity’ (Richardson 1876: 11). However, he felt obliged to break off from detailing these to advise the reader that his model town would, of course, be ‘well furnished with baths, swimming baths, Turkish baths, playgrounds, gymnasia, libraries, board schools, fine art schools, lecture halls, and places of instructive amusement’ (ibid.: 39). The museum’s early historians had a similar conception of the museum’s place in the new schemes of urban life. Thus, as Thomas Greenwood saw it, ‘a Museum and Free Library are as necessary for the mental and moral health of the citizens as good sanitary arrangements, water supply and street lighting are for their physical health and comfort’ (Greenwood 1888: 389). Indeed, for Greenwood, these provisions tended to go hand-in-hand and could serve as an index of the development of a sense of civic duty and self-reliance in different towns and cities. For it is, he says, no accident that the muni- cipalities in which ‘the most has been done for the education of the people, TR THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM either in the way of Board Schools, Museums, or Free Libraries” should also ‘be the ones with ‘the best street lighting and street cleansing arrangements’ ibid.: 18). ‘The public museum, as is well known, acquired its modern form during the jate eighteenth and carly nineteenth centuries. The process of its formation was! as complex as it was protracted, involving, most obviously and im- mediately, a transformation of the practices of earlier collecting institutions id the creative adaptation of aspects of other new institutions — the international exhibition and the department store, for example — which developed alongside the museum, However, the museum’s formation — {whether understood as a developmental process or as an achieved form — cannot be adequately understood unless viewed in the light of a more general set of developments through which culture, in coming to be thought of as useful for governing, was fashioned as a vehicle for the exercise of new forms of power. In what did this enlistment of culture for the purposes of governing consist? And how was the topography of the sphere of government to which it gave e organized?! On the one hand, culture ~ in so far as it referred to the habits, morals, manners and beliefs of the subordinate classes — was targeted as an ‘object of government, as something in need of both transformation and ‘regulation. This had clearly been viewed as a part of the proper concern of + the state in earlier formulations of the functions of police. In his Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, first published in 1795, Patrick Colquhoun had _thus argued: And it is no inconsiderable feature in the science of Police to encourage, protect, and control such as tend to innocent recreation, to preserve the good humour of the Public, and to give the minds of the people a right ' bias. ... Since recreation is necessary to Civilised Society, all Public Exhibitions should be rendered subservient to improvement of morals, and to the means of infusing into the mind a love of the Constitution, and a reverence and respect for the Laws. ... How superior this to the odious practice of besotting themselves in Ale houses, hatching seditious and treasonable designs, or engaging in pursuits of vilest profligacy, destructive to health and morals, (Colquhoun 1806: 347-8) _..° It is, however, only later — in the mid to late nineteenth century — that the relations between culture and government come to be thought of and “organized in a distinctively modern way via the conception that the works, forms and institutions of high culture might be enlisted for this governmental task in being assigned the purpose of civilizing the population as a whole. It = was, appropriately enough, James Silk Buckingham who first introduced such a conception of culture’s role into the practical agendas of reforming politics in early Victorian England. In the wake of the report of the 1834 Select 19HISTORY AND THEORY Contmittee on Drunkenness, whose establishment he had prompted and which he had chaired, Buckingham brought three bills before parliament proposing that local committees be empowered to levy rates to establish walks, paths, playgrounds, halls, theatres, libraries, museums and art galleries so as ‘to draw off by innocent pleasurable recreation and instruction, all who can be weaned from habits of drinking’ (Buckingham, cited in Turner 1934: 305). The bills were not successful, although the principles they enunciated were eventually adapted in the legislation through which, some two decades later, local authorities were enabled to establish municipal museums and libraries. What matters rather more, however, is the capacity that is attributed to high culture to so transform the inner lives of the population as to alter their forms of life and behaviour. It is this that marks the distinction between earlier conceptions of government and the emerging notions of liberal government which Buckingham helped articulate. There is scarcely a glim- mer of this in Colquhoun’s understanding of the means by which the morals and manners of the population might be improved. These, for Colquhoun, focus on the need to increase the regulatory capacities of the state in relation to those sites and institutions in which refractory bodies might be expected to assemble: public houses, friendly societies, and the sex-segregated asylums and places of industry provided for men and women released from gaol with no employment. For Buckingham and other advocates of ‘rational recreations’, by contrast, the capacity to effect an inner transformation that is attributed to culture reflects a different problematic of government, one which, rather than increasing the formal regulatory powers of the state, aims to ‘work at a distance’, achieving its objectives by inscribing these within the self- activating and self-regulating capacities of individuals. For Colquhoun, the ale-house was a space to be regulated as closely as possible; for Buckingham, new forms of government proceeding by cultural means, while not obviating the need for such regulation, would go further in producing individuals who did not want to besot themselves in ale-houses. It is, then, in the view of high culture as a resource that might be used to regulate the field of social behaviour in endowing individuals with new capacities for self-monitoring and self-regulation that the field of culture and modern forms of liberal government most characteristically interrelate. This was what George Brown Goode, in elaborating his view of museums as “passionless reformers’, was to refer to as ‘the modern Museum idea’ in his influential Principles of Museum Administration (1895: 71). While this ‘idea’ had an international currency by the end of the century, Goode attributed its conception to the role initially envisaged for museums by such mid-nineteenth century British cultural reformers as Sir Henry Cole and Ruskin.” For Cole, for example, the museum would help the working man choose a life characterized by moral restraint as preferable to the temptations of both bed. and the ale-house: 20 THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM If you wish to vanquish Drunkenness and the Devil, make God’s day of rest elevating and refining to the working man; don’t leave him to find his recreation in bed first, and in the public house afterwards; attract him to church or chapel by the earnest and persuasive eloquence of the preacher, restrained with reasonable limits; , . . give him music in which he may take his part; show him pictures of beauty on the walls of churches and chapels; but, as we cannot live in church or chapel all Sunday, give him his park to walk in, with music in the air; give him that cricket ground which the martyr, Latimer, advocated; open all museums of Science and Art after the hours of Divine service; {et the working man get his refreshment there in company with his wife and children, rather than leave him to booze away from them in the Public house and Gin Palace. The Museum will certainly lead him to wisdom and gentleness, and to Heaven, whilst the latter will lead him to brutality and perdition. (Cole 1884, vol. 2: 368) Of course, and as this passage clearly indicates, museums were not alone in being summoned to the task of the cultural governance of the populace, ‘To _ the contrary, they were envisaged as functioning alongside a veritable battery of new cultural technologies designed for this purpose. For Goode, libraries, parks and reading-rooms were just as much ‘passionless reformers’ as museums. And if the forms and institutions of high culture now found themselves embroiled in the processes of governing ~ in the sense of being called on to help form and shape the moral, mental and behaviourial characteristics of the population — this was, depending on the writer, with a plurality of aims in view. Museums might help lift the level of popular taste and design; they might diminish the appeal of the tavern, thus increasing the sobriety and industriousness of the populace; they might help prevent riot and sedition.> Whichever the case, the embroilment of the institutions and prac tices of high culture in such tasks entailed a profound transformation in their conception and in their retation to the exercise of social and political power. This is not to say that, prior to their enlistment for governmental pro- grammes directed at civilizing the population, such institutions had not already been closely entangled in the organisation of power and its exercise. By 1600, as Roy Strong puts it, ‘the art of festival was harnessed to the emergent modern state as an instrument of rule’ (Strong 1984: 19), And what was true of the festival was, or subsequently came to be, true of court masques, the ballet, theatre, and musical performances. By the late seven- teenth century all of these formed parts of an elaborate performance of power which, as Norbert Elias (1983) has shown, was concerned first and foremost with exhibiting and magnifying royal power before tout le monde — that is, the world of courtly society — and then, although only indirectly and secondarily, before the populace. If culture was thus caught up in the 4it ef HISTORY AND THEORY symbolization of powes, the principal role available to the popular classes = and especially so far as secular forms of power were concerned — was as spectators of a display of power to which they remained external, This was also true of the position accorded them before the scaffold within the theatre of punishment. The people, so far as their relations to high cultural forms were concerned, were merely the witnesses of a power that was paraded before them. In these respects, then, high cultural practices formed part of an apparatus of power whose conception and functioning were juridico-discursive: that is, as Foucault defines it, of a form of power which, emanating from a central source (the sovereign), deployed a range of legal and symbolic resources in order to exact obedience from the population.4 Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by contrast, these practices came to be inscribed in new modalities for the exercise of power which, at different times, Foucault has variously described as disciplinary or governmental power.’ Two aspects of these modalities of power are especially worthy of note from the point of view of my concerns here. First, unlike power in the juridico-discursive mode, disciplinary or govern- mental power is not given over to a single function. In his discussion of Machiavellian conceptions of the art of governing, Foucault thus argues that the prince constitutes a transcendental principle which gives to the state and governing a singular and circular function such that all acts are dedicated to the exercise of sovereignty — to the maintenance and extension of the prince’s power — as an end itself: ‘the end of sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty” (Foucault 1978: 95). Governmental power, by contrast, is characterized by the multiplicity of objectives which it pursues, objectives which have their own authorization and rationality rather than being derived from the interests of some unifying central principle of power such as the sovereign or, in later formulations, the state. Whereas in these formulations the state or sovereign is its own finality, governmental power, in taking as its object the conditions of life of individuals and populations, can be harnessed to the pursuit of differentiated objectives whose authorization derives from outside the self- serving political calculus of juridico-discursive power. As Foucault puts it, ‘the finality of government resides in the things it manages and in the pursuit of the perfection and intensification of the processes which it directs’ (ibid.: 95). Nineteenth-century reformers thus typically sought to enlist high cultural practices for a diversity of ends: as an antidote to drunkenness; an alternative to riot, or an instrument for civilizing the morals and manners of the population. While these uses were often closely co-ordinated with bourgeois class projects, their varied range stood in marked contrast to the earlier commitment of high culture to the singular function of making manifest or broadcasting the power of the sovereign, Second, however, and perhaps more important, governmental power aims at a different kind of effectivity from power conceived in the juridico- 990 THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM fiscursive mode. The latter is exercised by means of laws, edicts and promulgations supported by whatever means of enforcement the prince has ‘at his disposal. Governmental power, however, typically works through detailed calculations and strategies which, embodied in the programmes of specific technologies of government, aim at manipulating behaviour in specific.desired directions. The ‘instruments of government,’ as Foucault puts it, ‘instead of being laws, now come to be a range of multiform tactics’ (oucault 1978: 95) — and especially of tactics which, in aiming at changed conduct as their outcome, depend on a close relationship between the government of the state and the government of the self. The critical developments affecting the sphere of culture in these regards concerned the shift - which, of course, was a relative rather than a total one — from a conception in which culture served power by embodying, staging or repre- senting it, making it spectacularly visible. In place of this, culture was increasingly thought of as a resource to be used in programmes which aimed at bringing about changes in acceptable norms and forms of behaviour and “consolidating those norms as self-acting imperatives by inscribing them within broadly disseminated regimes of self-management. ‘There are, in this sense, many similarities between what was expected of the cultural technologies most closely associated with this new modality of power - the museum and the library, say — and the parallel reshaping of the ends and means of the power to punish, In Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault argues that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century penal ~geformers condemned the scaffold less on humanitarian grounds than because they perceived it as part of a poor economy of power: poor because it was intermittent in its effects, aiming to terrorize the population into obedience by _ means of periodic representations of the sovereign’s power to punish; poor because it lacked an effective apparatus for apprehending law-breakers; and poor because it wasted bodies which might otherwise be rendered useful. ‘Advocacy of the penitentiary as the primary form of punishment was thus based on what seemed to be its promise of a more efficient exercise of power: more efficient because it was calculated to transform the conduct of inmates through the studied manipulation of their behaviour in an environment built specifically for that purpose. More efficient also, to recall James Silk Bucking- ham, because — albeit via ‘mere technical arrangements’ — it aimed at an inner transformation, at the production of penitents with a built-in and ongoing capacity to monitor and hence curb their own tendency to wrong-doing. The enlistment of the institutions and practices of high culture for governmental purposes was similarly aimed at producing a better economy of cultural power, As has been noted, festivals, royal entries, tournaments, theatrical performances and the like had all served as means (among other things) for the periodic — and hence intermittent and irregular — display of power before the populace. The presence of the people — where it was required at all — was called for only in so far as the representation of power 23HISTORY AND THEORY required that there be an audience before whom such representations might be displayed. Transformations in the character, manners, morals, or aptitudes of the population were rarely the point at issue within such strategies of culture and power. The governmentalization of culture, by contrast, aimed precisely at more enduring and lasting effects by using culture as a resource through which those exposed to its influence would be led to ongoingly and progressively modify their thoughts, feelings and behaviour. ‘The inscription of cultural forms and practices within new technologies, rather than involving the population only intermittently, aimed at permanent and developmental and regular and repeatable effects and thus involved a significantly new economy of cultural power. This also offered the populace a more active and differentiated set of roles than merely as witnesses of a symbolic display of power (although this remained important — and more so than Foucault’s formulations often allow). To the contrary, culture, in this new logic, comprised a set of exercises through which those exposed to its influence were to be transformed into the active bearers and practitioners of the capacity for self-improvement that culture was held to embody. Enlisting the existing forms, practices and institutions of high culture for such purposes, however, required that they be instrumentally refashioned, retooled for new purposes. Nineteenth-century cultural reformers were resolutely clear-eyed about this. Culture, in its existing forms, could not simply be made available and be expected to discharge its reforming obligations of its own and unaided. It needed to be fashioned for the tasks to which it was thus summoned and be put to work in new contexts specially designed for those purposes. In the case of museums, three issues stood to the fore. The first concerned the nature ofthe museum as a social space and the need to detach that space from its earlier private, restricted and socially exclusive forms of sociality. The museum had to be