Wikipedia

Dispositif

Dispositif is one of the most used terms in 20th and 21st century philosophy, especially in the Continental philosophy tradition. The term has been widely attributed to Michel Foucault,[1] although there is now an extensive literature covering the much broader sources of dispositifs in contemporary philosophy.[2] In general terms, dispositifs are composed of discursive and non-discursive elements. They are productive mechanisms that are embedded in power relations, which produce our world, our subjective positions, and our ways of understanding the world. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, they are “machines that make one see and speak.”[3]

Translation issues

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Dispositif has been introduced into the English language via the work of Michel Foucault. Various translations have been used for this term such as "apparatus," "assemblage," "arrangement," "construction," "deployment," "device," "enframing," "formation," "machinery," "mechanism," "procedure," and "syntactic."

Apparatus and Hand
 
ArtistSalvador Dalí
Year1927
Mediumoil on panel
LocationSalvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, United States

In the English translation of Foucault's first volume of the History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Robert Hurley translated the "dispositif de sexualité" as "deployment of sexuality."[4] Later English translators started using "apparatus" for such texts as Giorgio Agamben's "What is an Apparatus?" (Che cos'è un dispositivo?),[5] or as a "social apparatus" in Gilles Deleuze's "What is a Dispositif?" (“Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif?").[6]

In his essay on dispositifs, Agamben notes that there are generally three different senses of dispositif in French: juridical, technological, and militaristic.[7] English commentators have noted that these senses are lost on English readers, where "dispositive" merely retains an arcane legal meaning (the legal disposition of a deceased person's property in their deed or will.[8] The act of disposing (from disponere) is expressed in this word, but it falls short of conveying the broader senses implied in the French dispositif.[9] Authors have also pointed out that "apparatus" is an inappropriate translation. A dispositif is not the same as an appareil. Dispositif philosophers are articulating something more comprehensive and far reaching than an ideological or state apparatus (Louis Althusser), or the cinematic application of this term by Jean-Louis Baudry with apparatus theory. Dispositif's wide range of senses also resonate far beyond the largely technical senses conveyed by the English word apparatus.[10] Since the publication of Agamben's essay, many English authors are electing to either translate the term into English as "dispositif" or use original French dispositif, while a few have elected to use "dispositive."

Philosophical genealogy of dispositif

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Untitled (on vous intoxique!)
 
ArtistClaire Fontaine
Year2018
MediumSilkscreen on newsprint
Websitehttps://www.clairefontaine.ws/

Foucault was not the first philosopher to use dispositifs. In contemporary philosophy, the genealogy of dispositifs has been subjected to much debate and speculation. The term has been compared with Foucault’s former teacher Louis Althusser's concept of Ideological state apparatuses.[11]; yet, Foucault incorporated dispositifs in his research in order to account for the productive and material dimensions of power/knowledge. For these reasons, others have traced the genealogy of dispositifs back to such concepts as Jean Hyppolite's notion of positivité,[12] Martin Heidegger's Gestell (enframing),[13] Jean-François Lyotard's early 1970s studies on the Libidinal Economy,[14] Georges Canguilhem's notion of "social normativity" (1966) and his use of the term dispositif in "Machine and Organism" (1952),[15] even Karl Marx's "assemblage of machinery" in The Fragment on Machines.[16]

Foucault

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In the 1970s, Foucault’s research shifted from archaeological analysis to genealogical investigations. The archaeological method focused on discursive statements and archives (see episteme), whereas the genealogical approach recentres the problem of the production of knowledge around questions of power and is grounded in an institutional analysis. He began using dispositifs in his research to examine how the discursive and material dimensions of power/knowledge are assembled together in a heterogeneous network of instruments, procedures, techniques, and strategies.


