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, although there is now an extensive literature covering the much broader sources of dispositifs in contemporary philosophy. 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.” Outside of philosophy, dispositifs have been used in several fields of study, such as Sociology, Geography, Political Science, Environmental Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Information and Communication Sciences, Organization Studies, Film Studies, Literary Theory, Art History, as well as by multiple Artists.

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." Later English translators started using "apparatus" for such texts as Giorgio Agamben's "What is an Apparatus?" (Che cos'è un dispositivo?), or as a "social apparatus" in Gilles Deleuze's "What is a Dispositif?" (“Qu'est-ce qu'un 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 legal disposition of a deceased person's property in their deed or will). 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. 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. 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's Definition

Foucault defines Dispositif in his 1977 "The Confession of the Flesh" interview, in response to question, "What is the meaning or methodological function for you of this term, apparatus (dispositif)?"

"What I'm trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, 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."

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.

In general terms, Foucault describes a dispositif as a “strategic assemblage composed of an intricate web of relations of force and knowledge embedded in the discursive and material fields, which arises as a response to a crisis".

Philosophical Genealogy of Dispositif

Foucault was not the first philosopher to use dispositifs. The term resonates with his former teacher Louis Althusser's concept of Ideological state apparatuses. In contemporary philosophy, the genealogy of dispositifs has been subjected to much debate and speculation. Different thinkers have traced this term back to Martin Heidegger's Gestell, Jean Hyppolite's notion of positivité, Karl Marx's assemblage of machinery in the Grundrisse, Franz Kafka's In The Penal Colony, even early Christian notions of the oikonomia (Greek: οἰκονομία).

Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben traces the trajectory of dispositif (dispositivo in Italian) to Aristotle's oikonomia (the effective management of the household) and the early Christian Church Fathers' attempt to save the concept of the Trinity from the allegation of polytheism, as the triplicity of the God is his oikonomia. 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."

Italian scholar Matteo Pasquinelli criticizes Agamben for relying too much on philological analysis. Pasquinelli points out that another source of Foucault's term is Georges Canguilhem. In The Normal and the Pathological Canguilhem used the term "social normativity" (1966), and he also directly referred to dispositifs in his the essay "Machine and Organism" (1952). "Both these lineages proceed from the notion of organic normativity that Canguilhem adopts from the German-Jewish neurologist Kurt Goldstein, that is from a tradition of Lebensphilosophie that appears to be incompatible with Agamben's theological thesis."

Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito argues that another source of the concept dispositif is 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 (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.

In Dispositif: A Cartography, Canadian theorist Greg Bird argues that the term dispositif "is one of the most prevalent yet elusive terms in contemporary thought." Many define dispositifs in strictly discursive terms, such as Judith Butler’s “apparatus of gender.” By expanding the genealogy of dispositif thinking to include such sources as Martin Heidegger’s Gestell, Karl Marx’s combination of the intellectual and physical labour in the general intellect and broader assemblage of machinery, and Gilles Deleuze’s description of dispositifs as “machines that make one see and speak,” Bird emphasizes the productive and material dimensions of dispositifs, which “do not just make sense, they make the world make sense.” This reading aligns with Foucault’s description of "a dispositif as a strategic assemblage composed of an intricate web of relations of force and knowledge embedded in the discursive and material fields, which arises as a response to a crisis".

Applications of Dispositif

The German 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."

The Danish philosopher 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." 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".

See also

• Apparatus theory
• Assemblage (philosophy)
• Institution
• Disposition
• Gestell

Further reading

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.

Recommended 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, p. 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.