Dispositif
Dispositif is one of the most prevalent concepts in 20th and 21st century philosophy, especially in Continental philosophy. As a philosophical term, dispositif has been introduced into the English language via the work of Michel Foucault, although there is now an extensive literature covering the much broader genealogy of dispositifs in contemporary philosophy. In general, they are a complex arrangement of discursive and non-discursive elements, which produce our world, subject positions, and ways of understanding. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, they are “machines that make one see and speak.” Power is productive in dispositifs, which not only capture, control, and orient subjects, but also create openings for resistance. Dispositifs are used by scholars in a number of disciplines, including anthropology, art history, communication studies, cultural studies, feminism, film studies, geography, linguistics, literary theory, organization theory, political science, queer theory, science and technology studies, and sociology.
Translation issues
Translation issues remain a key point of contention in the English literature on dispositifs. Various translations have been used for this French word 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." Later English translators started using "apparatus" for such texts as Giorgio Agamben's "What is an Apparatus?", or as a "social apparatus" in Gilles Deleuze's "What is a Dispositif?".
In his essay on dispositifs, Agamben notes that there are generally three different senses of dispositif in French: juridical, technological, and militaristic. English commentators have noted that these senses are lost on English readers, where "dispositive" merely retains an arcane legal meaning. The act of disposing is expressed in this word, but it falls short of conveying the broader senses implied in the French dispositif. Authors have also pointed out that "apparatus" is an inappropriate translation. A dispositif is not the same as an. Dispositif's wide range of meanings are lost when we translate it into the largely technical English word apparatus. Others have argued that a dispositif is more comprehensive than earlier, largely discursive and technical, uses of appareil in French philosophy, such as 's ideological or state apparatus and the cinematic application of it by Jean-Louis Baudry with apparatus theory. Since the publication of Agamben's essay, many English authors are now either translating it into English as "dispositif" or simply retaining it in French as dispositif, while a few have elected to use "dispositive."
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; 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, Martin Heidegger's Gestell, Jean-François Lyotard's early 1970s studies on the Libidinal Economy, Georges Canguilhem's notion of "social normativity" and his use of the term dispositif in "Machine and Organism", even Karl Marx's "assemblage of machinery" in "The Fragment on Machines."Foucault
In the 1970s, Foucault’s research shifted from archaeological analysis to genealogical investigations. The archaeological method focused on discursive statements and archives, whereas the genealogical approach re-centres the problem of the production of knowledge around questions of power and is grounded in an institutional analysis. Foucault's dispositifs, notes Judith Revel, “include institutions and practices, that is, ‘all the non-discursive social aspects.’” As a core concept in this later stage of his research, he uses them to examine how the discursive and material dimensions of power/knowledge are assembled together in a heterogeneous network of instruments, procedures, techniques, and strategies. "ll social institutions" are treated as dispositifs, notes Jacques Bidet, "that is to say, as relations of power, which is always the power of some over others, in the concreteness of 'technologies,' material assemblages and discursive formations."In many of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, he refers to dispositifs in general terms, such as a “dispositif of power” or a “dispositif of power-knowledge." 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, and he describes the panopticon as a dispositif. 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”. In these pages he provides a rough genealogical sketch of how the dispositif of sexuality emerges out the “dispositif d’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” and the “dispositif of governmentality”.
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’, ‘instrumentalities,’ ‘techniques,’ ‘mechanisms,’ ‘machineries,’ etc.”
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 ?” Foucault responds, “What I’m trying to pick out with this term is,
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.” 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, which in The Order of Things he describes as an a priori system of knowledge that grounds truth in discourse in a given epoch. 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.
Interpretations
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. One of the most prominent examples is Judith Butler’s adaptation of Foucault’s “dispositif of sexuality” to conceptualize gender as a discursive apparatus: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.
Giorgio Agamben traces the trajectory of dispositif to Aristotle's oikonomia 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. 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 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.” In the next section of his essay, he defines dispositif as:
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." Matteo Pasquinelli has criticized Agamben for relying too much on philological analysis.
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.” 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 ', they also preserve the dignity of the productive and creative aspects of the modern human '. 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.
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,”, Gilbert Simondon’s work on technical objects,, and Marx's "Fragment on Machines". This reading includes various Italian post-operaismo theorists such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their in their Empire trilogy.. Others include the anonymous collective Tiqqun, Jacques Bidet, artistic persona Claire Fontaine, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Hito Steyerl. 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. 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.
Drawing from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” and Heidegger’s "The Question Concerning Technology," Greg Bird argues that the "era of the dispositif is marked by an obsession with engineering," a "vast assemblage of machinery took hold of humanity.... ays of thinking, seeing, desiring, doing, and being were radically reconfigured." Authors who use dispositifs continue to reproduce one central problematic, which he calls the “problem of engineering: human–machine, nature–culture, artifice–intelligence.” 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, and racialization. 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, posthumanism, and transgender theory. It does not matter whether the author emphasizes the discursive dynamics or the material-productive operations of dispositifs, because at its core, dispositif thinking is animated by the problem of engineering.