💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › gilles-deleuze-what-is-a-dispositif.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:31:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: What Is a Dispositif? Author: Gilles Deleuze Date: 1992 Language: en Topics: apparatus, power, madness, not anarchist Source: Two Regimes of Madness Notes: http://www.no-w-here.org.uk/what%20is%20dispositif.pdf
Foucault's philosophy is often presented as an analysis of concrete
“dispositifs” or apparatuses. But what is an apparatus? First of all, it
is a skein, a multilinear whole. It is composed of lines of different
natures. The lines in the apparatus do not encircle or surround systems
that are each homogenous in themselves, the object, the subject,
language, etc., but follow directions, trace processes that are always
out of balance, that sometimes move closer together and sometimes
farther away. Each line is broken, subject to changes in direction,
bifurcating and forked, and subjected to derivations. Visible objects,
articulable utterances, forces in use, subjects in position are like
vectors or tensors. Thus the three main instances Foucault successively
distinguishes - Knowledge, Power and Subjectivity - by no means have
contours that are defined once and for all but are chains of variables
that are torn from each other. Foucault always finds a new dimension or
a new line in a crisis. Great thinkers are somewhat seismic; they do not
evolve but proceed by crises or quakes. Thinking in terms of moving
lines was Herman Melville's operation: fishing lines, diving lines,
dangerous, even deadly lines. There are lines of sedimentation, Foucault
says, but also lines of "fissure" and "fracture." Untangling the lines
of an apparatus means, in each case, preparing a map, a cartography, a
survey of unexplored lands - this is what he calls "field work." One has
to be positioned on the lines themselves; and these lines do not merely
compose an apparatus but pass through it and carry it north to south,
east to west or diagonally.
The first two dimensions of an apparatus or the ones that Foucault first
extracted are the curves of visibility and the curves of utterance.
Because apparatuses are like Raymond Roussel's machines, which Foucault
also analyzed; they are machines that make one see and talk. Visibility
does not refer to a general light that would illuminate preexisting
objects; it is made up of lines of light that form variable figures
inseparable from an apparatus. Each apparatus has its regimen of light,
the way it falls, softens and spreads, distributing the visible and the
invisible, generating or eliminating an object, which cannot exist
without it. This is not only true of painting but of architecture as
well: the "prison apparatus" as an optical machine for seeing without
being seen. If there is a historicity of apparatuses, it is the
historicity of regimes of light but also of regimes of utterances.
Utterances in turn refer to the lines of enunciation where the
differential positions of the elements of an utterance are distributed.
And the curves themselves are utterances because enunciations are curves
that distribute variables and a science at a given moment, or a literary
genre or a state of laws or a social movement are precisely defined by
the regimes of utterances they engender. They are neither subjects nor
objects but regimes that must be defined for the visible and the
utterable with their derivations, transformations, mutations. In each
apparatus, the lines cross thresholds that make them either aesthetic,
scientific, political, etc.
Thirdly, an apparatus contains lines of force. One might say that they
move from one single point to another on the previous lines. In a way,
they "rectify” the previous curves, draw tangents, surround the paths
from one line to another, operate a to-and-fro from seeing to speaking
and vice versa, acting like arrows that constantly mix words and things
without ceasing to carry out their battles. A line of forces is produced
"in every relationship between one point and another" and moves through
every place in an apparatus. Invisible and unspeakable, this line is
closely combined with the others but can be untangled. Foucault pulls
this line and finds its trajectory in Roussel, Brisset and the painters
Magritte and Rebeyrolle. It is the "dimension of power" and power is the
third dimension of space, interior to the apparatus and variable with
the apparatuses. Like power, it is composed with knowledge.
And finally, Foucault discovered lines of subjectivation. This new
dimension has already given rise to so much misunderstanding that it is
hard to specify its conditions. More than any other, this discovery came
from a crisis in Foucault's thought, as if he needed to rework the map
of apparatuses, find a new orientation for them to prevent them from
closing up behind impenetrable lines of force imposing definitive
contours. Leibniz expressed in exemplary fashion this state of crisis
that restarts thought when it seems that everything is almost resolved:
you think you have reached shore but are cast back out to sea. And as
for Foucault, he sensed that the apparatuses he analyzed could not be
circumscribed by an enveloping line without other vectors passing above
and below: "crossing the line," he said, like "going to the other side"?