In many of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, he refers to dispositifs in general terms, such as a “dispositif of power” (dispositif de pouvoir) or a “dispositif of power-knowledge."[17] Dispositifs played a central role in Discipline and Punish and in The History of Sexuality, volume one. In the former, he periodically refers to disciplinary power as a dispositif (dispositif disciplinaire),[18] and he describes the panopticon as a dispositif (dispositif panopitique).[19] His most sustained analysis of dispositifs is found in the closing chapters of The History of Sexuality. Part Four is entitled “Le dispositif of sexualité” (“Deployment of Sexuality” in English). In these pages he provides a rough genealogical sketch of how the dispositif of sexuality emerges out the “dispositif d’alliance” (Eng: “deployment of alliance”), while the final chapter outlines the relationship between dispositifs and biopower. Foucault also mentions several types of dispositifs in his Collège de France lectures during this period, such as the “dispositif of security” (Security, Territory, Population) and the “dispositif of governmentality” (The Birth of Biopolitics).[20]

Throughout the 1970s, Foucault offered multiple and lengthy descriptions of dispositifs, but he was reluctant to define them in clear and concise terms. The lack of any clear definition, and the elusive nature of dispositifs themselves, is one of most discussed issues the literature on dispositifs. Michel de Certeau, for example, claims that Foucault employed a “variety of synonyms, words that dance about and successfully approach an impossible proper name: ‘apparatuses’ [dispositifs], ‘instrumentalities,’ ‘techniques,’ ‘mechanisms,’ ‘machineries,’ etc.”[21]

Foucault’s most descriptive account of dispositifs is found in “The Confession of the Flesh” 1977 interview. Foucault was asked to clarify the meaning of dispositif in “dispositif of sexuality”: “What is the meaning or methodological function for you of this term, apparatus (dispositif)?” Foucault responds, “What I’m trying to pick out with this term is,

[F]irstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.

Secondly, what I am trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thus, a particular discourse can figure at one time as the programme of an institution, and at another it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary re-interpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new field of rationality. In short, between these elements, whether discursive or non-discursive, there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function which can also vary very widely.

Thirdly, I understand by the term 'apparatus' a sort of—shall we say—formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic function.

— Michel Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh"[22]

Detroit Industry Murals
 
ArtistDiego Rivera
Year1932-33
Mediumfresco
LocationDetroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, United States
OwnerUser:Carptrash

In the follow-up responses, Foucault summarizes his meaning: dispositifs are “strategic” in their nature as they are “always inscribed in a play of power” and “linked to certain coordinates of knowledge.”[23] That is, power/knowledge are combined in dispositifs, which is a process he often referred to as the "dispositif of power/knowledge" during this stage of his writings.

In the same interview, Foucault is also asked to clarify the relationship between dispositifs and his archaeological concept episteme (épistémè in French), which in The Order of Things (1966) he describes as an a priori system of knowledge that grounds truth in discourse in a given epoch.[24] Foucault states that “the episteme is a specifically discursive” dispositif, whereas a dispositif is a much broader and more heterogeneous device that consists of “discursive and non-discursive” elements. [25]

Interpretations

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A core issue in this literature is the tension between the discursive and the non-discursive, or the immaterial and material, composition of dispositifs. The prevailing tendency in the early reception of Foucault’s term was to interpret it in a strictly in discursive manner. This discursive reading was popularized in discourse analysis, which tended to reduce Foucault’s insights to a largely social constructionism framework.[26] One of the most prominent examples is Judith Butler’s adaptation of Foucault’s “dispositif of sexuality” to conceptualize gender as a discursive apparatus:

[G]ender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established…. [G]ender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts…. This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender.