refashioned so that it might function as a space of emulation in which civilized forms of behaviour might be learnt and thus diffused more widely through the social body. The second concerned the nature of the museum as a space of representation. Rather than merely evoking wonder and surprise for the idly curious, the museum’s representa- tions would so arrange and display natural and cultural artefacts as to secure ‘the utilisation of these for the increase of knowledge and for the culture and enlightenment of the people’ (Goode 1895: 3). ‘The museum of the past,’ as Goode put it in an 1889 lecture to the Brooklyn Institute, ‘must be set aside, reconstructed, transformed into a nursery of living thought’ (cited in Key 1973: 86). The third issue, by contrast, related more to the museum’s visitor than to its exhibits, It concerned the need to develop the museum as a space of observation and regulation in order that the visitor's body might be taken hold of and be moulded in accordance with the requirements of new norms of public conduct. In what follows, I shall consider each of these issues in turn. Although, of na THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM = © course, the ways in which these matters were addressed differed from one national context to another, as they did also between different types of museum, I shall, by and large, overlook such considerations in order to identify those most obviously shared characteristics which distinguished public museums from their predecessors. MUSEUMS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE ‘The reorganization of the social space of the museum occurred alongside the émerging role of museums in the formation of the bourgeois public sphere. ‘The institutions comprising this sphere had already partially detached high cultural forms and practices from their functions of courtly display and connected them to new social and political purposes. If, under feudal and jonarchical systems of government, art and culture formed a part, as _ Habermas puts it, of the ‘representative publicness’ of the lord or sovereign, the formation of the bourgeois public sphere was closely bound up with the development of new institutions and practices which detached art and culture from that function and enlisted it for the cause of social and political critique (Habermas 1989). This helped prepare the ground for the subsequent view that the sphere of culture might be reorganized in accordance with a governmental logic. ~The picture Habermas paints of the relations between different spheres of “social and political life and influence in late eighteenth-century European societies is, roughly, one characterized by a division between the state and ‘the court on the one hand and, on the other, civil society and the sphere of private intimacy formed by the newly constituted conjugal family. Mediating the relations between these was an array of new literary, artistic and cultural institutions in which new forms of assembly, debate, critique and comment- ary were developed. In the process, works of art and literature were fashioned ‘0 as to serve as the vehicles for a reasoned critique of the edicts of the state, ‘These institutions comprised, on the one hand, literary journals, philosophical = and debating societies (sometimes with museums attached), and coffee houses where the accent fell on the formation of opinions via a process of rational exchange and debate. On the other, they also included the new “cultural markets (academies, art galleries, salons) which, in their separation from both court and the state, allowed the formative bourgeois public to meet and, in rendering itself visually present to itself, acquire a degree of corporate self-consciousness.° The crucial discursive events accompanying these institutional changes consisted in the early formation of art and literary criticism, a development Which Habermas in turn attributes to the commodification of culture, For if the latter allowed cultural products to be made generally available, it did so only by simultaneously detaching those products from their anchorage in a tradition which had previously vouchsafed their meaning. As works of culture —HISTORY AND THEORY no longer derived their meaning from their place within an authoritative tradition emanating from the monarch (or church), the process of arriving at a meaning and a value for cultural products was a task which bourgeois consumers had now to undertake for themselves, both individually and, via debate, in collaboration with one another. They were assisted in this, however, by the newly flourishing genres of cultural criticism and comment- ary through which questions of aesthetic meaning and judgement came to form parts of a proto-political process whereby acts of state were subjected to reasoned debate and criticism.? For Habermas, of course, this critical deployment of art and culture served as an ideal — albeit an imperfectly realized one — in whose name the subsequent development of the debased public sphere of mass culture could be castigated for the loss of the critical function for culture which it entailed. There are, however, other ways of construing the matter. In his reflections on the role of technology in cultural production, Benjamin argued that the development of mass reproduction played a crucial role in politicizing art to the degree that, in depriving the work of art of its aura and thus detaching it from the singular function and identity associated with itembeddedness in tradition, its meaning could become an object of political contestation (Benjamin 1936). The argument is a familiar one within the Frankfurt tradition up to and including Habermas, albeit that the responsibility for freeing art from the restraints of tradition may be variously attributed to technology, the market, criticism, or all three. By the same token, the same conditions, in freeing high cultural forms from their earlier juridico-discursive forms of deployment, also made it possible for them to be thought of as useful for governing. However, this required that the conditions regulating culture's social deployment within the bourgeois public sphere should themselves be trans- formed. So far as the museum was concerned, two matters stand to the fore here. The first concerns the reversal of the tendency towards separation and social exclusiveness which had characterized the earlier formation of the bourgeois public sphere. It will be helpful to consider this issue in the light of a longer historical perspective. It is true, of course, that the secular collecting practices of European princes and monarchs in the post-Renaissance period had nat usually played a major role in symbolizing the monarch’s power before and to the popular classes. ‘It is,’ as Gerard Turner puts it, ‘part of the exercise and maintenance of any leader's power to ensure that his image is constantly before the people who count.’ As he continues, however, in the past ‘this has not, of course, been the mass of the population, but rather the ruler’s immediate supporters, the courtiers and nobility, and his rivals in other states’ (Turner 1985: 214). Obviously, there were exceptions and, in the course of the eighteenth century, these tended to multiply as a aumber of royal collections were made publicly accessible, usually as parts of statist conceptions of popular instruction. Even so, we should not mistake these for examples of the public museum 26 THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM avant ta lettre in that the form of power they instanced and exercised was still clearly juridico-discursive rather than governmental. Thus when, in _ 1584, the collection of Francesco I de Medici was transferred into the new and more public context of the Uffizi Gallery, this was in response to the need for public legitimation of the Medici dynasty, a need which, as Guiseppe ‘Olmi puts it, ‘meant that the glorification of the prince, the celebration of his deeds and the power of his family had constantly to be exposed to the eyes “of all and to be impressed on the mind of every subject’ (Olmi 1985: 10). In the main, however, collections of valued objects formed a part of the cultural accessories of power in contexts in which it was the organization and “transmission of power within and between ruling strata rather than the display of power before the populace that was the point at issue. Consequently, few “¢ollections were accessible to the popular classes; and, in some cases, those who might be admitted to view princely collections were so few that they symbolized not so much the power to amass artefacts which might be impressively displayed to others as the power to reserve valued objects for private and exclusive inspection (see Seelig 1985). Museums continued to be characterized by similar kinds of exclusiveness -during the period of their articulation to the institutions comprising the bourgeois public sphere. For, whether they were older museums annexed to the public sphere or new ones built in association with literary, debating, scientific or philosophical societies, access to them continued to be socially testricted.§ Habermas touches on these matters in his comments concerning “the class and gender characteristics of the institutions comprising the bourgeois public sphere, His concern in doing so, however, is largely to point to the conflict between the theoretical commitment to the universalist and equitably dialogic principles of discourse which characterized these institu- = tions and their practical limitation to middle-class men as a means of retaining the view that such discursive norms might yet be realized in a more ideal speech situation. As Stallybrass and White have suggested, however, the social logic of the bourgeois public sphere is not adequately understood if attention focuses "solely on its discursive properties. The institutions comprising this sphere were characterized not merely by their subscription to certain rules of discourse (freedom of speech, the rule of reason, etc.). They were also characterized by their proscription of codes of behaviour associated with places of popular assembly-fairs, taverns, inns and so forth. No swearing, no spitting, no brawling, no eating or drinking, no dirty footwear, no gambling: these rules which, with variations, characterized literary and debating societ- ies, museums, and coffee-houses also, as Stallybrass and White put it, formed ‘part of an overall strategy of expulsion which clears a space for polite, cosmopolitan discourse by constructing popular culture as the “low-Other”, the dirty and crude outside to the emergent public sphere’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 87). aqHISTORY AND THEORY The construction of the public sphere as one of polite and rational discourse, in other words, required the construction of a negatively coded other sphere - that comprised of places of popular assembly — from which it might be differentiated. If the institutions of the public sphere comprised places in which its members could assemble and, indeed, recognize them- selves as belonging to the same public, this was only because of the rules which excluded participation by those who ~ in their bodily appearances and manners — were visibly different.? The mid-nineteenth-century reconceptualization of museums as cultural resources that might be deployed as governmental instruments involving the whole population thus entailed a significant revaluation of earlier cultural strategies. In the earlier phase, the rules and proscriptions governing attend- ance at museums had served to distinguish the bourgeois public from the rough and raucous manners of the general populace by excluding the latter. By contrast, the museum’s new conception as an instrument of public instruction envisaged it as, in its new openness, an exemplary space in which the rough and raucous might learn to civilize themselves by modelling their conduct on the middle-class codes of behaviour to which museum attendance would expose them. The museum, in its Enlightenment conception, had, of course, always been an exemplary space, and constitutively so. As Anthony Vidler argues, the didactic function attributed to it meant that the objects it housed were invested with an exemplary status (Vidler 1987; 165~7). To be rendered serviceable as a governmental instrument, then, the public museum attached to this exemplary didacticism of objects an exemplary didacticism of personages in arranging for a regulated commingling of classes such that the subordinate classes might learn, by imitation, the appropriate forms of dress and comportment exhibited by their social superiors. This, at least, was the theory. In practice, museums, and especially art galleries, have often been effectively appropriated by social elites so that, rather than functioning as institutions of homogenization, as reforming thought had envisaged, they have continued to play a significant role in differentiating clite from popular social classes. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the museum is neither simply a homogenizing aor simply a differentiating institution: its social functioning, rather, is defined by the contradictory puils between these two tendencies. Yet, however imperfectly it may have been realized in practice, the conception of the museum as an institution in which the working classes — provided they dressed nicely and curbed any tendency towards unseemly conduct — might be exposed to the improving influence of the middle classes was crucial to its construction as anew kind of social space. There was also a gendered aspect to this refashioning of the socialspace of the museum. Joan Landes (1988) and Denise Riley (1988) have demon- steated the respects in which, in France and Britain respectively, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a deep and far-reaching a2 THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM duction of women’s involvement in public and political life and a parallel jjiaturalization of femininity in which women were made to embody a Rousseauesque conception of the natural." In Riley’s argument, this natural- ation of women prepared the ground for the subsequent emergence of the cial as a zone of population management in which the naturalized virtues of e feminine were accorded a key role in redressing social problems identified as having their provenance in the conditions (housing, hygiene, morality, etc.) ‘affecting family life. ‘This new production of “the social”’, as Riley puts it, ffered a magnificent occasion for the rehabilitation of “women”. In its very founding conceptions, it was feminised; in its detail, it provided the chances for some women to enter upon the work of restoring other, more damaged, women to a newly conceived sphere of grace’ (Riley 1988: 48), The consequences of women’s naturalization for the cultural sphere were somewhat similar. In an important reappraisal of Habermas’s conception of “the public sphere, Joan Landes, with the French context primarily in mind, ‘views women’s exclusion from this sphere as part of a cultural-political tactic that ‘promised to reverse the spoiled civilisation of le monde where stylish women held sway and to return to men the sovereign rights usurped by an absolutist monarch’ (Landes 1992: 56). The redefinition of femininity that accompanied this process in associating women with the spheres of the “fatural and the domestic, and with the functions of nurturing and growth, prepared the way for a redefinition of women’s role in the cultural sphere. “Women no longer appeared as the domineering mistresses of the world of salons but, rather, in the guise of culture’s gentle handmaidens. it was, then, just as important that, in their new conception as public institutions, museums were equally accessible to men and women. This had _ not always been so, and even where women had been admitted, their Presence was not always welcomed. An cighteenth-century German visitor to the ‘Ashmolean Museum thus complained that ‘even the women are allowed up here for sixpence: they run here and there, grabbing at everything and taking no rebuff from the Sub-Custos’ (cited in MacGregor 1983: 62). By the early nineteenth century, however, women were permitted — and sometimes encouraged — to attend museums in a way thai distinguished this component of the bourgeois public sphere from the coffee-houses, academies, and literary and debating societies which were still largely reserved for men. In this regard, museums belonged, as Linda Mahood has shown, to a select range of public contexts (parks, shopping arcades) which, in being differentiated from the unregulated sexual commingling associated with fairs and other sites of popular assembly, respectable women were able to attend — but only if accompanied by their menfolk or if chaperoned (Mahood 1990). It was, however, within the commercially provided space of the department Store that women found their first custom-built, single-sex, urban public space (see Leach 1984). Designed mainly by men but with women in mind, department stores allowed women to enjoy the amenities of urban sociabilityah iu oon ue a He a: th HISTORY AND THEORY without being threatened by the disturbing sights of the street scene which had formed a part of the scopic pleasures of the male fldneur and without courting the associations that were attached to women who frequented the public world of male pleasure. The department store, as Judith Walkowitz puts it, offered a space in which ‘women safely reimagined themselves as fldneurs, observing without being observed’ (Walkowitz 1992; 48). But it was more than that. In putting aside spaces reserved exclusively for women, the department store provided an enclave within which women could ‘mimic the arts of urban mingling without incurring the risks of the world outside” (Ryan 1990: 76). It also created a precedent which public authorities were not slow to follow in providing special places for women in public places and institutions: special reading-rooms in public libraries; special compartments for women on ferries; women’s rooms in city halls and post offices. The consequence was the organization of an urban space which had been ‘sanitized’ through the provision of locales in which respectable women could recreate themselves in public free from fear that their sensibilities might be assaulted or their conduct be misinterpreted. This, in turn, paved the way for the civilizing strategy of attracting men away from places of raucous male assembly and ushering them ‘into public spaces that had been sanitised by the presence of women’ (ibid.: 79). Ttis in the light of these broader changes that we need to consider the role played by gender in the constitution of the space of the public museum. For, in so far as it was envisaged as a reformatory of manners, the complex relations