Dispositif

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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 very 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]

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Translation issues

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."

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."

Foucault

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 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." [11] 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), [12] and he describes the panopticon as a dispositif (dispositif panopitique). [13] 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). [14]

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.” [15]

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" [16]

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.” [17] Foucault also distinguishes between dispositifs and episteme in this interview. He notes that “the episteme is a specifically discursive” dispositif, whereas as dispositif contains more heterogeneous elements that are “discursive and non-discursive.” [18]

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. [19]

Philosophical genealogy of dispositif

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. [20] ; yet, Foucault aimed to emphasize the productive and material dimensions of dispositifs in his research. For these reasons, others have traced the genealogy of dispositifs back to such concepts as Jean Hyppolite's notion of positivité, [21] Martin Heidegger's Gestell (enframing), [22] Jean-François Lyotard's early 1970s studies on the Libidinal Economy, [23] Georges Canguilhem's notion of "social normativity" (1966) and his use of the term dispositif in "Machine and Organism" (1952), [24] even Karl Marx's "assemblage of machinery" in The Fragment on Machines. [25]

Interpretations

A central arises in this literature is the tension between the productive (poiesis) and the discursive or technical (techne) dimensions of dispositifs. [26] The prevailing tendency in the early reception of Foucault’s term was to interpret it in strictly in discursive manner. Many treated the dispositif as an extension of his earlier notion of 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. [27] This discursive reading was popularized in discourse analysis, which tended to reduce Foucault’s insights to a largely social constructionism framework. [28] 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 [29]

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. [30]

Others side more on the productive characterizations of dispositifs, drawing from Deleuze’s description of dispositifs as “machines that make one see and speak.” [31] and Gilbert Simondon’s work on technical objects. [32] This strain of thinkers includes Italian post-operaismo theorists such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who used dispositifs to re-conceptualize how social workers collaborate in producing the social factory in their Empire trilogy. [33] . Others in this strain include the anonymous collective Tiqqun, artistic persona Claire Fontaine, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Hito Steyerl. [34]

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. [35] Agamben defines dispositif (translated as apparatus in English) as

"Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall call an apparatus literally 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. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not—language itself, which is 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." [36]

Italian scholar Matteo Pasquinelli criticizes Agamben for relying too much on philological analysis. [37]

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.” [38] 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.

Applications

Linguist Siegfried Jäger 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 .... Dispositifs can thus be imagined as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk , the complexly interwoven and integrated dispositifs add up in their entirety to a dispositif of all society." [39]

Sverre Raffnsøe "advances the 'dispositive' (le dispositif) as a key conception in Foucault's work" and "a resourceful approach to the study of contemporary societal problems." [40] According to Raffnsøe, "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. Furthermore, it 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". [41]

See also

References

  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. ↑ Foucault, Michel. Il faut défendre la société. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
  12. ↑ The English translation renders dispositif as “mechanism”, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pages 197 and 207; Surveiller et punir, 231 and 241
  13. ↑ “panoptic mechanism” in English, Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 206, Surveiller et punir, p. 241.
  14. ↑ 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
  15. ↑ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 45.
  16. ↑ 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.
  17. ↑ Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 196.
  18. ↑ Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 196-197.
  19. ↑ Larroche, Valerie. The Dispositif: A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019, p. 83
  20. ↑ 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.
  21. ↑ Hyppolite, Jean. Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Translated by Bond Harris and Jacqueline Bouchard Spurlock. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1996.
  22. ↑ 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.
  23. ↑ Crano, "Dispositif"
  24. ↑ 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).
  25. ↑ Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.
  26. ↑ Larroche, The Dispositif, pp. 5-34.
  27. ↑ Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1970.
  28. ↑ Peltonen, Matti. “From Discourse to Dispositif: Michel Foucault’s Two Histories” in Historical Reflections 30(2), Summer 2004, pp. 205-219.
  29. ↑ Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
  30. ↑ Repo, Jemima. The Biopolitics of Gender. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 6
  31. ↑ Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?”
  32. ↑ Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence in Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2017.
  33. ↑ Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000
  34. ↑ See Bird and Tusa, Dispositif a Cartography.
  35. ↑ Murray, Alex. Agamben Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
  36. ↑ Giorgio Agamben, "What is an Apparatus?" in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009: p. 14.
  37. ↑ Pasquinelli, “What an Apparatus is Not.”
  38. ↑ Esposito, Roberto. Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought, trans. Zakiya Hanafi. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.
  39. ↑ "das Zusammenspiel diskursiver Praxen (= Sprechen und Denken auf der Grundlage von Wissen), nichtdiskursiver Praxen (= Handeln auf der Grundlage von Wissen) und „Sichtbarkeiten“ bzw. „Vergegenständlichungen“ (von Wissen durch Handeln/Tätigkeit) .... Dispositive kann man sich insofern auch als eine Art „Gesamtkunstwerke“ vorstellen, die – vielfältig miteinander verzahnt und verwoben – ein gesamtgesellschaftliches Dispositiv ausmachen.", Siegfried Jäger: Theoretische und methodische Aspekte einer Kritischen Diskurs- und Dispositivanalyse
  40. ↑ What is a dispositive? Foucault's historical mappings of the networks of social reality" https://www.academia.edu/9838825/What_is_a_dispositive_Foucault_s_historical_mappings_of_the_networks_of_social_reality
  41. ↑ Foucault's dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational Research": 21 Organization: http://org.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/16/1350508414549885.full.pdf+html

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