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."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. Power is productive in dispositifs, which not only capture, control, and orient subjects, but also create openings for resistance (either through counter-dispositifs or by rendering them inoperative). 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.Kesler, Frank. "Notes on Dispositifs", 2007. Various translations have been used for this French word such as "apparatus", "assemblage", "arrangement", "construction", "deployment", "device", "enframing", "formation", "machinery", "mechanism", "procedure", "syntactic", and "system".
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".Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Roberto Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Later English translators started using "apparatus" for such texts as Giorgio Agamben's "What is an Apparatus?" (Che cos'è un dispositivo?),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. or as a "social apparatus" in Gilles Deleuze's "What is a Dispositif?" ("Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif?").Deleuze, "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.Agamben, "What is an Apparatus?," p. 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).See Disposition (Scots law). 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).Bussolini, Jeffrey (2010): "What is a Dispositive?," Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 85–107. Apparatus is a technical term which does not convey the broader array of meanings or the etymological connotations of (disponere), implied in dispositif. Commentators have argued that a single dispositif often consists of multiple apparatuses.Bird, Greg. "Problematizing Dispositifs" in Dispositif: A Cartography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2023, pp. 1–4. Others have argued that a dispositif is more comprehensive than earlier, largely discursive and technical, uses of appareil in French philosophy, such as Louis Althusser's ideological or state apparatusLambert, Gregg. The Elements of Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. and the cinematic application of it by Jean-Louis Baudry with apparatus theory.Baudry, Jean-Louis. L'Effet cinéma. Paris: Albatros, 1978; See Crano, Ricky. "Dispositif." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2020. 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".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.
Philosophical genealogy
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;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. 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,Hyppolite, Jean. Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of History. Translated by Bond Harris and Jacqueline Bouchard Spurlock. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1996. Martin Heidegger's Gestell (enframing),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. Jean-François Lyotard's early 1970s studies on the Libidinal Economy,Crano, "Dispositif." Georges Canguilhem's notion of "social normativity" (1966) and his use of the term dispositif in "Machine and Organism" (1952),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). even Karl Marx's "assemblage of machinery" in "The Fragment on Machines".Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.
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 re-centres the problem of the production of knowledge around questions of power and is grounded in an institutional analysis. “The transition from episteme to dispositif,” claims Yuk Hui, “is a strategic move to a more immanent critique, which Foucault was able to apply in a more contemporary analysis.”Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Boston: MIT Press, 2019, p. 30. Foucault's dispositifs, notes Judith Revel, "include institutions and practices, that is, 'all the non-discursive social aspects.'"See Revel, Judith. "Dispositif" in Dictionnaire Foucault. Paris: Ellipses, 2007, pp. 24–25.; see also, Michel Foucault. "Les problèmes de la culture: Un débat Foucault-Preti", No. 109 in Dits et écrits. Paris: Gallimard, 4 vols, 1994, vol II 369—380; 2 vols, 2001, vol I 1237—1248. During his later stages of research, Foucault deployed dispositifs to examine how the discursive and material dimensions of power/knowledge are assembled together in a heterogeneous network of instruments, procedures, techniques, and strategies. "[A]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." Bidet, Jacques, Foucault with Marx, trans. by Steven Corcoran. London: Zed Books, 2016, p. 151.
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."Foucault, Michel. Il faut défendre la société. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. 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),The English translation renders dispositif as "mechanism", see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pages 197 and 207; Surveiller et punir, 231 and 241. and he describes the panopticon as a dispositif (dispositif panopitique)."panoptic mechanism" in English, Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 206, Surveiller et punir, p. 241. 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 these pages he provides a rough genealogical sketch of how the dispositif of sexuality emerges out the "dispositif d'alliance" ("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).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.
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 the most discussed topics in 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." Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 45.
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 his "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,
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."Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh," p. 196. 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.