between the cross-class and cross-gender forms of commingling the museum allowed for are crucial to an understanding of the types of be- haviourial reformations it was to effect and of the means by which it was to do so. The most interesting development here consisted in the organization of a role for the working-ciass woman as a mediating agent helping o pass on the improving influence of middle-class culture to the recalcitrant working- class man. Consideration of the parallel and complementary strategies of class regu- lation associated with department stores will help both to make the point and to underline the specificity of the museum’s aims and practices in this regard. The similarities between the museum and the department store have often been noted.!' Both were formally open spaces allowing entry to the general public, and both were intended to function as spaces of emulation, places for mimetic practices whereby improving tastes, values and norms of conduct were to be more broadly diffused through society. The Bon Marché in Paris thus offered, as Michael Miller puts it, ‘a vision of a bourgeois life-style that became a mode! for others to follow’ (Miller 1981: 183). This was, in part, a function of the goods on sale. In offering a version of the lifestyle of the Parisian haute-bourgeoisie that was within the reach of the middle classes and that the upper echelons of the working classes could aspire to, the Bon Marché served as an important instrument of social homogenization at the THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM levels of dress and domestic decor. However, the influence of the department tore went further than this. In the person of the sales assistant it supplied a living model of transformed appearances and conduct on which the socially aspirant might model themselves, Yet, if this was a delicate matter, it was also very much a gendered matter too. For if the sales assistant was typically female, so, too, was the customer. Susan Porter Benson’s examination of the relations between gender and 4) power in department stores tellingly describes the complex dialectic between lass and gender that was played out in the relations between sales assistants and customers (see Benson 1979, 1988). Much as was true of the museum, the department store was subject to contradictory imperatives, On the one hand, it needed to mark itself off from the rough and the vulgar as a zone of exclusivity and privilege if it were to retain the custom of bourgeois women. On the other hand, it needed to reach a broader buying public — partly in order jo realize appropriate economies of scale in its operations but also as a jecessary means of influencing popular tastes, values and behaviour. While there were many different ways in which these tensions were managed,'? the point at which they were most acutely manifest was in the grooming of the _sales assistant who, in being typically recruited from the store’s local working- lass environs, needed her rough edges smoothing in order to be rendered ‘fit to serve’ the bourgeois clientele.'* Yet it was equally important that this grooming should not be carried too far, Should her dress and demeanour become too refined, the sales assistant would threaten that distinction between herself and her customer on which the latter’s sense of her own superiority lepended. Equally, though, the sales assistant did have to be distanced from her ciass of origin sufficiently for her to embody higher standards on which the aspirant working-class customer might model herself. As a consequence of the need to balance these competing requirements, the body and person of the sales assistant were targeted for quite intense and detailed regulation. In part, it was envisaged that, just as she would come to constitute a mode! for the working-class customer, so the sales girl would herself simply learn new ways from observing the behaviour of both her supervisors and those of her customers who were of higher social position. "These ‘natural’ civilizing effects of the department store environment, however, were typically augmented by active civilizing programmes — lessons in hygiene, etiquette and grammar; visits to museums and art galleries »- to acquire the principles of taste; the provision of well-stocked reading rooms » ~ through which the sales assistant was groomed both to serve and to function asa living testimony of cultural improvement. If, then, the civilizing programmes associated with the department store were directed mainly at women, there is little doubt that, in the mid- nineteenth-century British context, the primary target of the museum's - reforming intent was the working-class man, As the museum’s advocates saw it, it was the working-class man who needed to be attracted away from theHISTORY AND THEORY corrupting pleasures of fair or tavern in a reforming strategy which sought constantly to recruit, or at least to envisage, the working-class wife as an ally of culture’s advocates. Lloyds’ response to the opening of the Sheepshank Gallery in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1858 was, no doubt, a piece of fond imagining, but it was typical of the period: The anxious wife will no longer have to visit the different taprooms to drag her poor besotted husband home. She will seek for him at the nearest museum, where she will have to exercise all the persuasion of her affection to tear him away from the rapt contemplation of a Raphael. (Cited in Physik 1982: 35} If, however, the working-class woman was envisaged as a beneficiary of culture’s reformatory powers, she was also enlisted as an accomplice of those powers, as a cog in culture's mechanisms. This was, in part, a matter of the museum functioning, like the department store, as a learning environment in which bourgeois conceptions of femininity and domesticity might be trans- mitted to working-class women. Equally important, however, such norms then served as models through which the tastes of the working man might be improved. In the museum projects of Ruskin and Mortis, reconstructions of the ideal home — fashioned on the bourgeois interior, but supposedly within the economic reach of the artisan — were thus the primary means through which the working man was to be led to ‘better things’. More generally, however, women were held to exert a civilizing influence through their mere presence in both embodying and enjoining a gentleness of manners. This conception, moreover, was not limited to women’s partici- pation in museums. Peter Bailey has shown how — as a recurring trope through the literature of the rational recreations movement in Britain — women are envisaged as a civilizing influence on men. Robert Slane, extolling the virtues of public parks, thus opined: A man walking out with his family among his neighbours of different ranks, will naturally be desirous to be properly clothed, and that his wife should be also; but this desire duly directed and controlled, is found by experience to be of the most powerful effect in promoting Civilisation and exciting industry. (Cited in Bailey 1987: 53) Similarly, in her discussion of the early public library movement in America, Dee Garrison has shown how women were often thought of as more suited to library work than men owing to their ability to ‘soften the atmosphere’ in which culture was called on to perform its reformatory labours (see Garrison 1976). The same was true of teaching, and especially of the role accorded women in the teaching of English (see Doyle 1989). The specific position accorded women in these different cultural apparatuses, of course, varied. Museums, for example, did not develop into spheres of employment for women along the a2 THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM same lines as, in America, libraries did; the authoritative voice of the museum remained monologically male. None the less, there was a common pattern in which women, in being welcomed out of the ‘separate sphere’ of domesticity “to which their naturalization had earlier confined them, were accorded a role in which the attributes associated with that sphere were enlisted for reformat- ory purposes ~ as culture’s instruments rather than its targets. THE REORDERING OF THINGS While thus recruited for a civilizing task, the position accorded women within the museum’s conception of civilization as a process was more ambivalent. This is to touch on the second transformation of available cultural resources and practices associated with the public museum’s formation: the fashioning fa new space of representation which, in providing a new context for display f the valued objects inherited from previous collections, allowed those bjects to be harnessed to new social purposes. In the period of absolutism, Habermas argues, all major forms of display, including those associated with ollections, served to fashion a representative publicness for the prince: that s, to enhance the prince’s power by symbolically magnifying it in the public -domain. In the course of the nineteenth century, the museum’s space of “representation comes to be reorganized through the use of historicized principles of display which, in the figure of ‘man’ which they fashioned, “yielded a democratic form of public representativeness, albeit one which organized its own hierarchies and exclusions. _. What kind of a change was this? The emergence of historicized principles of display associated with the formation of the modern public museum was part of the more general transition Foucault has traced from the classical to the modern episteme. Yet the museum’s semiotic recoding of the artefactual field was also shaped by, and contributed to, the task of using cultural fesources in new ways and for new purposes that was associated with the development of liberal forms of government. Viewed in this light, I shall _ Suggest, the museum’s reordering of things needs to be seen as an event that was simultaneously epistemic and governmental. To develop this argument adequately, however, will require that we pay attention to the ways in which the museum’s new field of representations, as well as functioning semiotic- ally, provided a performative environment in which new forms of conduct and behaviour could be shaped and practised. As before, it will be convenient to take our initial cue here from Habermas. In his discussion of the relations between the fields of the public and the private in the late medieval and early modern periods, Habermas notes that, ~_incontrast to present-day usage, the field of the public was distinguished from that of the common and ordinary in referring to that which, through its association with persons of high status, was deemed worthy of being accorded a representative publicness. As Habermas, quoting Carl Schmitt, puts it: 33HISTORY AND THEORY For representation pretended to make something invisible visible through the public presence of the person of the lord: *. . . something that has no life, that is inferior, worthless, or mean, is not representable. It lacks the exalted sort of being suitable to be elevated into public status, that is, into existence. Words like excellence, highness, majesty, fame, dignity, and honour seek to characterise this peculiarity of a being that is capable of representation. (Habermas 1989: 5) Under the absolutism of Louis XIV, this principle had, as its correlate, the requirement that everything associated with the monarch should be deemed representable, as of public significance. Louis Marin, in bis vivid dissection of a proposal for a history of the king, thus shows how, since the life and acts of the king were taken to be co-extensive with those of the state, this history had to be a total one — a history that ‘admits of no remainder . . . [and] is also a space of total visibility and of absolute representability’ (Marin 1988: 71). ‘fo suppose otherwise, Marin continues, would be to ‘admit a “corner” of the royal universe where a kingly act, word, or thought would not be representable, would not be praisable, would not be sayable in the form of narrative-praise’ (ibid.: 71). Since this would be to think the unthinkable of an absolutism that was no longer absolute, a history of the king could only be imagined as one in which the king was both ‘the archactor of History and the metanarrator of his narrative’ (ibid.: 72). A history that would be the accomplice of absolutism must see the king everywhere and in everything, the moving force of all that happens, and it must tell the story of history as the unfolding of the monarch’s self-originating activity from the monarch’s point of view. Since this is the source of all illumination, it offers the only vantage point from which history’s unfolding can possibly be understood, The royal historiographer must write constantly both in His Majesty’s service and from his side: ‘To see the historical event at the place of the king, to be placed in this supreme — or almost — position, is to see the coming of History itself, since the king is its unique agent. And since the gaze of the absolute master sends the light that gives sight and produces what is to be seen, to be present at his side is to participate in his gaze and to share, in a fashion, his power: to double and substitute for him in the narrative-to- come that this past presence not only authenticates but permits and authorises. (Marin 1988: 73) Similar principles were evident in the royal collections which, at varying points in the eighteenth century, were made more accessible to broader sections of the population: the Viennese Royal Collection, moved into the Belvedere Palace in 1776, and the Dresden Gallery are among the more famous examples. These were not public museums in the modern sense. Their THE FORMATION OF THE MUSBUM | (neoretical openness proved, more often than not, to be qualified by ail kinds practical restrictions just as the collections they housed remained royal property rather than being owned by the state on behalf of the people. Even the placement of royal collections in new public or quasi-public contexts volved a significant transformation in the spheres of visibility they formed ucpart of as well as in the relations of visibility to which they gave rise. Krzysztof Pomian’s analysis of the phenomenological structure of col- jections usefully illuminates these matters. All collections, Pomian argues, are involved in organizing an exchange between the fields of the visible and the. invisible which they establish (Pomian 1990). What can be seen on display is viewed as valuable and meaningful because of the access it offers fo\a realm of significance which cannot itself be seen. The visible is significant not for its own sake but because it affords a glimpse of something beyond itself: the order of nature, say, in the case of cighteenth-century natural history coliections.'* Looked at in this light, Pomian suggests, collections can be distinguished from one another in terms of the ways in "which their classification and arrangement of artefacts, the settings in which these are placed, etc., serve both to refer to a realm of significance that is invisible and absent (the past, say) and to mediate the visitor’s or spectator’s access to that realm by making it metonymically visible and present. It has to be added, however, that collections only function in this manner for those who possess the appropriate socially-coded ways of seeing ~ and, in some cases, power to see — which allow the objects on display to be not __ just seen but seen through to establish some communion with the invisible to which they beckon. Collections can therefore also be differentiated from ‘one another in termis of who has access to the possibility of, and capacity for, -the kinds of double-levelled vision that are called for if the contract they _ establish between the visible and the invisible is to be entered into. Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of the modern art gallery is a case in point. The art gallery’s capacity to function as an instrument of social distinction depends on the fact that only those with the appropriate kinds of cultural capital can both see the paintings on display and see through them to perceive the hidden order of art which subtends their arrangement. However, similar processes are discernible in relation to other collections. In a recent study of late nineteenth-century colonial museums in India, Prakash shows how, in the process of negotiating a privileged relation to the imperial power, Indian elites used these museums to claim a ‘second sight’ which served to distinguish them from the illiterate peasantry who failed to see through the objects on display to understand the organizing principles of Western science on which they rested (Prakash 1992). An account of the museum's formation must therefore include an account of the changing forms and social relations of visibility associated with the different stages of its development. The studioli of Renaissance princes, which were among the more important precursors of the royal collections ofHISTORY AND THEORY absolutist regimes, reserved this power for double-levelled vision exclusively to the prince. Indeed, the significance of this power was underscored by the production of a division within the field of the visible such that one level of this was not open to inspection. Typically comprising a small, windowless room whose location in the palace was often secret, the walls of a studiolo housed cupboards whose contents symbolized the order of the cosmos. These cupboards and the objects they contained were arranged around a central point of inspection whose occupancy was reserved for the prince, The studiolo, as Giuseppe Olmi has put it, formed ‘an attempt to reappropriate and reassemble all reality in miniature, to constitute a place from the centre of which the prince could symbolically reclaim dominion over the entire natural and artificial world’ (Olmi 1985: 5). The real distinctiveness of the studiolo, however, consisted in the fact that the doors of the cupboards containing the objects were closed. ‘Their presence, and their meaning’, as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill puts it, ‘was indicated through the symbolic images painted on the cupboard doors’ (Hooper-Greenhill 1992; 106). The sphere of the actually visible (the paintings on the doors) mediated the prince’s exclusive access to the, in principle, visible but, in practice, invisible contents of those cupboards — and thence to the order of the cosmos which those contents represented, To the degree that this doubly mediated access to the order of the cosmos was available only to the prince, the sfudiolo embodied a power-knowledge relation of a very particular kind in that it ‘reserved to the prince not only the knowledge of the world constituting his supremacy, but the possibility of knowing itself” (ibid.: 106). When, in