Truth, Power, Participation and Discourse

This chapter will examine historical ideas that have formed over centuries informing notions of power. It will also present alternatives to how this power can perform. Participation can be seen as essential to achieving decision-making powers through various declarations of rights since the Middle Ages right through to theatre methodology and the Dadaist movement that activate audiences through the embodiment of active participation. Using the works of French philosopher and cultural thinker Michel Foucault, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel’s constructs of what constitutes being human or unhuman, the author delves into these influences to excavate theoretical underpinnings to the mechanics of empowerment-lite in museums. Foucault asserts that a ‘certain knowledge of man was formed in the nineteenth century […] and is simply the outcome of the interplay, the encounter, the junction, the struggle, and the compromise between instincts’ (Foucault, 1975). Foucault further determines that ‘it is in the relationship between the individual and the institution that we find power operating most clearly’. It is for this reason that an analysis of the prevailing discourse used in museums can clarify what the challenges are and why. By revealing these embedded ‘instincts’ of human-ness and how thinking through language and our understanding of such have developed, this chapter enables the practitioner to begin to unpack these issues by shining a light on them.