Exhibititon, truth, power : reconsidering "The Exhibitionary Complex"

What forms of truth shaped the nineteenth-century development of public museums? What kinds of power did these forms of truth constitute and exercise? "The Exhibitionary Complex;' published in 1988, was a response to these questions, which themselves were prompted by a broader set of interrogations concerning the changing economies of power referenced by Michel Foucault's concepts of disciplinary power, governmental power, and biopower, and the respects in which these challenged, but without ever entirely displacing, the forms of power-notably sovereign power-that had hitherto been predominant in Western Europe. These critiques were taken up at a time, the mid- 1980s, when the "new museology" provided a conceptual rendezvous for the criticisms that had been accumulating since the 1960s of the classed, gendered, and colonial hierarchies and exclusions that constituted a still-active legacy of the public museum's formation. The spirit in which these criticisms were conducted was, by and large, that of ideology critique, taking museums to task for their socially partisan distortions of the truth. While not lacking just cause, such critiques tended to gloss over the issues that Foucault had put on the agenda regarding the politics of truth. Instead of asking how ideological falsification serves the interests of the powerful, such an approach poses the question, "How is power constituted and exercised through the functioning of specific regimes of truth?" As arguably the most significant knowledge institutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, museums presented themselves as obvious candidates for analysis in these terms. "The Exhibitionary Complex;' then, was an initial attempt to identify how the development of public museums might best be approached to understand their operation as distinctive institutional articulations of relations of truth and power during a historical period when such relations were being significantly transformed.