the eighteenth century, royal collections were translated into more public domains, this involved a transformation in their functioning for the objects they contained then assumed the function of embodying a representative publicness of and for the power of the king, This was what royal art galleries made visible: addressing their visitors as subjects of the king, they comprised part of a semio-technique of power through which the sovereign’s power was to be augmented by making it publicly visible. However, as Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach have observed, the royal art gallery also served as a context for organizing a new set of relations between the fields of the visible and the invisible, The development of display principles in which paintings were grouped by national schools and art- historical periods conferred a new codified visibility on the history of the nation and the history of art. This aspect of the royal art gallery allowed the form to be subsequently adapted, with relatively little refashioning, in the service of a democratic citizenry. Thus the administration of the Louvre during the French Revolution required no fundamental change in its icono- graphic programme for it to be adjusted to this end. Strategic replacements of images of royalty with allegorical and depersonalized representations of the state permitted a recodification of the works of art exhibited such that the nation they now made manifest was not ‘the nation as the king’s realm’ but ae THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM ‘the nation as the state — an abstract entity in theory belonging to the people’ (Duncan and Wallach 1980: 454). Most authorities are in agreement on this point. For Eilean Hooper- Greenhill, for example, the Louvre remained tied to statist principles derived from its earlier monarchical organization. Its centring of the citizen or, “ater, the emperor thus ‘could not help but recall those older renditions of the prince who represented the world, which centred himself, through the organisation of meaningful objects’ (Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 168). Perhaps more to the point, there is little or no evidence to suggest that, during the course of the revolution, the programme envisaged for the Louvre departed appreciably from that which had already been proposed during the pre- revolutionary period. ‘The articulation of a clear political demand that the royal collections, once housed in the Louvre but subsequently moved to Versailles, should be returned to the Louvre and be opened to the public was first made by La Font de Saint Yenne in 1747 in his Réflexions sur quelques causes de I état présent de ia peinture en France. The demand was repeated fairly regularly thereafter, receiving the support of the Encyclopedists in 1765. Partly in response to these demands, and partly in response to other circumstances (the establishment of public collections in many areas of provincial France; the examples of the Dusseldorf and Belvedere Galleries), 1778 saw the establishment of a commission to advise on opening the grand gallery of the Louvre as a public museum. In his discussion of the concerns of this commission, Edouard Pommier suggests that the plans it developed for the Louvre envisaged it as amuseum which, in its dedication to civic virtues, was to promote attachment to the state and nation as entities that were conceived as partly separate from and superior to the king. He further contends — and the documents concur ~ - that there was very little evidence of any new conception of the muscum’s purpose and function evident in the proceedings of the Commission du Museum and, subsequently, the Conservatoire - the organizations established, once the museum had been seized for the people, to superintend its develop- ment. Indeed, if anything, the contrary was true, These revolutionary organ- izations, Pommier argues, simply inherited the earlier conception of the museum, worked out by the commission established in 1778, as ‘the sanctuary of the example’ through which civic virtues were to be instilled in the public while failing to give any attention to the detailed muscological matters (the arrangement of space, the classification of the paintings) through which this programme might be carried out and put into effect. Instead, the revolution was content simply ‘to fill the grand gallery with paintings and open it to the public’ (Pommier 1989: 27)."5 The adjustments made to the programme of the Louvre during the revolution, then, were a development of earlier tendencies rather than in any sense announcing a radical break with the past. Even so, this should not incline us to underrate the cumulative significance of these changes. TheirTHE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM knowledges. The most crucial developments concerned the extensions of time produced by discoveries in the fields of geology and palaeontology, espe- cially in the 1830s and 1840s, and the reorientations of anthropology which this production of a deep historical time prompted in allowing for the nistoricization of other peoples as ‘primitive’.!° While important differences remained between competing schools of evolutionary thought throughout the. nineteenth century, the predominating tendency was one in which the different times of geology, biology, anthropology and history were connected to one another so as to form a universal time. Such a temporality links together the stories of the earth’s formation, of the development of life on earth, of the evolution of human life out of animal life and its development from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilized’ fo‘ms, into a single narrative which posits modern Man (white, male, and middle class, as Catherine Hall (1992) would put it) as the outcome and, in some cases, telos of these processes. These changes are often accounted for, by those who draw on Foucault’s work, as parts of a more general shift from the classical to the modern episteme and as a reaction to its splintering effects, For Stephen Bann (1984) and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1989) the museum functions as a site in which the figure of ‘Man’ is reassembled from his fragments, If the dispersal of that figure across what now emerges as a series of separated histories means that Man's unity can no longer be regarded as pre-given, the museum allowed that unity to be reconstituted in the construction of ‘Man’ as a project to be completed through time, Like all the king's horses and all the king’s men, the museum is engaged in a constant historical band-aid exercise in seeking to put back together the badly shattered human subject. While true so far as it goes, this account is too abstract to engage adequately with the representational regime of the public museum or the manner of its functioning. It is also necessary to consider the consequences of a related transformation whereby collections were rearranged in accord- ance with the principle of representativeness rather than that of rarity. At the same time as being a representational shift, however, this change is tied up with and enables a functional transformation as collections, no longer thought of as means for stimulating the curiosity of the few, are reconceptualized as means for instructing the many. These changes, together with those which reorganized museum displays in accordance with the requirements of an evolutionary historicism, were developed and implemented in a gradual and piecemeal fashion over an extended period: they were not completed until the final quarter of the nineteenth century. They are also ones which saw the centre of initiative move away from France and towards Britain and, later, the United States as societies in which the deployment of cultural resources in accordance with the principles of liberal government proceeded more rapidly and mote evenly. In France this process was interrupted by a succession of royal and imperial restorations through which art and culture were periodically re-enlisted in the 20HISTORY AND THEORY effect, to recall Marin’s discussion, was the organization of a narrative (the history of the state’) in which it was not the king but the citizen who functioned, simultaneously, as both archactor and metanarrator. The con- sequence, as Dominique Poulot puts it, was a form in which’ a national citizenry was meant to commune with itself through a celebration of art in which the nation served as both subject and object (see Poulot, 1983: 20). In this respect, the transformation of the Louvre into a public art museum and the iconographic adjustments which accompanied this provided the basis for a new form. Duncan and Wallach call this the ‘universal survey museum’. Its objective was to make a new conception of the state visible to the inspection of the citizen by redeploying expropriated royal treasures in a democratic public setting and thereby investing them with new meanings in embodying a democratic public representativeness: The public art collection also implies a new set of social relations. A visitor to a princely collection might have admired the beauty of individuai works, but his relationship to the collection was essentially an extension of his social relationship to the palace and its lord. The princely gallery spoke for and about the prince. The visitor was meant to be impressed by the prince’s virtue, taste and wealth, The gallery’s iconographic programme and the splendour of the collection worked to validate the prince and his rule. In the museum, the wealth of the collection is still a display of national wealth and is still meant to impress. But now the state, as an abstract entity, replaces the king as host. This change redefines the visitor. He is no longer the subordinate of a prince or lord. Now he is addressed as a citizen and therefore a shareholder in the state, (Duncan and Wallach 1980: 456) The royal art gallery is merely one of the precursors of the modern public art museum. Moreover, we shall not fully understand the latter and the signific- ance of the semiotic recoding to which it subjected works of art unless we consider it in relation to the other museum types (of geology, natural history, anthropology, science and technology, etc.) which developed alongside it and which, in doing so, subjected their own precursors to equally significant transformations, re-arranging their objects in new configurations so as to allow new concepts and realities to be figured forth into the sphere of visibility. Viewed in this light, the displacement, in the art gallery, of the king by the citizen as the archactor and metanarrator of a self-referting narrative formed part of a new and broader narrative, one with a wider epistemic reach in which it is ‘Man’ who functions as the archactor and metanarrator of the story of his (for it was a gendered narrative) own development, This narrative was made possible as a consequence of a complex set of transformations governing the objects and procedures of a wide range of ao THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM knowledges. The most crucial developments concerned the extensions of time produced by discoveries in the fields of geology and palaeontology, espe- ~ Gially in the 1830s and 1840s, and the reorientations of anthropology which this production of a deep historical time prompted in allowing for the historicization of other peoples as ‘primitive’.'© While important differences semained between competing schools of evolutionary thought throughout the nineteenth century, the predominating tendency was one in which the different times of geology, biology, anthropology and history were connected to one another so as to form a universal time. Such a temporality links together the stories of the earth’s formation, of the development of life on + earth, of the evolution of human life out of animal life and its development - from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilized’ forms, into a single narrative which posits ~ modern Man (white, male, and middle class, as Catherine Hall (1992) would put it) as the outcome and, in some cases, felos of these processes. ‘These changes are often accounted for, by those who draw on Foucault's work, as parts of a more general shift from the classical to the modern episteme and as a reaction to its splintering effects. For Stephen Bann (1984) and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1989) the museum functions as a site in which the figure of ‘Man’ is reassembled from his fragments. If the dispersal of that figure across what now emerges as a series of separated histories means that Man’s unity can no longer be regarded as pre-given, the museum allowed that unity to be reconstituted in the construction of ‘Man’ as a project to be completed through time. Like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, the museum is engaged in a constant historical band-aid exercise in seeking to put back together the badly shattered human subject. While true so far as it goes, this account is too abstract to engage adequately with the representational regime of the public museum or the manner of its functioning. It is also necessary to consider the consequences of a related transformation whereby collections were rearranged in accord~ ance with the principle of representativeness rather than that of rarity, At the same time as being a representational shift, however, this change is tied up with and enables a functional transformation as collections, no longer thought of as means for stimulating the curiosity of the few, are reconceptualized as means for instructing the many. ; These changes, together with those which reorganized museum displays in accordance with the requirements of an evolutionary historicism, were developed and implemented in a gradual and piecemeal fashion over an extended period: they were not completed until the final quarter of the nineteenth century. They are also ones which saw the centre of initiative move away from France and towards Britain and, later, the United States as societies in which the deployment of cultural resources in accordance with the principles of liberal government proceeded more rapidly and more evenly. In France this process was interrupted by a succession of royal and imperial restorations through which art and culture were periodically ze-enlisted in theHISTORY AND THEORY service of power by being called on to symbolize it. By contrast, the programme the South Kensington Museum developed in the 1850s — and it was a programme that proved influential throughout the English-speakin world — detached art and culture from the function of bedazzling the population and harnessed them, instead, to that of managing the population by providing it with the resources and contexts in which it might become self- educating and self-regulating. | These transformations are perhaps most readily discernible in the forma- tion of the natural history museum. Krzysztof Pomian’s discussions of the principles of curiosity and of their gradual erosion, in the eighteenth centur . by the new orientations embodied in natural history collections, provides 4 convenient point of departure. In Pomnian’s view, the principles of curiosit as exemplified in the cabinets de curieux of sixteenth- and seventeenth, century collectors, comprised a distinctive epistemic universe, an inter- fegnum between the restrictions that had been placed on inquiry by religio and those that were to be placed on it by the requirements of Scientife rationality. As Pomian puts it, the Ki n a 4 ‘unstkammer and Wunderk r Renaissance constructed: ammer of the a universe peopled with strange beings and objects, where anythin, could happen, and where, consequently, every question could iegitim. ately be posed. In other words, it was a universe to which corresponded a type of curiosity no longer controlled by theology and not yet controlled by science, both these domains tending to reject certain questions as either blasphemous or impertinent, thus subjecting curi- osity to 2 discipline and imposing certain limits on it. Given free reign during is brief interregnum, curiosity spontaneously fixed on all that ‘as most rare and i Si ishi we mest most inaccessible, most astonishing and most (Pomian 1990: 77-8) In his discussion of the collection of Pierre Borel, Pomian notes how the stress that was placed on the singular, the unique and the exceptional reflected a Pre-scientific rationality in its commitment to a view of nature’s infinit variability and diversity.'7 The reason for this, he argues, is clear: ‘if nature is said to be governed always and everywhere by the same laws, then logical it should be reflected in the common, the repetitive and the reproducible it if, on the other hand, no laws can be seen at work in nature, rare things alone we seen to be capable of representing nature properly’ (Pomian 1990: 47) For Pomian, the regime of representation to which the governing principles fone aes a gave me sas, at the same time, the manifestation of a specific form of pistemic desire — the desire for a knowledge of totality acquired by ins that were, ultimately, secretive and cultic. For the curiewx, the singular and exceptional objects assembled in the cabinet are valued Because thy stand in a special relationship to the totality and, hence, offer a means of 40 THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM acquiring a knowledge of, and privileged relation to, that totality. But this ok es, : © form of knowledge is, like the objects through which it is accessible, a rare ne only available to those special few who actively seek it. And the cabinet “of curiosities, in its design and in its social relations, reflects its role as a torehouse of a knowledge that is, at once, rare and exclusive, intelligible nly to those with the time, inclination and cultural training to be able to iecipher the relationship in which each object stands to the whole. ‘The initial challenge to the principles of curiosity, Pomian argues, came from the changing focus of natura] history displays which, through the eighteenth century, came increasingly to accord priority of attention to the ‘normal, the commonplace and the close-at-hand at the expense of the exceptional and the exotic. This shift of emphasis was, as Pomian puts it, ~~ simultaneously epistemic and utilitarian. It was the product of new principles of scientific rationality in which a search for laws as revealed by recurrences at the level of the average or commonplace came to prevail over the fascination with nature’s singular wonders. Yet it also entailed a new concern with the general communicability of this knowledge in order, through its effective dissemination, to allow it to be put to useful effect in the productive exploitation of nature, What changed, then, was not merely the classificatory