Civic Laboratories

Abstract This paper examines the extent to which the perspectives of science studies and actor-network theory can be combined with those of post-Foucauldian governmentality theory to understand the processes through which cultural institutions fabricate distinctive entities and bring these to bear on the governance of the social. The argument is developed by considering the respects in which the procedures of museums and the distinctive forms of cultural objecthood these give rise to can be illuminated by comparing them to laboratories. This prepares the way for an examination of the ways in which such forms of objecthood have been mobilized in programmes of social and civic governance both within museums and outside them, paying due attention to the differences between their functioning in these regards in the context of liberal forms of government and more directive forms of role. These general arguments are then illustrated with reference to contemporary debates focused on the refashioning of museums as instruments of cultural diversity. The paper concludes by reviewing the respects in which the perspectives it develops suggest the need to question the analytical effects of the extended concept of culture that has underlain the development of cultural studies and contemporary sociological understandings of culture. Keywords: civiccultural diversitylaboratoryliberal governmentmuseumscience studies Notes 1. This paper arises out of the research theme ‘Culture, governance and citizenship: the formation and transformations of liberal government’ of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester and the Open University. I am grateful to the members of this theme for their comments on the initial version of the paper at a theme meeting, and more especially to Grahame Thompson and Kath Woodward for their more detailed comments on the later version that was published as CRESC Working Paper 2. The paper published here is a revised version of that working paper. 2. I place ‘natural objects’ in quotes since, as Frow (2004, pp. 358–61) shows, there can be no clear-cut distinction between culturally defined and naturally occurring objects. The ‘naturalness’ that is at issue here then concerns those objects which laboratory practice takes as natural. 3. Belting develops his conception of the invisible masterpiece via a commentary on Balzac's 1845 short story ‘The unknown masterpiece’ (see Balzac 2001). 4. The nineteenth-century literature contains many examples of arts administrators and museum directors who are prepared to sacrifice aesthetic complexity for the accessibility of more familiar kinds of art as the price of enlisting art in the cause of improving public manners. This was especially true of Henry Cole whose reasoning on this matter I have discussed elsewhere (Bennett 1992). 5. The individualizing aspect of this strategy is important and in sharp contrast to both the earlier forms of Aboriginal administration based on a logic of protection of Aborigines as communities on separated reserves and to Aboriginal (mis)interpretations of these strategies as ones which would, through the application of Lockean principles, eventually earn them the right to community–based forms of freedom and self-governance in recognition of the rights derived from the application of their labour to the lands granted them (see Attwood 2004). 6. See, for example, the contributions – including my own – in Lumley (1988), an early and influential collection of the ‘new museology’ in English. 7. Thompson, though, does go on to take actor network theory to task for subscribing to too unbounded and open-ended a conception of the capacity for networks to be endlessly rearticulated. 8. This is true, in some degree, of Eilean Hooper Greenhill's Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (1992) and of my own The Birth of the Museum (Bennett 1995a). 9. I have discussed the range of positions on the relations between museums and cultural diversity more fully elsewhere: see Bennett (2006). 10. This was an especially evident aspect of Neil MacGregor's address in a public seminar held to mark the opening of the Enlightenment exhibition. Organized around the contemporary role of universal survey museums, the seminar was addressed by the Directors of five such museums: the Louvre, the Hermitage Museum, the National Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. Macgregor invoked the Living and Dying exhibition as an example of the Museum's commitment to diversity, and a way of exhibiting diversity that would not be possible but for the ways of accumulating and storing the world developed by Enlightenment forms of collecting. 11. The debates leading to the establishment of the South Kensington Museum at South Kensington rather than Trafalgar Square are an extraordinarily vivid example of this: a clear case of withdrawing culture from the city, organizing it as a separate and separated zone, so that it would be better able to act as an improving force upon it (see Bennett 1995b).