Thinking (with) museums : from exhibitionary complex to governmental assemblage

One of the reasons for the extraordinary growth of interests in museums in recent decades is that museums have proved to be "good to think with" in the opportunities they have provided for engaging with a number of more general theoretical shifts that have taken place across the humanities and social sciences. My purpose in this chapter is to review some of the ways in which the analysis of museums has both helped to shape, and been shaped by, broader developments in social and cultural theory. My approach, though, will be a selective one focused on the different angles of theoretical engagement that are implied by approaching museums as parts of what I have called "the exhibitionary complex" or as "governmental assemblages." I do not present these as contraries. While the concept of the exhibitionary complex provided the organizing focus for my initial foray into museum theory in the late 1980s, I have more recently suggested that museum practices can be usefully conceptualized as" and as pars of" governmental assemblages. I have done so primarily in order to explore the alignments that might be developed between the "veridical twist" that the Foucauldian perspective has contributed to cultural analysis and the "material turn", particularly with a view to opening up new lines of inquiry into the forms of power that museums both exercise and are connected to. My purpose in what follows, then, is to identify how the conception of museums as parts of governmental assemblages both builds on and departs from the perspective of the exhibitionary complex. In need first, though, to review this perspective and to outline what now strike me as some of its chief limitations as well as its virtues.