SCALING GOVERNMENTALITY

Abstract

This article explores contemporary uses of museum co-production for public policy through a sustained theoretical engagement with Tony Bennett's work on museums as an ‘object of government’. The specific focus is a theoretical discussion of the ‘logic of culture’ as it relates to new UK policy uses of participants' ‘experience’ as the desired site of authenticity at the very same time as the process of expressing this authenticity is located as a site for reform. It is argued that Bennett mobilizes two techniques of scale (fixing the analytic lens of governmentality and drawing on a strong scalar correspondence of power) in order to secure a relatively disciplinary reading of governmentality and to foreclose the resistant possibilities of cultural politics. Drawing on the differences between practices associated in UK museums with ‘access’ (which works through the dis-intensification of the difference between the museum and everyday life) and with ‘social impact’ (which requires a re-intensification of this difference in order to increase the visibility of effect), this article concludes by countering Bennett's more disciplinary uses of Foucault with the Foucault of ‘The Subject and Power’. It is argued that the ‘logic of culture’ can be calibrated to varying intensities in considering the coming-into-relationship between the museums and those-to-be-involved. It is specifically argued – following Foucault's spatializaton of ‘thought’ as distance (limit-attitude) and ‘counter-conduct’ as proximity – that the ‘logic of culture’ might be actively re-calibrated to use the spatialized dynamic of distance and proximity to create spaces which might allow the museum and its associated policy – not just those involved – to be affected by the co-production encounter.

Keywords:

• museums
• governmentality
• Cultural Studies
• cultural policy
• co-production
• community engagement

Notes

1. There are different traditions in play here. For practitioners or ex-practitioners there is a strong advocacy logic at work which produces detailing of how museums might play a productive role in their communities in ways are often attentive to policy (Sandell 2002, 2007, Weil 2002). In a more anthropological tradition, description of specific encounters or projects are mobilized followed by a hoped-for idea of effect. For example Ruth B. Phillips:

The closing (of the exhibition) was a public testimonial of the transformative social power that can be generated by collaborative exhibition projects, where diverse communities with different intellectual, cultural and social orientations come together in a museum, as equals, in determined and patient search of a language of common understanding

(2003, p. 168).

In the tradition of art criticism, there has also been more of a focus on the being ‘unsettled’ by radical displays where participation is more focused on radical effects on the visitor (Basu 2007, Lindauer 2007, Pollock 2007).

2. Laurajane Smith both on her own (2006) and with Emma Waterton, has been more critical and less optimistic than many others writing in this field. However, hope is still place on community-led heritage projects which ‘resist’ dominant definitions of heritage (‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’) and in increasing community ‘control’ (Smith and Waterton 2009, pp. 72, 100).

3. In ‘Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates’, Hall position of ‘no necessary correspondence’ and ‘no necessary non correspondence’ (1985, p. 94) specific both relates to questions, effectively, of political practice. Revolution is not teleological but neither is it impossible (1985, p. 95).

4. Butler mobilizes ‘subjectivation’ as the English translation of Foucault's use of assutjetissement. Although assutjettissement is translated elsewhere as ‘subjection’ (see for example Miller 1993, p. xiii) subjectivation works better to convey the Foucault's emphasis on the double-meaning of ‘subject’.

5. Co-production’ is a term which is being used in current UK policy to refer to a range of citizen-state interactions. For example, co-production is being used to refer to how an individual co-produces health with the National Health Service (by exercising, eating fruit and vegetable and conducting various forms of self-examination) and how disabled people will co-produce the forms of their personal assistance (rather than being in receipt of ‘services’) (Gannon and Lawson 2008, Stephens et al. 2008).

6. In terms of the relationship between practice and structure Hall argues:

we need both if we are to avoid the trap of treating history as nothing but the outcome of an internally self-propelling structuralist machine. The structuralist dichotomy serves a useful purpose but should not be fetishized into a ridged, mutually exclusive distinction

(1985, p. 96).

7. The example Bennett gives of power operating on a ‘single plane’ is that of Fred Myers work on the process through which Aboriginal dot painting became accepted as ‘fine art’, which, he argues, took place [via]:

a complex series of adjustments between Aboriginal art knowledges and practices, the operations of Western art markets the expectation of international arts audiences, government programmes aimed at the transformation of dependent Aboriginal reserves into self-reliant communities, and the interfaces between these and Aboriginal forms of self governance

(Bennett 2007, p. 622).

8. It is no doubt that case that Foucault appears to support a scalar tracability between micro practices and forms of total domination, a case made in at least two of his lecture series ([1975–1976] 2003a, [1977–1978] 2007). Yet the multiple intellectual strategies Foucault advocates in later work – systems of differentiations; types of objectives; instrumental modes; forms of institutionalization; degrees of rationalisation – appear to suggest that the relationship between micro practices and ‘total domination’ cannot be simply methodologically approached by a visible tracing (1982 [2003c], pp. 140–141). However, the slipperiness of Foucault on this subject is suggested by Stuart Hall's 1980 claim that Foucault was ‘deeply committed to the necessary non-correspondence of all practices to one another (Hall 1980, p. 71) but also Bennett's recognition that by the time he was writing that ‘this aspect of Foucault's work is now more likely to be cited as a positive asset rather than a disadvantage’ (1998, p. 83).

9. Latour draws this distinction to distinguish between translation which is transparent – intermediaries – and translation which transforms – mediators (2005, p. 37).

10. This is a point elaborated by Nick Lee and Steven D. Brown. They argue that for Foucault ‘discipline’ ‘involves a number of simplifications’: ‘a collection of bodies in interaction with one another is boiled down into a number of individuals who can, to all intents and purposes, be treated as individual from one another’. (2002, p. 271). They go on to suggest that:

Foucault, then, tells us how the practices of testing and record keeping, the technologies of pedagogy, allowed the production of a normal line of development. These practices produced this line by ensuring first that each pupil individualised in this manner, the individual cases could be compared to produce a general norm. This suggests that the general and the particular are not just different kinds of knowledge to be set in mutual complicity or antagonism but are fundamentally linked products of attempts to set pupils in order

(2002, p. 271).

In other words, disciplinary modes of power actively seek alignment.

11. While Bennett's later work became increasingly interested in the liberal range of governmentality, he notes in Culture: A Reformer's Science that the Foucault he then found so compelling – the Foucault of the essay ‘Governmentality’ – is not the ‘Foucault much loved by libertarian thinkers’ (1998, p. 61).

12. Michel Callon uses agencement to discuss all that needs to be in place for an economic actor to act: an actor ‘is made up of human bodies but also of prostheses, tools, equipment, technical devices, algorithms, etc’ (2005, p. 4).

13. The tension between the desire for sharing knowledge production and the momentum and policies (e.g. of access) relating to exhibition design is explored in detail by Bernadette Lynch and Sam Alberti in a reflection on a Manchester Museum project ‘Revealing Histories: Myths about Race’ (2010).

14. George Yúdice has drawn attention to the public nature of such work and that it is work which has to offer some kind of recognition:

Critique.. . will not produce the disalienating effects believed to ensue from the uncovering of ideological structures and processes characteristic of ideological critique. Nor will we get in touch with out phenomenological body or have a limit experience … [The specific event he is discussing] calls for, in my view, is to become a user, a collaborator who intervenes in order to have the labour expended recognized and compensated

(2003, p. 337).