principles governing the arrangement of exhibits. There was also a changed orientation to the visitor — one which was increasingly pedagogic, aiming to render the principles of intelligibility governing the collections readily intelligible to all and sundry, as contrasted with the secretive and cultic knowledge offered by the cabinet of curiosity. The issues at stake here are posed most clearly by the debates regarding whether or not collections might be separated into two parts: one for research purposes and the other for public display. Richard Owen had proved recaleitrantly opposed to this during his period as Director of the Natural History collections at the British Museum as well as, later, founding-Director of the Museum of Natural History when it moved to its own premises. Owen insisted, throughout, on the need for a national collection to be as wholly and exhaustively representative of nature's diversity as space would allow (see Owen 1862).!8 None the less, it was Edward Gray, the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum and Owen’s subordinate, who was the first to suggest, in 1858, ‘that it would be desirable to form a study-series as distinct from the exhibition-series’. Gray argued that what ‘the largest class of visitors, the general public, want, is a collection of the more interesting objects so arranged as to afford the greatest possible amount of information in a moderate space, and to be obtained, as it were, at a glance’ (cited in Winson 1991: 121), Louis Agassiz, who had argued, in 1862, that ‘collections of natural history are less useful for study in proportion as they are more extensive’ (Agassiz 1862: 415) was to prove the first influential advocate of this principle of separate displays. Although at first seeking to reconcile the two functions of research and popular pedagogy, in 1878 he divided the AL |HISTORY AND THEORY collection of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology along the lines Gray had suggested. Sir iam Henry Flower, Owen’s successor at London's Museum of Natural History, was to do the same in 1884. In the principles Flower enunciated for public natural history displays, the singularity of the object — its unique properties — is no longer of any interest, Citing G. Brown Goode’s famous definition of a weil-arranged muscum as ‘a collection of instructive labels illustrated by well-selected specimens’, Flower goes on to describe the process through which, ideally, the arrange. ment of that part of a museum intended for public instruction should be arrived at: First, as 1 said before, you must have your curator, He must carefully consider the object of the muscum, the class and capacities of the persons for whose instruction it is founded, and the space available to carry out this object. He will then divide the subject to be illustrated into groups, and consider their relative proportions, according to which he will plan out the space. Large labels will next be prepared for the principal headings, as the chapters of a book, and smaller ones for the various subdivisions. Certain propositions to be illustrated, either in the Structure, classification, geographical distribution, geological position, habits, or evolution of the subjects dealt with, will be laid down and reduced to definite and concise language. Lastly will come the illus- trative specimens, each of which as procured and prepared will fall into its appropriate place. . (Flower 1898: 18) The main point to note here is Jess that the object comes last but that, in doing so, its function and place is drastically altered to the extent that its status is now that of an illustration of certain general laws or tendencies. The implications of this new status are clearly identified as Flower proceeds to argue both the need for, and the possibility of, sparsity in the display of specimens so that the visitors’ attention should not be distracted by the Proliferation of objects on display. This new representational principle of Sparsity, however, is possible only on the condition that the object displayed is viewed as representative of other objects falling within the same class, This contrasts markedly with the principles of curiosity which, since objects are valued for their uniqueness, and since, therefore, no object can stand in for another, can assign no limits to the potentially endless proliferation of objects which they might contain, But the principle of sparsity is, at the same time, a principle of legibility — and of public legibility. If the museum object is an illustration, there is, in Flower’s scheme, no room for ambiguity regarding its meaning, ‘This is already vouchsafed for it by the evolutionary narratives which assign it its place ~ narratives which, ideally, govern the performative as well as the representational aspects of the museum’s environment. Thus, in outlining his AQ THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM -perfect plan for a natural history museum, Flower visualizes a representa- tional arrangement that is, at the same time, a performative one or, better, a representation that is realized in and through its performance. His plan, an adaptation of one that James Bogardus had earlier proposed for a world’s fair (see Giedion 1967: 199), consisted of a series of galleries arranged in the ‘form of circles, one within the other, and communicating at frequent “intervals: Each circle would represent an epoch in the world’s history, com- mencing in the centre and finishing at the outermost, which would be that in which we are now living. The history of each natural group would be traced in radiating lines, and so by passing from the centre to the circumference, its condition of development in each period of the world’s history could be studied, (Flower 1898: 49) ~The visitor at such a museum is not placed statically before an order of things ‘whose rationality will be revealed to the visitor’s immobile contemplation. Rather, locomotion — and sequential locomotion — is required as the visitor is faced with an itinerary in the form of an order of things which reveals itself only to those who, step by step, retrace its evolutionary development. How far similar principles of representation characterized the full range of specialist museums that developed in the nineteenth century is a moot point. Its influence on anthropological collections is clear. Pitt Rivers (or, as he was then, Colonel Fox) clearly articulated the relationship between the principles ‘of representativeness, sparsity and public instruction governing the typo- logical method he used in displaying his collections, In outlining the principles of classification governing the first public display of his collections at Bethnal Green in 1874, he thus stated: The collection does not contain any considerable number of unique specimens, and has been collected during upwards of twenty years, not for the purpose of surprising any one, either by the beauty or value of the objects exhibited, but solely with a view to instruction. For this purpose ordinary and typical specimens, rather than rare objects, have been selected and arranged in sequence, so as to trace, as far as Practicable, the succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed from the simple to the complex, and from the homogencous to the heterogeneous. (Lane-Fox 1875: 293-4) ‘The museum type most usually cited as an exception to this general tendency is the art museum. For Stephen Greenblatt (1991), the modern art museum is still governed by the principle of wonder to the degree that it seeks to stop the visitor in her or his tracks by conveying a sense of the uniqueness of the work of art, In contrast with the principle of resonance which characterizesHISTORY AND THEORY other modern collections where the viewer’s attention is diverted away from the object itself and towards the implied system of relationships of which it forms a part, the modern art museum, Greenblatt contends, is dedicated to displaying the singularity of the masterpiece. This requires such an intensity of regard from the visitor that everything else is blocked out from her or his vision. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s position is similar. While agreeing that, in the sciences, nineteenth-century museum classifications had shifted ‘the grounds of singularity from the object to a category within a particular taxonomy’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991: 392), the exhibition of works of art continued to be predicated on the singularity of each object and its power to dazzle, There is, then, a fairly widespread school of thought according to which the art museum stands to one side of the representational regime that has developed in association with the formation of other types of public museums, However, this view has been compellingly challenged by Philip Fisher who sees the modern art museum as being just as much dominated by what he calls the ‘technology of the series’ as other museum types and for much the same sorts of reasons. As art came to be envisaged as a cultural resource which might be utilized in governmental programmes aimed at enriching the whole population, then so the principles of its display were fundamentally modified. Where once sensory values had governed displays. of art with paintings, mirrors, tapestries, etc., being placed in relation to one another in Such a way as to produce a pleasing harmony, the public art museum developed new forms of exhibition that ‘involved an instruction in history and cultures, periods and schools, that in both order and combination was fundamentally pedagogic’ (Fisher 1991: 7), The resulting technology of the series, Fisher argues, was inherently inimical to the logic of the masterpiece, Whereas the masterpiece is ‘the quintessential complete and finished object” (ibid.: 174), a self-subsistent singularity existing outside the orders of time, the script of the art museum necessarily deprives the work of art of any such status in subordinating it to the effects of the technology of the series — that is, of works of art placed one after the other in a sequential toil that is historicized. This technology forms merely a part of the modern ‘machinery of a history of art which sequences each object and provides it with sources (ancestors) and consequences (descendants) beyond itself”, hanging paintings in a row so that ‘the individual work is implied to be following this and leading to that’ (ibid.: 97), The pedagogy comprised by this technology is not just a representational one that works via its influence on the visitor’s consciousness. It is a technology which also saturates the routines of the visitor as the lesson of - art’s progress takes the form of an itinerary that the visitor is obliged to perform. The museum converts rooms into paths, into spaces leading from and to somewhere. Fisher outlines what he means by this in contending that it is the museum that teaches us to ‘follow’ art: aa THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM ‘That we walk through a museum, walk past the art, recapitulates in our act the motion of art history itself, its restlessness, its forward motion, ts power to link. Far from being a fact that shows the public’s ignorance ‘of what art is about, the rapid stroll through a museum is an act in deep harmony with the nature of art, that is, art history and the museum itself (not with the individual object, which the museum itself bas profoundly _ fiidden in history). (Fisher 1991: 9) performative consequences of this technology of the series are most Jearly discernible where it is absent. The Museum of Modern Art at the -ompidou Centre is perhaps the best-documented example. Here there, is no istory of art to be performed. Instead, the museum substitutes a directed form of directionlessness for the narrativized route of the historical collection in ¢ aimless wandering it obliges its visitors to undertake. For more traditional isitors used to the performative requirements of the technology of the series, 1¢ new demands posed by such a de-historicized context for art’s display ave been experienced as deeply disorientating (see Heinich 1988). To summarize, then, while the formation of the public museum forms part ind parcel of the fashioning of a new discursive space in which ‘Man’ ‘functions as the archactor and metanarrator of the story of his own develop- _gnent, we shall not adequately understand the functioning and organization of this space if we view it solely as fabricating a compensatory totality in the face ‘of the ruins of the human subject. Nor shall we do so if we focus solely on its representational aspects. This is the central weakness of post-structuralist criticisms of the museum in their focus on the museum’s claims to representa- tional adequacy and then, inevitably, finding those claims wanting. For Eugenio Donato, for example, the aspiration of the nineteenth-century ‘museum ‘to give by the ordered display of selected artefacts a total representa- tion of human reality and history’ depended on the fiction that ‘a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for totality, object to label, series of “objects to series of labels, can still produce a representation which is somehow adequate to a nonlinguistic universe’ (Donato 1979: 221-3). Once these assumptions are questioned, Donato argues, the museum collapses into a meaningless bric-a-brac. This criticism, whilst perfectly correct, is also beside the point in that the specific efficacy of the museum does not depend on the adequacy or otherwise of its relationship to a referential ding-an-sich. Indeed, its efficacy, its specific modus operandi, does not derive from the structure of the representations it happens to contain. To suppose that it does is to view the museum itself, as an apparatus, as of an entirely incidental significance compared with the representations it contains. It is, of course, true that the museum’s construction of ‘Man’ as the (still incomplete) outcome of a set of intertwined evolutionary series (geological, biological, anthropological, archaeological) was articulated to existing socialHISTORY AND THEORY - THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM hierarchies in the most obvious and palpable of ways. Christina Crosby has noted the respects in which the view of bist eon ‘th ogee _existence that ethnographic displays projected for colonized peoples. The part that such representations played in authorizing the Practices of colonialism has been amply documented. However, the evolutionary space of the museum to which its specificity can be defined. ‘In these ways," she argues, “man” had another, more local set of articulations. It provided a Context in which the that generic, universal category typifying everything human 5 in fact ae visitor might rehearse and recapitulate the ordering of social life promoted by constituted through violently hierarchical differences, “Women” must ‘be those institutions of discipline and regulation which provided a new grid for ily life. The relationship worked the other way, too, with the hierarchical rankings associated with the museum often providing a model for other social institutions, In outlining the series of stages that education should follow, Herbert Spencer reproduced the hierarchical logic governing the arrangement of classes at international exhibitions, A rational programme of education, Spencer proposed, should commence with those activities which directly and indirectly ‘minister to self-preservation’ and proceed, thence, to those activ- ities which ‘have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring’. The _ higher stages of education would comprise instruction in ‘those activities which are involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations’ to be crowned, finally, by instruction in ‘those miscellaneous activities which fill up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of the tastes and feelings’ (Spencer, cited in Humes 1983: 31). Viewed in this light, the museum might be regarded as a machinery for producing ‘progressive subjects’. Its routines served (o induct the visitor into an improving relationship to the self. This yielded ~ ideally — a citizenry which, in drilling itself, would come to be auto-tuned to the requirements of the new forms of social training whose operations provided the museum with a salient point of external reference and connection. In a second argument, however, the performative context of the museum might be seen as having a more directly ‘progressive effect’ in its own right. For the space of the museum was also an emulative one; it was envisaged as a place in which the working classes would acquire more civilized habits by imitating their betters. It was, moreover, seen as crucial to the future progress of civilization that this should occur: the dissemination of middle-class forms of prudential restraint into the working classes via the male head of household was seen, throughout most of the century, as a necessity if civilization was not to be forfeited to nature and progress collapse beneath the weight of overpopu- lation. Viewed in this light, the museum might be seen as issuing its visitors with both a prompt and an opportunity to civilize themselves and in so doing, by treating the exhibits as props for a social performance aimed at ascending through the ranks, to help to keep progress on path. In these respects, the museum provided its visitors with a set of resources through which they might actively insert themselves within a particular vision of history by fashioning themselves to contribute to its development. In other Tespects, however, the museum was heir to earlier utopian conceptions of a society perfectly transparent to itself and, as a consequence, self-regulating. aye ‘ivi dee abeHISTORY AND THEORY TRANSPARENCY AND SOCIAL REGULATION As well as being provided with museums, libraries and art galleries, the inhabitants of James Silk Buckingham’s model town, which he proposed to call Victoria, were to enjoy the benefits of what Anthony Vidier refers to as its ‘colonnades of morality’ (Vidler 1978: 63). Comprising, essentially, a series of raised promenades which traversed all the main thoroughfares and ic spaces of the town, these colonnades were intended to confer a ty on all aspects of urban life and to transform the fléneur into a citizen policeman — or, more accurately, a citizen who was interchangeably the abject and the subject of policing in circulating between being subjected to the controlling gaze of others to, in turn, exercising such a gaze. For the intended effect of these promenades, combined with that of the central tower whose gallery was to provide for a panoptic inspection of the whole urban scene, was to banish any and all spaces of darkness and secrecy in which vice might flourish (sce Figure 1.1). As Buckingham summarized