This going beyond the line of force is what happens when it bends back,
starts meandering, goes underground or rather when force, instead of
entering into a linear relationship with another force, turns back on
itself, acts on itself or affects itself. This dimension of the Self is
not a preexisting determination that can be found ready-made. Here
again, a line of subjectivation is a process, a production of
subjectivity in an apparatus: it must be made to the extent that the
apparatus allows it or makes it possible. It is a line of flight. It
escapes the previous lines; it escapes from them. The Self is not
knowledge or power. It is a process of individuation that effects groups
or people and eludes both established lines of force and constituted
knowledge. It is a kind of surplus value. Not every apparatus
necessarily has it.
Foucault designates the apparatus of the Athenian city-state as the
first place of creation of a subjectivation: according to his original
definition, the city-state invents a line of forces that moves through
the rivalry between free men. From this line on which a free man can
have command over others, a very different line separates itself
according to which the one who commands free men must also be master of
himself. These optional rules for self-mastery constitute a
subjectivation, an autonomous subjectivation, even if it is later called
on to furnish new knowledge and inspire new powers. One might wonder
whether lines of subjectivation are the extreme edge of an apparatus and
whether they trace the passage from one apparatus to another: in this
sense, they would prepare "lines of fracture." And no more than other
lines, lines of subjectivation have no general formula. Cruelly
interrupted, Foucault's research was going to show that processes of
subjectivation eventually took on other modes than the Greek mode, for
example in Christian apparatuses, modern societies, etc. Couldn't we
cite apparatuses where subjectivation no longer goes through
aristocratic life or the aestheticized existence of free men but through
the marginalized existence of the "excluded"? The sinologist Tokei
explains how freed slaves in a way lost their social status and found
themselves relegated to an isolated, plaintive, elegiac existence from
which they had to draw new forms of power and knowledge. The study of
the variations in the processes of subjectivation seems to be one of the
tasks Foucault left those who came after him. I believe this research
will be extremely fruitful and the current endeavors towards a history
of private life only partially overlap it. Sometimes the ones
subjectivized are the nobles, the ones who say "we the good..."
according to Nietzsche, but under other conditions the excluded, the
bad, the sinners, or the hermits, or monastic communities, or heretics
are subjectivized: an entire typology of subjective formations in
changing apparatuses. And with combinations to be untangled everywhere:
productions of subjectivity escaping the powers and knowledge of one
apparatus to reinvest themselves in another through other forms to be
created.
Apparatuses are therefore composed of lines of visibility, utterance,
lines of force, lines of subjectivation, lines of cracking, breaking and
ruptures that all intertwine and mix together and where some augment the
others or elicit others through variations and even mutations of the
assemblage. Two important consequences ensue for a philosophy of
apparatuses. The first is the repudiation of universals. A universal
explains nothing; it, on the other hand, must be explained. All of the
lines are lines of variation that do not even have constant coordinates.
The One, the Whole, the True, the object, the subject are not universals
but singular processes of unification, totalization, verification,
objectification, subjectivation immanent to an apparatus. Each apparatus
is therefore a multiplicity where certain processes in becoming are
operative and are distinct from those operating in another apparatus.
This is how Foucault's philosophy is a pragmatism, a functionalism, a
positivism, a pluralism. Reason may cause the greatest problem because
processes of rationalization can operate on segments or regions of all
the lines discussed so far. Foucault pays homage to Nietzsche for a
historicity of reason. And he notes all of the importance of
epistemological research on the various forms of rationality in
knowledge (Koyré, Bachelard, Canguilhem), of socio-political research
into the modes of rationality in power (Max Weber). Maybe he kept the
third line for himself, the study of the types of "reasonable" in
potential subjects. But he refused essentially to identify these
processes in a Reason par excellence. He rejected any restoration of
universals of reflection, communication or consensus. In this sense, one
could say that his relationship with the Frankfurt School and the
successors to this school are a long series of misunderstandings for
which he is not responsible. And no more than there are universals of a
founding subject or exemplary Reason that would allow judgment of
apparatuses, there are no universals of the disaster of reason being
alienated or collapsing once and for all. As Foucault told Gérard
Raulet, there is not one bifurcation of reason; it constantly
bifurcates, there are as many bifurcations and branches as
instaurations, as many collapses as constructions following the cuts
carried out by the apparatuses and "there is no meaning to the statement
that reason is a long story that is now over." From this point of view,
the objection raised with Foucault of knowing how to assess the relative
value of an apparatus if no transcendental values can be called on a
universal coordinates is a question that could lead us backward and lose
its meaning itself. Should one say that all apparatuses are equal
(nihilism)? Thinkers like Spinoza and Nietzsche showed long ago that
modes of existence had to be weighed according to immanent criteria,
according to their content in "possibilities," freedom, creativity with
no call to transcendental values. Foucault even alluded to "aesthetic"
criteria, understood as life criteria, that substitute an immanent
evaluation for a transcendental judgment every time. When we read
Foucault's last books, we must do our best to understand the program he
is offering his readers. An intrinsic aesthetics of modes of existence
as the final dimension of apparatuses?