— Judith Butler, Gender Trouble[27]

 
Printing press, engraving by W Lowry after mechanical engineer John Farey Jr., 1819

Jemima Repo criticizes Butler for overlooking "the historically specific technology of biopower," including "the strategies and tactics of biopower," which were central to Foucault's account of the dispositif of sexuality.[28]

Giorgio Agamben traces the trajectory of dispositif (dispositivo in Italian) to Aristotle's oikonomia (Greek: οἰκονομία) as the effective management of the household and the early Christian Church Fathers' use of the oikonomia to save the concept of the Trinity from the allegation of polytheism.[29] He argues that Foucault's dispositif is part of a larger, and broad-ranging "theological genealogy of economy," which he traces through the Christian theological dispositio, Hegel's notion of positivity, and Heidegger's Gestell. This (oikonomia) is "a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient—in a way that purports to be useful—the behaviours, gestures, and thoughts of human beings.”[30] In the next section of his essay, he defines dispositif as:

[L]iterally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.

— Giorgio Agamben, "What is an Apparatus?"[31]

Agamben provides a long list of examples, ranging from institutions such as prisons, factories, and schools to discursive devices such as pens, writing, literature, and cell phones. He also refers to "language itself" as "perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses—one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face."[32] Matteo Pasquinelli has criticized Agamben for relying too much on philological analysis.[33]

Roberto Esposito traces the genealogy of dispositifs back to Martin Heidegger's theory of the Gestell. In Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought, Esposito draws from Heidegger’s Bremen Lectures to examine the “dispositif of the person.”[34] Heidegger’s Gestell, he argues, addresses a key tension in the human between ordering-positioning and producing-creating. Although the technical mechanisms threaten to obstruct the process of disclosure (Aletheia), they also preserve the dignity of the productive and creative aspects of the modern human (poiesis). This tension rests at the centre of many accounts of dispositifs in contemporary philosophy. In fact, the four main characteristics outlined in Esposito's reading of the Gestell—elusiveness, concealment, inclusionary power, and subjectification—are repeated by most philosophies of dispositifs.

Autodidact's Transport
 
ArtistRaqs Media Collective
Year2015
MediumPublic Art, Gwangju Metro System
LocationGwangju, South Korea
OwnerMinseong Kim, CC BY-SA 4.0
Websiteraqsmediacollective.net

Others place their emphasis on how dispositifs are grounded in materiality. These readings focus on the mechanistic and productive dynamics of dispositifs. Key references here are Deleuze’s description of dispositifs as “machines that make one see and speak,”[35], Gilbert Simondon’s work on technical objects,[36], and Marx's "Fragment on Machines".[37] This reading includes various Italian post-operaismo theorists such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their in their Empire trilogy.[38]. Others include the anonymous collective Tiqqun, artistic persona Claire Fontaine, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Hito Steyerl.[39] A second, related, strain is also addressed by feminist and queer theorists who examine the material embodiment in dispositifs, which includes New materialism figures such as Karen Barad and Catherine Malabou and critics such as Nikki Sullivan.[40] A third, interrelated strain is found in Assemblage (philosophy), and other philosophers of technology who adapted the paradigm of dispositifs into their research, such as Bernard Stiegler and Bruno Latour.[41]

Drawing from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” and Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, Greg Bird argues that "dispositif thinking" is driven by one central problematic, which he calls the “problem of engineering: human–­machine, nature–­culture, artifice–­intelligence.”[42] This begins with a series of texts concerned with mechanical, technological, and biological engineering. It was further developed by a second and third generation of philosophers who have used dispositifs to examine human engineering projects, such as biopower, colonialism, Orientalism, gender, transhumanism, and sexism. The initial iterations of dispositif thinking were concerned with the masculine conception of "Man-the-engineer," but subsequent thinkers adapted this problematic to address the relationship between embodiment and dispositifs in feminist technoscience, queer theory, and transgender theory.[43] Regardless if the theorist emphasizes the discursive dynamics or the material-productive operations of dispositifs, Bird argues that at its core, dispositif thinking is animated by the problem of engineering.

Other disciplines

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Linguistics

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German linguist Siegfried Jäger published several articles on "dispositif analysis" (Dispositivanalyse),[44] which became prominent in German discourse analysis.[45] In an unpublished article, he defines Foucault's dispositif as "the interaction of discursive behavior (i.e. speech and thoughts based upon a shared knowledge pool), non-discursive behavior (i. e. acts based upon knowledge), and manifestations of knowledge by means of acts or behaviors...." He compares dispositifs to Gesamtkunstwerk, due to their complexity, as being interwoven and integrated across societies.[46] See de:Dispositiv.

