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ABSTRACT: Michel Foucault argues that truth is not to be emancipated from power. Given that museums have played a central role in these "regimes of truth," Foucault's work was a reference point for the debates around "the new museology" in the 1980s and remains so for contemporary debates in the field. In this introduction to a new volume of selected essays, the use of Foucault's work in my previous research is considered in terms of the relations between museums, heritage, anthropology, and government. In addition, concepts from Pierre Bourdieu, science and technology studies, Actor Network Theory, assemblage theory, and the post-Foucaultian literature on governmentality are employed to examine various topics, including the complex situation of Indigenous people in contemporary Australia.
KEYWORDS: Foucault, governmentality, knowledge, museums, power, theory, truth
At the end of his interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino on the subject of truth and power, Michel Foucault puts forward a few propositions to clarify the political implications of all that he had said before in seeking to detach truth from the idealist freight that had been placed on it-as the moment of revelation that accompanies liberation-to insist that it must be understood as "a thing of this world" (1980: 131). Truth, he says, is to be understood as "a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements." As such, it "is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it" (133). Since such "regimes of truth" are not ideological superstructures but material practices, the political task they pose for intellectuals is not one of ideology critique but that "of ascertaining the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth" (133). The problem, Foucault goes on to say, "is not changing people's consciousness-or what's in their heads-but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth" (133). Truth is not to be emancipated from power; rather, its detachment from the economic, social, and cultural hegemonies within which it currently operates is to serve as a prelude to the production of new regimes of truth that will, in turn, produce their own distinctive power effects. Such is the task to...