Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

 generally uses the term "dispositif," "deployment," or "apparatus" to refer to the various institutional, physical and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body.

Roots

Dispositif is a French word, meaning device. The three terms are analogous in the French to English translations of Foucault's work.

Definition

Foucault uses the term in his 1977 “The Confession of the Flesh” interview, where he answers the question, "What is the meaning or methodological function for you of this term, apparatus (dispositif)?" as follows:

"What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogenous 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."

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

Gesamtkunstwerk

A Gesamtkunstwerk is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so...

, the complexly interwoven and integrated dispositifs add up in their entirety to a dispositif of all society."

Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian political philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer....

defines apparatus/dispositif 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."