Organizational theory

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In a working paper, Sverre Raffnsøe et al. demonstrate that Foucault's "dispositive" is not only a key concept in Foucault's research, but also "a resourceful approach to the study of contemporary societal problems."[47] In a separate article, Raffnsøe et al. argue that "the dispositionally prescriptive level is a crucial aspect of social reality in organizational life, since it has a determining effect on what is taken for granted and considered real."[48]. It further "determines not only what is and can be considered possible but also what can even be imagined and anticipated as potentially realizable, as something one can hope for, or act to bring about".[49] This organizational approach, they claim, moves beyond the narrow reading of dispositifs in discourse analysis, which reduces "organizations to discursive constructions and organizing to linguistic practices." In contrast, "the dispositive maps a systematism that cuts across and closely connects the discursive and non-discursive."[50]

Communication and information science

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In her book The Dispositif: A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences, Valerie Larroche summarizes Foucault's dispositifs as any of the various institutional, physical, and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body. The links between these elements are said to be heterogeneous since knowledge, practices, techniques, and institutions are established and reestablished in every age. It is through these links that power relations are structured.[51]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Foucault, Michel (1980). "The Confession of the Flesh (1977) interview". In Colin Gordon (ed.). Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings. pp. 194–228.
  2. ^ Greg Bird; Giovanbattista Tusa, eds. (2023). Dispositif: A Cartography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  3. ^ Deleuze, Gilles. “What is a Dispositif?” In Michel Foucault, Philosopher: Essays Translated from the French and German, edited by Timothy J. Armstrong, 159–168. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992.
  4. ^ Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Roberto Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
  5. ^ Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?” In What is an apparatus? And Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, 1–24. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
  6. ^ Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?”
  7. ^ Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, p. 7.
  8. ^ See Disposition (Scots law).
  9. ^ Crano, Ricky. "Dispositif." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2020, p. 3; Bird, Greg. "Problematizing Dispositifs" in Dispositif: A Cartography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2023, pp. 1-4; and Kesler, Frank. "Notes on Dispositifs", 2007.
  10. ^ Bussolini, Jeffrey (2010): “What is a Dispositive?,” Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 85-107; Raffnsøe, S., Gudmand-Høyer, M., & Thaning, M. S. (2014). "Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research," Organization, 23(2) (2014): 272-298.
  11. ^ Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation,” trans. by Ben Brewster, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Press, 1971), pp. 127–86.
  12. ^ Hyppolite, Jean. Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Translated by Bond Harris and Jacqueline Bouchard Spurlock. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1996.
  13. ^ Heidegger, Martin. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures. Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012; Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Levitt, 3-35. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1997.
  14. ^ Crano, "Dispositif"
  15. ^ Canguilhem, Georges. “Machine and Organism.” In Knowledge of Life. Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, 75–97. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Pasquinelli notes that "the notion of organic normativity that Canguilhem adopts" stems from the German-Jewish neurologist Kurt Goldstein, that is from a tradition of Lebensphilosophie," which is "incompatible with Agamben's theological thesis." (2015).
  16. ^ Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.
  17. ^ Foucault, Michel. Il faut défendre la société. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
  18. ^ The English translation renders dispositif as “mechanism”, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pages 197 and 207; Surveiller et punir, 231 and 241
  19. ^ “panoptic mechanism” in English, Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 206, Surveiller et punir, p. 241.
  20. ^ Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2007; Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
  21. ^ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 45.
  22. ^ Michel, Foucault. “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977) Interview in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Colin Gordon, 194-228. New York, Pantheon Books, 1980.
  23. ^ Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 196.
  24. ^ Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1970.
  25. ^ Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 196-197.
  26. ^ Peltonen, Matti. “From Discourse to Dispositif: Michel Foucault’s Two Histories” in Historical Reflections 30(2), Summer 2004, pp. 205-219.
  27. ^ Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
  28. ^ Repo, Jemima. The Biopolitics of Gender. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 6
  29. ^ Murray, Alex. Agamben Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
  30. ^ Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, p. 12.
  31. ^ Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, p. 14.
  32. ^ Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, p. 14.
  33. ^ Pasquinelli, “What an Apparatus is Not.”
  34. ^ Esposito, Roberto. Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought, trans. Zakiya Hanafi. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.
  35. ^ Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?”
  36. ^ Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence in Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2017.
  37. ^ Marx, Grundrisse, 1973.
  38. ^ Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000
  39. ^ See Bird and Tusa, Dispositif a Cartography.
  40. ^ Sullivan, Nikki. (2012). "The Somatechnics of Perception and the Matter of the Non/human: A critical response to the new materialism. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 19(3), 299-313.
  41. ^ Giovanbattista Tusa. “Dispositifs: Cartographies of Disorientation.” In Dispositif: A Cartography, edited by G. Bird and G. Tusa, 487-502, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  42. ^ Bird, “Problematizing Dispositifs”, p. 15.
  43. ^ Bird, “Problematizing Dispositifs”, pp. 15-16.
  44. ^ Siegfried Jäger: „Diskurs und Wissen. Theoretische und methodische Aspekte einer Kritischen Diskurs- und Dispositivanalyse“, in: Handbuch Sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse. Band 1 Theorien und Methoden, hrsg. von Reiner Keller u. a., Wiesbaden: Leske & Budrich 2001, S. 81–112, hier S. 81.
  45. ^ Caborn, Joannah. On the Methodology of Dispositive Analysis" in Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 1, 1, pp. 115-123.
  46. ^ See Theoretische und methodische Aspekte einer Kritischen Diskurs- und Dispositivanalyse
  47. ^ Raffnsøe, S., Gudmand-Høyer, M. T., & Thaning, M. S. "What is a Dispositive? Foucault’s Historical Mappings of the Networks of Social Reality." Copenhagen Business School, 2014.
  48. ^ Raffnsøe, S., Gudmand-Høyer, M., & Thaning, M. S. (2014). "Foucault’s Dispositive: The Perspicacity of Dispositive Analytics in Organizational Research" in Organization, 23(2), p. 292.
  49. ^ Sverre Raffnsøe et al., "Foucault's Dispositive," p. 292.
  50. ^ Sverre Raffnsøe et al., "Foucault's Dispositive," p. 283.
  51. ^ Larroche, Valerie. The Dispositif: A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019, p. 83