his intent: From the entire absence of all wynds, courts and blind alleys, or culs-de- sac, there would be no secret and obscure haunts for the retirement of the filthy and the immoral from the public eye, and for the indulgence of that morose defiance of public decency which such secret haunts generate in their inhabitants. (Buckingham 1849: 193) Similar schemes abounded during this period. Indeed, as Vidler shows, Buckingham’s plan drew on Robert Owen's earlier plan for a harmonious community — the Parallelogram — for much of its detail. Similarly, the role it envisaged for the colonnades echoed that which, in the design for Fourier’s Phalanstery, had been assigned to a network of galleries in providing for the supervision of communal spaces. In her discussion of nineteenth-century utopian and religious communities, Delores Hayden has also shown how important the architectural manipulation of relations of space and vision was to the ways in which such communities aspired to be morally self- regulating in subjecting cach individual to the controlling gaze of their fellows (Hayden 1976). This utopian fascination with architecture as a moral science was nothing new. In his study of Clande-Nicolas Ledoux — for whom architecture provided an opportunity ‘to join the interests of art with those of government’ (cited in Vidler 1990: 75) - Vidler shows the degree to which the architectural production of relations of transparency was central to the reforming projects of the Enlightenment. In his designs for salt-works, masonic lodges, theatres, and for Houses of Education and Houses of Games, the organization of relations of either hierarchical or mutual visibility played a crucial role in Ledoux’s conception of the ways in which architecture might help to shape and fashion human conduct. Yet the wish to make a society transparent to itself as a means of rendering Figure 1.1 Perspective view of Victoria Source: Buckingham (1849).HISTORY AND THEORY it self-regulating is not limited, in either its origins or its provenance, to the architectural sphere. Indeed, the aspiration was perhaps first most thoroughly worked through, both philosophically and practically, in the various attempts that were made, in the course of the French Revolution, to refashion the practices of the festival so that they might serve as an instrument of civic self- consciousness for a citizen democracy. In the political imaginary of the Revolution, the festival, as Mona Ozouf puts it, was regarded as providing for ‘the mingling of citizens delighting in the spectacle of one another and the perfect accord of their hearts’ (Ozouf 1988: 54). The festival, as Ozouf elaborates the argument, was thought of as an occasion in which the individual was ‘rebaptised as a citizen’ (ibid.: 9). It was a form through which ‘the new social bond was to be made manifest, eternal, and untouchable’ Gbid.: 9) in allowing the members of society to be rendered visually co- present to and with one another, Tt was chiefly for this reason that the amphitheatre was the preferred architectural setting for the festival in allowing spectators and participants to see one another in, theoretically, relations of perfect reciprocity. “The ideal place in which to install the Revolutionary festival’, as Ozouf puts it, ‘was therefore one that provided an uninterrupted view, in which every movement was immediately visible, in which everyone could encompass at a glance the intentions of its organisers’ (Ozouf 1988: 129). Yet if ‘unimpeded vision and the festive spirit’ seemed to go hand-in-hand, it was also true that the ‘spontaneity’ of the festival became increasingly organized and, indeed, coercive to the extent that the official ideal of the festival form could only be Figure 1.2 Festival of Labour, the Pamilistére, 1872 Source: Hayden (1981). 50 THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM yealized by the rigorous exclusion of all those elements of misrule, riotous ‘assembly and carnivalesque inversion associated with traditional popular tivals. An occasion for the exercise of social virtues, the revolutionary festival constituted an overdetermined context in which ‘mere contact between people was an education in civics’ and in this, its civic function, the festival was regarded as ‘very different from the riotous assembly or even ‘ne crowd’ (ibid.: 200). The ideal of scopic reciprocity, in other words, was much an instrument of social discipline as it was a means of celebrating the citizenry’s co-presence to and with itself, ‘The architectural legacy of such conceptions is evident in the design of the courtyard for the Familistére, or Social Palace, built in Guise from 1859 and ‘modelled on Fourier’s communitarian principles (see Figure 1.2). Here, in the Festival of Labour, the community is gathered together in a collective celebratory mode which, at the same time that it is self-affirming, is also self- olicing. The most striking aspects of this scene are its resemblances to the ew forms of exhibitionary architecture developed in the nineteenth century. in arcades (see Figure 1.3), department stores (see Figure 1.4) and the new Figure 1.3 Cleveland Arcade, Cleveland, 1888-90 Source: Pevsner (1976). 451HISTORY AND THEORY Figure 14 The Bon Marché Source: Miller (1981). museums that were custom built for their new public function (see Figures 1.5 and 1,6), the same architectural principle recurs again and again, Relations of space and vision are organized not merely to allow a clear inspection of the objects exhibited but also to allow for the visitors to be the objects of each other's inspection — scenes in which, if not a citizenry, then certainly a public displayed itself to itself in an affirmative celebration of its own orderliness in architectural contexts which simultaneously guaranteed and produced that orderliness.!9 That this was a wholly conscious technology of regulation is clear from the way in which these new exhibitionary architectures were developed out from, and by means of, a critique of earlier architectural forms. Significantly enough, however, it was not the museum’s most immediate precursors that were most typically looked to in this regard. Where collections were reserved for royal inspection or were assembled in cabinets of curiosities to which only the privileged were admitted, and then usually on the basis of per- sonalized tours for a handful of visitors at a time, the need for an architectural regulation of the visitor did not arise. The warren-like layout of Sir John Soane’s museum thus provided no mechanism for inhibiting the visitor's conduct (see Figure 1.7). When, in 1841, a House of Commons Select Committee on National Monuments and Works of Art considered the 52 THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM cee Figure 1.5 Bethnal Green Muscum, 1876 Source: Physik (1982), architectural layout of public buildings, buildings of this kind and — where they existed — the labour-intensive practices of visitor supervision which accompanied them were assessed as inefficient so far as their regulatory capacities were concerned. The Tower of London emerged as antiquated in its continued use of wardens as the primary means of guiding visitors while keeping a watchful eye on them. For William Buss, an artist, the guided tours of the armouries diminished their potential value: at that time it appeared to me to be very defective; the people were hurried through in gangs of from 20 to 30, and there was no time allowed for the investigation of any thing whatever; in fact, they were obliged to attend to the warder, and if the people had catalogues they might as well have kept them in their pockets; when they wanted to read ~ them in conjunction with the object they saw, of course they lagged behind, and then the warder would say, “You must not do that; the catalogues are to be read at home; you must follow me, or you will lose a great deal;” and E was peculiarly struck by that, for I thought it a very odd mode of exhibiting national property. (Report, 1841, minute 2805) The primary objection to this form of visitor regulation, as it emerges in the 53ba HISTORY AND THEORY Figure 1.6 "the Industrial Gatlery, Birmingham Source: 8. Tait, Palaces of Discovers, London, Quiller Press, 1989, Figure 1.7 Section drawing of Sir John Soane’s Museum, 1827 Source: 8. Tait, Palaces af Discovery, London, Quiller Press, 1989. 54 THE FORMATION OF THE MUSEUM Report consists in its inability to regulate public spaces into which indi- viduals are admitted in large numbers but on a one-by-one basis and in which is in the art museum — the individual must be allowed to contemplate the rk displayed in order to be receptive to its beauty and uplifting influence, guided tour, in herding the visitor round to a fixed time-schedule in an ybligatory close association with strangers, and in requiring attention to the | Get patter of the warden, was regarded as inconsistent with this objective. The | preference was for more streamlined ways of managing the visitor via ‘anized routes (one-way systems which do not allow visitors to retrace their ps) and impersonalized forms of surveillance (two guards per room, as at the National Gallery). However, perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the Report was the interest evinced in making use of the visitors themselves as tegulatory resource. For Sir Henry Ellis, the chief librarian of the British luseum, it was thus clear that ‘if a small number of persons are distributed through the whole house there is a great chance that you may some day or ther be robbed; our servants cannot watch them so well when a few persons re distributed over a large space; when there are many, one visitor, to a ertain extent, may be said to watch another’ (Report, 1841, Minute 2944). The most interesting comparisons, from this point of view, were those drawn between the new public exhibitionary institutions of the time and cathedrals. Just as conservatives objected that opening museums to the public would resu!t in the destruction and desecration of art by the mob, so it was argued that cathedrals, in allowing unrestricted entry during service time, ran the risk of undermining their own spirituality, ‘Even now, with the restricted right of entrance,’ the Reverend Smith of St Paul’s thus argued in his written submis- ion, ‘we see beggars, men with burthens, women knitting, parties cating luncheon, dogs, children playing, loud laughing and talking, and every kind of scene incompatible with the solemnity of worship’ (Report, 1841, Minute 23). Yet, at the same time, if they were a means of stating the problem, cathedrals also promised a solution. In the evidence that was submitted, it was © Suggested that, where unrestricted entry was granted to large numbers, the resultant capacity for self-watching might provide for a more effective regulation of conduct than the supervision of groups of visitors by wardens. When Charles Smith, a contemporary expert on cathedrals, was asked whether “the number of persons admitted form a number of witnesses who observe the wrong-doer and deter him?', he agreed that ‘the number is not so great as to form a crowd to hide each other’ (Report, 1841, Minute 1582). This, of course, was precisely what Buckingham’s ‘colonnades of morality’ were designed to prevent. The elevated vantage point they offer stops an assembly of people becoming a crowd; it breaks it up and individualizes it through the capacity for self-monitoring it provides. The transparency of the crowd to itself Prevents it from being a crowd except in purely numerical terms. If this was an achievement of the museum, it also had Pparalicls in the architectural evolution of the fair. The elevated promenade of Luna ParkHISTORY AND THEORY echoed Buckingham’s colonnades of morality (see Figure 1.8) just as the observation tower in the pool area of the park provided for a Panoptic surveillance similar to that of Buckingham’s central tower (see Figure 1,9), While closely interconnected in many ways, the architectural developments leading to this scopic regulation of the fair were distinct from those associated with the development of exhibitionary institutions. Indeed, they are most obviously indebted to the discourses of town planning which, modelled on Haussmann’s surgical dissection of Paris, aimed at the moral regulation of the population by opening up the streets to the cleansing light of public inspection ~ albeit, in the case of Luna Park, Haussmann’s influence was routed via that ideal city of light, Chicago’s White City (sce Boyer 1986). The result, however, was essentially the same in installing a scopic regime which led to the breakdown and individuation of the crowd. The contrasting scene of Southwark Fair in 1733 makes the point (see Figure 1.10). It was in this form ~ the grotesque body of the people appearing in ail its tumultuous disorder that conservatives had feared the crowd would inflict ail its excesses on the museum. The early nineteenth-century depiction of the behaviour of the popular classes in William Bullock’s commercial museum shows the transfer- ence of meanings from the one scene to the other (see Figure 1.11). Figure 1.9 Observation tower at Luna Park Source: Kasson (1978) Figure 1.8 Elevated promenade at Luna Park Source: Kasson (1978) 56 Figure 1.10 Southwark Fair, 1733 Source: $. Rosenfeld, The Theatre of Loudon Fairs in the 18th Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1960.HISTORY AND THEORY Figure 1.17 Bullock's Museum of Natural Curiosities Source: Altick (1978). In the event these apprehensions proved unfounded — partly because of the new technologies of regulation that were developed by public museums and related institutions, and partly because of the parallel developments which reorganized the social and architectural relations of popular recreations. By the end of the century, museums had, as George Brown Goode put it, become ‘passionless reformers’, capable of breaking up, segregating and regulating the conduct of those who entered through their doors. It was also true that the cultural environment surrounding the museum no longer delivered a rowdy crowd to those doors. This is not to say the museum visitor and the fair- goer were indistinguishable: to the contrary, they were significantly different from one another even when they were the same people. The two activities were perceived as different cultural occasions even by those who took part in both. But the gap between them had lessened to the degree that both had developed similar techniques for regulating the conduct of their participants. 58 THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX In reviewing Foucault on the asylum, the clinic, and the prison as institutional articulations of power and knowledge relations, Douglas Crimp suggests that there ‘is another such institution of confinement ripe for analysis in Fou- “cault’s terms — the museum — and another discipline — art history’ (Crimp 1985: 45). Crimp is no doubt right, although the terms of his proposal are _-misleadingly restrictive. For the emergence of the art museum was closely related to that of a wider range of institutions — history and natural science museums, dioramas and panoramas, national and, later, international exhibi- tions, arcades and department stores — which served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision. Further- more, while these comprised an intersecting set of institutional and disciplin- ary relations which might be productively analysed as particular articulations of power and knowledge, the suggestion that they should be construed as institutions of confinement is curious. It seems to imply that works of art had previously wandered through the streets of Europe like the Ships of Fools in © Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation; ot that geological and natural history specimens had been displayed before the world, like the condemned on the scaffold, rather than being withheld from public gaze, secreted in the studiolo of princes, or made accessible only to the limited gaze of high society in the cabinets des curieux of the aristocracy (Figure 2.1). Museums may have enclosed objects within walls, but the nineteenth century saw their doors opened to the general public — witnesses whose presence was just as essential to a display of power as had been that of the people before the spectacle of punishment in the eighteenth century. Institutions, then, not of confinement but of exhibition, forming a complex of disciplinary and power relations whose development might more fruitfully be juxtaposed to, rather than aligned with, the formation of Foucault’s ‘carceral archipelago’. For the movement Foucault traces in Discipline and Punish is one in which objects and bodies ~ the scaffold and the body of the condemned — which had previously formed a part of the public display of 59HISTORY AND THEORY Figure 1.11 Bullock's Museum of Natural Curiosities Source: Altick (1978) In the event these apprehensions proved unfounded — partly because of th wae oroRies of regulation that were developed by public museums and institutions, and partly because of the parallel deve i ‘organized the social and architectural relations of populer nereatene se u ie end of the century, museums had, as George Brown Goode put it, become ipassionless reformers’ capable of breaking up, segregating and regulating there o those who entered through their doors. It was also true that tural environment surrounding the museum no longer delivered a rowdy crowd to those doors, This is not to say the museum visitor and the fair- goer were indistinguishable: to the contrary, they were significantly different from one another even when they were the same people. The two activities wer Derceived as different cultural occasions even by those who took part me - ut the gap between them had lessened to the degree that both had oped similar techniques for regulating the conduct of their participants, -HE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX Th reviewing Foucault on the asylum, the clinic, and the prison as institutional ‘culations of power and knowledge relations, Douglas Crimp suggests that {here ‘is another such institution of confinement ripe for analysis in Fou- jilt’s terms — the museum — and another discipline — art history’ (Crimp 1985: 45). Crimp is no doubt right, although the terms of his proposal are jnisteadingly restrictive. For the emergence of the art museum was closely “ felated to that of a wider range of institutions - history and natural science muscums, dioramas and panoramas, national and, later, international exhibi- tions, arcades and department stores — which served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, © man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision. Further- more, while these comprised an intersecting set of institutional and disciplin- ary