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Sport, Media and Visual Culture • 141

For Foucault (1977), there can be no power without the construction of a fi eld of
knowledge, and no knowledge without corresponding power relations. This intersec-
tion of power–knowledge can be seen in the way that powerful discourses are able to
have effects in the world on the basis that their knowledge claims are assumed to be
true. Discourses of the body beautiful, for example, are effectively able to discipline

individuals into perpetual body modification through diet, exercise and surgery be-
cause it is assumed to be true that slim people lead better lives. Power–knowledge is
imbued in a variety of ways in the constitution of institutions such as prisons and can
include architecture as well as rules and regulations, timetables, scientifi c treatises,
philosophical statements, laws and moral codes. These forms of power–knowledge
can be understood as institutional apparatuses (Rose 2007). Institutional technolo-
gies are the much less formulated sets of tools and methods used to practise power–
knowledge.
Bennett (1995) saw connections between the museum and the prison that was the
focus of Foucault’s (1977) work. While Foucault traced the history of the prison as
taking punishment away from the public (where previously, the scaffold provided
punitive theatre, the prison enclosed the criminal body in the state apparatus), Ben-
nett (1995) argued that museums made public objects and bodies that had previously
been enclosed and private and used them to communicate messages of power through
spectacle. Bennett (1995: 63) suggested that these two sets of institutions, with their
accompanying power–knowledge relations, have different but parallel histories, and
adapted Foucault’s work ‘to unravel the relations between knowledge and power
effected by the technologies of vision embodied in the architectural forms of the
exhibitionary complex’. In this spirit, Rose (2007: 177) suggested that a discourse
analysis of the museum should examine its institutional apparatuses and technolo-
gies and the ways that it produces and disciplines its visitors.

The Apparatus of the Museum

Attention to the apparatus of the museum requires us to consider the themes and
truth claims of the exhibitions. Museums in the nineteenth century communicated
their message about the hierarchical ordering of nations, for example, by establishing
national collections to propagate the political identities of European countries, while
ethnographic museums were arranged to make colonised cultures appear primitive
and in need of ‘modernisation’. Since then, however, the world order has changed,
and newly independent nations have used the language of display to their own ends.
Equally, as the discipline of anthropology began to acknowledge that non-Western
cultures were different but not less advanced, exhibitions involved ‘a gradual turning
away from taxonomies of objects to displays which situated objects within their cul-
tural and place-based contexts’ (Dicks 2003: 148). These types of exhibitions, which
have presented a ‘window on the world’ in an attempt to capture other cultures, have