Further reading

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Primary sources

  • Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?” In What is an apparatus? And Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, 1–24. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
  • Bird, Greg & Tusa, Giovanbattista (eds.) Dispositif: A Cartography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2023.
  • Deleuze, Gilles. “What is a Dispositif?” In Michel Foucault, Philosopher: Essays Translated from the French and German, edited by Timothy J. Armstrong, 159–168. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992.
  • Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
  • Foucault, Michel. “The Confession of the Flesh.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Colin Gordon, 194–228. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1980.
  • Heidegger, Martin. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures. Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012.

Secondary sources

  • Bird, Greg. "Problematizing Dispositifs" in Dispositif: A Cartography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2023: 1-20.
  • Bussolini, Jeffrey. "What is a Dispositive?" Foucault Studies 10, 2010: 85-107.
  • Crano, Ricky. "Dispositif." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2020: 1-30.
  • Kesler, Frank. "Notes on Dispositifs", 2007.
  • Pasquinelli, Matteo. "What an Apparatus is Not: On the Archeology of the Norm in Foucault, Canguilhem, and Goldstein". Parrhesia 22, 2015: 79-89.
  • Raffnsøe, S., Gudmand-Høyer, M., & Thaning, M. S. "Foucault’s Dispositive: The Perspicacity of Dispositive Analytics in Organizational Research." Organization, 23(2), 2014: 272-298.
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