relations which might be productively analysed as particular articulations of power and knowledge, the suggestion that they should be construed as institutions of confinement is curious. It seems to imply that works of art had previously wandered through the streets of Europe like the Ships of Fools in Foucault's Madness and Civilisation; or that geological and natural history specimens had been displayed before the world, like the condemned on the scaffold, rather than being withheld from public gaze, secreted in the studiolo of princes, or made accessible only to the limited gaze of high society in the cabinets des curieux of the aristocracy (Figure 2.1). Museums may have enclosed objects within walls, but the nineteenth century saw their doors opened to the general public — witnesses whose presence was just as essential to a display of power as had been that of the people before the spectacle of punishment in the eighteenth century. Institutions, then, not of confinement but of exhibition, forming a complex of disciplinary and power relations whose development might more fruitfully be juxtaposed to, rather than aligned with, the formation of Foucault’s ‘carceral archipelago’. For the movement Foucault traces in Discipline and Punish is one in which objects and bodies — the scaffold and the body of the condemned — which had previously formed a part of the public display ofHISTORY AND THEORY Figure 2.1 The cabinet of curiosities: the Metallotheca of Michele Mercati in the Vatican, 1719 Source: Tmpey and MacGregor (1985). power were withdrawn from the public gaze as punishment increasingly took the form of incarceration. No longer inscribed within a public dramaturgy of power, the body of the condemned comes to be caught up within an inward- looking web of power relations, Subjected to omnipresent forms of surveil- lance through which the message of power was carried directly to it so as to render it docile, the body no longer served as the surface on which, through the system of retaliatory marks inflicted on it in the name of the sovereign, the lessons of power were written for others to read: ‘The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifest force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchised structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus. (Foucault 1977: 115-16) ‘The institutions comprising ‘the exhibitionary complex’, by contrast, were involved in the transfer of objects and bodies from the enclosed and private 60 THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX domains in which they had previously been displayed (but to a restricted “ublic) into progressively more open and public arenas where, through the presentations to which they were subjected, they formed vehicles for scribing and broadcasting the messages of power (but of a different type) hroughout society. ‘Two different sets of institutions and their accompanying knowledge/ wer relations, then, whose histories, in these respects, run in opposing “directions. Yet they are also paralle! histories. The exhibitionary complex and ‘the carceral archipelago develop over roughly the same period — the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century — and achieve developed articu- ations of the new principles they embodied within a decade or so of one other. Foucault regards the opening of the new prison at Mettray in 1840 a key moment in the development of the carceral system. Why Mettray? jccause, Foucault argues, ‘it is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the ‘model in which are concentrated all the coercive technologies of behaviour - _ previously found in the cloister, prison, school or regiment and which, in ing brought together in one place, seryed as a guide for the future “development of carceral institutions’ (Foucault 1977; 293). In Britain, the opening of Pentonville Model Prison in 1842 is often viewed in a similar light, Less than a decade later the Great Exhibition of 1851 (see Figure 2.2) brought together an ensemble of disciplines and techniques of display that d been developed within the previous histories of museums, panoramas, ‘Mechanics’ Institute exhibitions, art galleries, and arcades. In doing so, it translated these into exhibitionary forms which, in simultaneously ordering objects for public inspection and ordering the public that inspected, were to have a profound and lasting influence on the subsequent development of museums, art galleries, expositions, and department stores. Nor are these entirely separate histories. At certain points they overiap, Often with a transfer of meanings and effects between them. To understand their interrelations, however, it will be necessary, in borrowing from Fou- -_cault, to qualify the terms he proposes for investigating the development of power/knowledge relations during the formation of the modern period. For the set of such relations associated with the development of the exhibitionary complex serves as a check to the generalizing conclusions Foucault derives ‘from his examination of the carceral system. In particular, it calls into question his suggestion that the penitentiary merely perfected the indi- ‘vidualizing and normalizing technologies associated with a veritable swarm- ing of forms of surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms which came to iuffuse society with a new — and all pervasive — political economy of power. ‘This is not to suggest that technologies of surveillance had no place in the xhibitionary complex but rather that their intrication with new forms of spectacle produced a more complex and nuanced set of relations through which power was exercised and relayed to — and, in part, through and by — the populace than the Foucaultian account allows. 61HISTORY AND THEORY Figure 2.2 The Great Exhibition, 1851: the Western, or British, Nave, looking East Source: Plate by H. Owen and M. Ferrier, Foucault’s primary concern, of course, is with the problem of order, He conceives the development of new forms of discipline and surveillance, as Jeffrey Minson puts it, as an ‘attempt to reduce an ungovernable populace to a multiply differentiated population’, parts of ‘an historical movement aimed at transforming highly disruptive economic conflicts and political forms of disorder into quasi-technical or moral problems for social adminis- tration’. These mechanisms assumed, Minson continues, ‘that the key to the populace’s social and political unruliness and also the means of combating it lies in the “opacity” of the populace to the forces of order’ (Minson 1985: 24). The exhibitionary complex was also a response to the problem of order, but one which worked differently in seeking to transform that problem into one of culture — a question of winning hearts and minds as well as the disciplining and training of bodies. As such, its constituent institutions reversed the orientations of the disciplinary apparatuses in seeking to render the forces and principles of order visible to the populace — transformed, here, 62 THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX jnto.a people, a citizenry ~ rather than vice versa. They sought not to map "athe social body in order to know the populace by rendering it visible to wer. Instead, through the provision of object lessons in power — the power ‘command and arrange things and bodies for public display — they sought allow the people, and en masse rather than individually, to know rather aii be known, to become the subjects rather than the objects of knowledge. © Yet, ideally, they sought also to allow the people to know and thence to what power knows, and knowing themselves as (ideally) known by power, jintetiorizing its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance and, hence, self. gulation. . It is, then, as a set of cultural technologies concerned to organize a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry that I propose to examine the formation of the exhibitionary complex. In doing so, I shall draw on the Gramscian “perspective of the ethical and educative function of the modern state to ‘account for the relations of this complex to the development of the bourgeois democratic polity. Yet, while wishing to resist a tendency in Foucault towards misplaced generalizations, it is to Foucault’s work that I shall look to unravel the relations between knowledge and power effected by the technologies of ision embodied in the architectural forms of the exhibitionary complex. DISCIPLINE, SURVEILLANCE, SPECTACLE “In discussing the proposals of late eighteenth-century penal reformers, "Foucault remarks that punishment, while remaining a ‘legible lesson’ organ- ed in relation to the body of the offended, was envisioned as ‘a school rather han a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony’ (Foucault 1977: _1L1). Hence, in schemes to use convict labour in public contexts, it was ‘envisaged that the convict would repay society twice: once by the labour he " provided, and a second time by the signs he produced, a focus of both profit and signification in serving as an ever-present reminder of the connection ‘between crime and punishment: Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics, And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays. (Foucault 1977: 111) In the event, punishment took a different path with the development of the carceral system, Under both the ancien régime and the projects of the late cighteenth-century reformers, punishment had formed part of a public system «of representation, Both regimes obeyed a logic according to which ‘secret onHISTORY AND THEORY punishment is a punishment half-wasted’ (Foucault 1977: 111). With the development of the carceral system, by contrast, punishment was removed from the public gaze in being enacted behind the closed walls of the penitentiary, and had in view not the production of signs for society but the correction of the offender, No longer an‘art of public effects, punishment aimed at a calculated transformation in the behaviour of the convicted. The body of the offender, no longer a medium for the relay of signs of power, was zoned as the target for disciplinary technologies which sought to modify the behaviour through repetition. The body and the soul, as principles of behaviour, form the element that is now proposed for punitive intervention. Rather than on an art of representation, this punitive intervention must rest on a studied manip- ulation of the individual. ... As for the instruments used, these are no longer complexes of representation, reinforced and circulated, but forms of coercion, schemata of restraint, applied and repeated. Exer- cises, not signs... (Foucault 1977: 128) It is not this account itself that is in question here but some of the more general claims Foucault elaborates on its basis. In his discussion of ‘the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms’, Foucault argues that the disciplinary technologies and forms of observation developed in the carceral system — and especially the principle of panopticism, rendering: everything visible to the eye of power ~ display a tendency ‘to become “de-institutionalised”, to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a “free” state’ (Foucault 1977: 211), These new systems of surveillance, mapping the social body so as to render it knowable and amenable to social regulation, mean, Foucault argues, that ‘one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society .. . that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social “quarrantine”, to an indefinitely gencralisable mechanism of “panopticism””? (ibid.: 216). A society, according to Foucault in his approving quotation of Julius, that ‘is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance’: Antiquity had been a civilisation of spectacle. ‘To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects’: this was the problem to which the architecture of tempies, theatres and circuses responded .... In a society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the one hand, private individuals and, on the other, the state, relations can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse of the spectacle. It was fo the modern age, to the ever-growing influence of the state, to its ever more profound intervention in all the details and all the relations of social life, that was reserved the task of increasing and perfecting its 64 THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX guarantees, by using and directing towards that great aim the building and distribution of buildings intended to observe a great multitude of men at the same time. . (Foucault 1977; 216-17) “A. disciplinary society: this general characterization of the modality of ‘power in modern societies has proved one of the more influential aspects of Foucault's work. Yet it is an incautious generalization and one produced by peculiar kind of misaitention. For it by no means follows from the fact that punishment had ceased to be a spectacle that the function of displaying power ‘of making it visible for all to see — had itself fallen into abeyance.' Indeed, Graeme Davison suggests, the Crystal Palace might serve as the emblem of an architectural series which could be ranged against that of the asylum, school, and prison in its continuing concern with the display of objects to a great multitude: ‘The Crystal Palace reversed the panoptical principle by fixing the eyes of the multitude upon an assemblage of glamorous commodities. The Panopticon was designed so that everyone could be seen; the Crystal ‘Palace was designed so that everyone could see. (Davison 1982/83: 7) This opposition is a little overstated in that one of the architectural imnovations of the Crystal Palace consisted in the arrangement of relations between the public and exhibits so that, while everyone could see, there were “also vantage points from which everyone could be seen, thus combining the functions of spectacle and surveillance. None the less, the shift of emphasis is worth preserving for the moment, particularly as its force is by no means imited to the Great Exhibition. Even a cursory glance through Richard Altick’s The Shows of London convinces that the nineteenth century was quite _umprecedented in the social effort it devoted to the organization of spectacles arranged for increasingly large and undifferentiated publics (Altick 1978). Several aspects of these developments merit a preliminary consideration. First, the tendency for society itself -- in its constituent parts and as a whole "to be rendered as a spectacle. This was especially clear in attempts to render - the city visible, and hence knowable, as a totality. While the depths of city life were penetrated by developing networks of surveillance, cities in- creasingly opened up their processes to public inspection, laying their secrets open not merely to the gaze of power but, in principle, to that of everyone; indeed, making the specular dominance of the eye of power available to all. By the turn of the century, Dean MacCannell notes, sightseers in Paris ‘were given tours of the sewers, the morgue, a slaughterhouse, a tobacco factory, the government printing office, a tapestry works, the mint, the stock exchange and the supreme court in session’ (MacCannell 1976: 57). No doubt such tours conferred only an imaginary dominance over the city, an illusory rather 65ett sist? HISTORY AND THEORY than substantive controlling vision, as Dana Brand suggests was the case with earlier panoramas (Brand 1986). Yet the principle they embodied was real enough and, in seeking to render cities knowable in exhibiting the workings of their organizing institutions, they are without parallel in the spectacles of earlier regimes where the view of power was always ‘from below’, This ambition towards a specular dominance over a totality was even more evident in the conception of international exhibitions which, in their heyday, sought to make the whole world, past and present, metonymically available in the assemblages of objects and peoples they brought together and, from their towers, to lay it before a controlling vision. Second, the increasing involvement of the state in the provision of such Spectacles, In the British case, and even more so the American, such involvement was typically indirect.? Nicholas Pearson notes that while the Sphere of culture fell increasingly under governmental regulation in the second half of the nineteenth century, the preferred form of administration for museums, art galleries, and exhibitions was (and remains) via boards of trustees. Through these, the state could tetain effective direction over policy by virtue of its control over appointments but without involving itself in the day-to-day conduct of affairs and so, seemingly, violating the Kantian imperative in subordinating culture to practical requirements (Pearson 1982: 8-13, 46-7), Although the state was initially prodded only reluctantly into this sphere of activity, there should be no doubt of the importance it eventually assumed, Museums, galleries, and, more intermittently, exhibi- tions played a pivotal roie in the formation of the modern state and are fundamental to its conception as, among other things, a set of educative and civilizing agencies, Since the late nineteenth century, they have been ranked highly in the funding priotities of all developed nation-states and have proved remarkably influential cuitural technologies in the degree to which they have recruited the interest and participation of their citizenries, Finally, the exhibitionary complex provided a context for the permanent reality as “super-power”” (Foucault 1977; 57). It is not that the nineteenth Century dispensed entirely with the need for the periodic magnification of Bower through its excessive display, for the expositions played this role. They did so, however, in relation to a network of institutions which provided mechanisms for the permanent display of power. And for a power which wes not reduced to periodic effects but which, to the contrary, manifested itself Precisely in continually displaying its ability to command, order, and control objects and bodies, living or dead. There is, then, another series from the one Foucault examines in tracing 66 “and public contexts, And, as a part of a profound transformation in their social THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX "Ihe shift from the ceremony of the scaffold to the disciplinary rigours of the nitentiary. Yet itis a series which has its echo and, in some respects, model We other section of the socio-juridical apparatus: the trial. The scene of the aland that of punishment traversed one another as they moved in opposite ctions during the early modern period, As punishment was withdrawn com) the public gaze and transferred to the enclosed space of the penitentiary, | Gy the procedures of trial and sentencing — which, except for