Tony Bennett THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX In reviewing

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 Foucault's terms the museum and another discipline art history'. 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 exhibitions, 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. Furthermore, while these comprised an intersecting set of institutional and disciplinary 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. 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the scaffold and the body of the condemned which had previously formed a part of the public display of power were withdrawn from the public gaze as punishment increasingly took the form of incarceration.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 surveillance through which