ABSTRACT

This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part explains about the ‘industrial character’ of the modem manufacture of consciousness echo a long tradition of social critique accompanying the rise of modernity and the disciplinary institutions of the nation-state. It aims to clarify the fundamental problem to which the ‘swarming of disciplinary mechanisms’ responded - namely, that of making large and diverse populations governable. The part argues that ‘the development of bourgeois democratic polities required not merely that the populace be governable but that it assent to its governance’. It describes the work of the museum to that of the ambitions of world exhibitions in the nineteenth century, which worked to ‘render the whole world, as represented in assemblages of commodities, subordinate to the controlling vision of the spectator.’