England, had therto been mostly conducted in secret, ‘opaque not only to the public but a 2S | also to the accused himself” (Foucault 1977: 35) — were made public as part ‘a new system of judicial truth which, in order to function as truth, needed fo be made known to all, If the asymmetry of these movements is compelling, ig no more so than the symmetry of the movement traced by the trial and || the museum in the transition they make from closed and restricted to open ioning, it was ultimately to these institutions — and not by witnessing iinishment enacted in the streets nor, as Bentham had envisaged, by making » the penitentiaries open to public inspection ~ that children, and their parents, Were invited to attend their lessons in civies. , a Moreover, such lessons consisted not in a display of power which, in ‘seeking to terrorize, positioned the people on the other side of power as its potential recipients but sought rather to place the people — conceived as a ationalized citizenry ~ on this side of power, both its subject and its eneficiary. To identify with power, to see it as, if not directly theirs, then indirectly so, a force regulated and channelled by society’s ruling groups but for the good of all: this was the rhetoric of power embodied in the exhibitionary complex — a power made manifest not in its ability to inflict pain but by its ability to organize and co-ordinate an order of things and to produce a place for the people in relation to that order. Detailed studies of hineteenth-century expositions thus consistently highlight the ideological economy of their organizing principles, transforming displays of machinery and industrial processes, of finished products and objets dart, into material signifiers of progress — but of progress as a collective national achievement with capital as the great co-ordinator (Silverman 1977, Rydell 1984). This _ power thus subjugated by flattery, placing itself on the side of the people by "affording them a place within its workings; a power which placed the people behind it, inveigled into complicity with it rather than cowed into submission before it. And this power marked out the distinction between the subjects and the objects of power not within the national body but, as organized by the many rhetorics of imperialism, between that body and other, non civilized? peoples upon whose bodies the effects of power were unleashed with as muc force and theatricality as had been manifest on the scaffold, This was, in other words, a power which aimed at a rhetorical effect through its representation of otherness rather than at any disciplinary effects. ; Yet it is not merely in terms of its ideological economy that the exhib-HISTORY AND THEORY itionary complex must be assessed. While museums and expositions may have set out to win the hearts and minds of their visitors, these also brought their bodies with them creating architectural problems as vexed as any posed by the development of the carceral archipelago. The birth of the Latter, Foucault argues, required a new architectural problematic: that of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external space (cf. the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control — to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform indi- viduals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them, (Foucault 1977: 172) As Davison notes, the development of the exhibitionary complex also posed a new demand: that everyone should see, and not just the ostentation of imposing facades but their contents too. This, too, created a series of architectural problems which were ultimately resolved only through a ‘polit- ical economy of detail’ similar to that applied to the regulation of the relations between bodies, space, and time within the penitentiary. In Britain, France, and Germany, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a spate of state-sponsored architectural competitions for the desi ign of museums in which the emphasis shifted progressively away from organizing spaces of display for the private pleasure of the prince or aristocrat and towards an organization of space and vision that would enable museums to function as organs of public instruction (Seling 1967). Yet, as I have already suggested, it is misleading to view the architectural problematics of the exhibitionary complex as simply reversing the principles of panopticism. The effect of these principles, Foucault argues, was to abolish the crowd conceived as ‘a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect’ and to replace it with ‘a collection of separated indi- vidualities’ (Foucault 1977: 201). However, as John MacArthur notes, the Panopticon is simply a technique, not itself a disciplinary regime or essen- tially a part of one, and, like all techniques, its potential effects are not exhausted by its deployment within any of the regimes in which it happens to be used (MacArthur 1983: 192-3). The peculiarity of the exhibitionary complex is not to be found in its reversal of the principles of the Panopticon. Rather, it consists in its incorporation of aspects of those principles together with those of the panorama, forming a technology of vision which served not to atomize and disperse the crowd but to regulate it, and to do so by rendering it visible to itself, by making the crowd itself the ultimate spectacle. An instruction from a ‘Short Sermon to Sightseers’ at the 1901 Pan- American Exposition enjoined: ‘Please remember when you get inside the THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX ates you are part of the show’ (cited in Harris 1978: 144). This was also true f museums and department stores which, like many of the main exhibition alls of expositions, frequently contained galleries affording a superiot yantage point from which the layout of the whole and the activities of other ‘isitors could also be observed. It was, however, the expositions which developed this characteristic furthest in constructing viewing positions from "which they could be surveyed as totalities: the function of the Biffel Tower t the 1889 Paris exposition, for example. To see and be scen, to survey yet ways be under surveillance, the object of an unknown but controlling look: in these ways, as micro-worids rendered constantly visible to themselves, xpositions realized some of the ideals of panopticism in transforming the rowd into a constantly surveyed, self-watching, self-regulating, and, as the istorical record suggests, consistently orderly public — a society watching wer itself. Within the hierarchically organized system of looks of the penitentiary in which each level of looking is monitored by a higher one, the inmate onstitutes the point at which all these looks culminate but he is unable to turn a look of his own or move to a higher levei of vision. The exhibitionary complex, by contrast, perfected a self-monitoring system of looks in which the subject and object positions can be exchanged, in which the crowd comes commune with and regulate itself through interiorizing the ideal and ordered view of itself as seen from the controlling vision of power — a site __ of sight accessible to all. It was in thus democratizing the eye of power that the expositions realized Bentham’s aspiration for a system of looks within hich the central position would be available to the public at all times, a model lesson in civics in which a society regulated itself through self- observation. But, of course, self-observation from a certain perspective. As Manfredo Tafuri puts it: The arcades and the department stores of Paris, like the great ex- positions, were certainly the places in which the crowd, itself become a spectacle, found the spatial and visual means for a self-education from the point of view of capital, (Tafuri 1976: 83) However, this was not an achievement of architecture alone. Account must 50 be taken of the forces which, in shaping the exhibitionary complex, rmed both its publics and its rhetorics. SEEING THINGS Tt seems unlikely, come the revolution, that it will occur to anyone to storm the British Museum. Perhaps it always was. Yet, in the early days of its history, the fear that it might incite the vengeance of the mob was real enough. In 1780, in the midst of the Gordon Riots, troops were housed in the gardensHISTORY AND THEORY and building and, in 1848, when the Chartists marched to present the People’s Charter to Parliament, the authorities Prepared to defend the museum as vigilantly as if it had been a penitentiary. The museum staff were sworn in as special constables; fortifications were constructed around the perimeter; a garrison of museum staff, regular troops, and Chelsea pensioners, armed with muskets, pikes, and cutlasses, and with provisions for a three-day siege, occupied the buildings; stones were carried to the roof to be hurled down on the Chartists should they succeed in breaching the outer defences.4 This fear of the crowd haunted debates on the muscum’s policy for over a century. Acknowledged as one of the first public museums, its conception of the public was a limited one. Visitors were admitted only in groups of fifteen and were obliged to submit their credentials for inspection prior to admission which was granted only if they were found to be ‘not exceptionable’ (Wittlin 1949: 113). When changes to this policy were proposed, they were resisted by both the museum's trustees and its curators, apprehensive that the unruliness of the mob would mar the ordered display of culture and knowledge. When, shortly after the museum’s establishment, it was Proposed that there be public days on which unrestricted access would be allowed, the Proposal was scuttled on the grounds, as one trustee put it, that some of the visitors from the streets would inevitably be ‘in liquor’ and ‘will never be kept in order’, And if public days should be allowed, Dr Ward continued: then it will be necessary for the Trustees to have a presence of a Committee of themselves attending, with at least two Justices of the Peace and the constables of the division of Bloomsbury . . . supported by a guard such as one as usually attends at the Play-House, and even after all this, Accidents must and will happen. (Cited in Miller 1974: 62) Similar objections were raised when, in 1835, a select committee was appointed to inquire into the management of the museum and suggested that it might be opened over Easter to facilitate attendance by the labouring classes. A few decades later, however, the issue had been finally resolved in favour of the reformers. The most significant shift in the state's attitude towards museums was marked by the opening of the South Kensington Museum in 1857 (Figure 2.3). Administered, eventually, under the auspices of the Board of Education, the museum was officially dedicated to the service of an extended and undifferentiated public with opening hours and an admissions policy designed to maximize its accessibility to the working classes. It proved remarkably successful, too, attracting over 15 million visits between 1857 and 1883, over 6.5 million of which were recorded in the evenings, the most popular time for working-class visitors who, it seems, remained largely sober. Henry Cole, the first director of the museum and an ardent advocate of the role museums should play in the formation of a rational Public culture, pointedly rebutted the conceptions of the unruly mob which 70 THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX bad informed earlier objections to open admissions policies. Informing a ‘House of Commons committee in 1860 that only one person had had to be excluded for not being able to walk steadily, he went on to note that the sale of alcohol in the refreshment rooms had averaged out, as Altick summarizes , at “two and a half drops of wine, fourteen-fifteenths of a drop of brandy, and ten‘and a half drops of bottled ale per capita’ (Altick 1978: 500). As the evidence of the orderliness of the newly extended museum public mounted, even the British Museum relented and, in 1883, embarked on a programme of electrification to permit evening opening. ‘The South Kensington Museum thus marked a significant turning-point in the development of British museum policy in clearly cnunciating the prin- ciples of the modern museum conceived as an instrument of public education, It provided the axis around which London’s museum complex was to develop throughout the rest of the century and exerted a strong influence on the Figure 2.3 The South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Albert): interior of the South Court, eastern portion, from the south, 1876 (drawing by John Watkins) Source: Physik (1982).HISTORY AND THEORY development of museums in the provincial cities and towns. These now rapidly took advantage of the Museum Bill of 1845 (hitherto used relatively sparingly) which empowered local authorities to establish museums and art galleries: the number of public museums in Britain increased from 50 in 1860 to 200 in 1900 (White 1983). In its turn, however, the South Kensington Museum had derived its primary impetus from the Great Exhibition which, in developing a new pedagogic relation between state and people, had also subdued the spectre of the crowd. This spectre had been raised again in the debates set in motion by the proposal that admission to the exhibition should be free. It could only be expected, one correspondent to The Times argued, that both the rules of decorum and the rights of property would be violated if entry were made free to ‘his majesty the mob’. These fears were exacerbated by the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, occasioning several European mon- archs to petition that the public be banned from the opening ceremony {planned for May Day) for fear that this might spark off an insurrection which, in turn, might give rise to a general European conflagration (Shorter 1966). And then there was the fear of social contagion should the labouring classes be allowed to rub shoulders with the upper classes. In the event, the Great Exhibition proved a transitional form. While open to all, it also stratified its public in providing different days for different classes of visitors regulated by varying prices of admission. In spite of this limitation, the exhibition proved a major spur to the development of open- door policies. Attracting over 6 million visitors itself, it also vastly stimulated the attendance at London’s main historic sites and museums: visits to the British Museum, for example, increased from 720,643 in 1850 to 2,230,242 in 1851 (Altick 1978: 467), Perhaps more important, though, was the orderliness of the public which, in spite of the 1,000 extra constables and 10,000 troops kept on stand-by, proved duly appreciative, decorous in its bearing and entirely apolitical. More than that, the exhibition transformed the many-headed mob into an ordered crowd, a part of the spectacle and a sight of pleasure in itself. Victoria, in recording her impressions of the opening ceremony, dwelt particularly on her pleasure in seeing so large, so orderly, and so peaceable a crowd assembled in one place: The Green Park and Hyde Park were one mass of densely crowded human beings, in the highest good humour and most enthusiastic, I never saw Hyde Park look as it did, being filled with crowds as far as the eye could see. (Cited in Gibbs-Smith 1981: 18) Nor was this entirely unprepared for. The working-class public the exhibition attracted was one whose conduct had been regulated into appropri- ate forms in the earlier history of the Mechanics Institute exhibitions. d largely to the display of industrial objects and processes, these ions pioneered policies of low admission prices and late opening hours > THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX to encourage working-class attendance long before these were adopted within the official museum complex. In doing so, moreover, they sought to tutor their visitors on the modes of deportment required if they were to be admitted, Instruction booklets advised working-class visitors how to present them- selves, placing particular stress on the need to change out of their working clothes - partly so as not to soil the exhibits, but also so as not to detract from the pleasures of the overall spectacle; indeed, to become parts of it: Here is a visitor of another sort; the mechanic has resolved to treat himself with a few hours’ holiday and recreation; he leaves the ‘grimy shop’, the dirty bench, and donning his Saturday night suit he appears before us — an honourable and worthy object. (Kusamitsu 1980: 77) In brief, the Great Exhibition and subsequently the public museums de- veloped in its wake found themselves heirs to a public which had already been formed by a set of pedagogic relations which, developed initially by voluntary organizations ~ in what Gramsci would call the realm of civil society — were henceforward to be more thoroughgoingly promoted within the social body in being subjected to the direction of the state. Not, then, a history of confinement but one of the opening up of objects to » more public contexts of inspection and visibility: this is the direction of movement embodied in the formation of the exhibitionary complex. A movement which simultaneously helped to form a new public and inscribe it in new relations of sight and vision. Of course, the precise trajectory of these ‘developments in Britain was not followed elsewhere in Europe. None the less, the general direction of development was the same. While earlier collections (whether of scientific objects, curiosities, or works of art) had gone under a _ Variety of names (museums, siudioli, cabinets des curieux, Wunderkammern, Kunstkammern) and fulfilled a variety of functions (the storing and dis- semination of knowledge, the display of princely and aristocratic power, the advancement of reputations and careers), they had mostly shared two prin- ciples: that of private ownership and that of restricted access.’ The formation of the exhibitionary complex involved a break with both in effecting the transfer of significant quantities of cultural and scientific property from private into public ownership where they were housed within institutions administered by the state for the benefit of an extended general public. ‘The significance of the formation of the exhibitionary complex, viewed in this perspective, was that of providing new instruments for the moral and _ cultural regulation of the working classes. Muscums and expositions, in drawing on the techniques and thetorics of display and pedagogic relations developed in earlier nineteenth-century exhibitionary forms, provided a context in which the working- and middle-class publics could be brought _ together and the former — having been tutored into forms of behaviour to suit them for the occasion — could be exposed to the improving influence of the