The second result of a philosophy of apparatuses is a change in
orientation, turning away from the Eternal to apprehend the new. The new
is not supposed to designate fashion, but on the contrary the variable
creativity for the apparatuses: in conformance with the question that
began to appear in the 20th century of how the production of something
new in the world is possible. It is true that Foucault explicitly
rejected the "originality'' of an utterance as a non-pertinent,
negligible criterion. He only wanted to consider the "regularity" of
utterances. But what he meant by regularity was the slope of the curve
passing through the singular points or the differential values of the
group of utterances (he also defined the relationship of forces as
distributions of singularities in a social field). By rejecting the
originality of utterances, he meant that the potential contradiction of
two utterances is not enough to distinguish them or to indicate the
newness of one in relation to the other. What counts is the newness of
the regime of enunciation itself in that it can include contradictory
utterances. For example, we could ask what regime of utterances appeared
with the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution: the newness of the
regime counts more than the originality of the utterance. Each apparatus
is thus defined by its content of newness and creativity, which at the
same time indicates its ability to change or even to break for the sake
of a future apparatus unless, on the contrary, there is an increase of
force to the hardest, most rigid and solid lines. Since they escape the
dimensions of knowledge and power, lines of subjectivation seem
particularly apt to trace paths of creation, which are constantly
aborted but also taken up again and modified until the old apparatus
breaks. Foucault's as yet unpublished studies on the various Christian
processes will certainly open many directions in this regard. One should
not believe, however, that the production of subjectivity is left only
to religion; anti-religious struggles are also creative, just as the
regimes of light, enunciation and domination move through very diverse
domains. Modern subjectivations resemble the Greek subjectivations no
more than Christian ones; the same is true of light, utterances and
powers.
We belong to these apparatuses and act in them. The newness of an
apparatus in relation to those preceding it is what we call its
currency, our currency. The new is the current. The current is not what
we are but rather what we become, what we are in the process of
becoming, in other words the Other, our becoming-other. In every
apparatus, we have to distinguish between what we are (what we already
no longer are) and what we are becoming: the part of history, the part
of currentness. History is the archive, the design of what we are and
cease being while the current is the sketch of what we will become. Thus
history or the archive is also what separates us from ourselves, while
the current is the Other with which we already coincide. Some have
thought that Foucault was painting the portrait of modern societies as
disciplinary apparatuses in opposition to the old apparatuses of
sovereignty. This is not the case: the disciplines Foucault described
are the history of what we are slowly ceasing to be and our current
apparatus is taking shape in attitudes of open and constant control that
are very different from the recent closed disciplines. Foucault agrees
with Burroughs who announced that our future would be more controlled
than disciplined. The question is not which is worse. Because we also
call on productions of subjectivity capable of resisting this new
domination and that are very different from the ones used in the past
against the disciplines. A new light, new utterances, new power, new
forms of subjectivation? In every apparatus we must untangle the lines
of the recent past from the lines of the near future: the archive from
the current, the part of history and the part of becoming, the part of
analysis and the part of diagnosis. If Foucault is a great philosopher,
it is because he used history for something else: like Nietzsche said,
to act against time and thus on time in favor, I hope, of a time to
come. What Foucault saw as the current or the new was what Nietzsche
called the untimely, the "non-current," the becoming that splits away
from history, the diagnosis that relays analysis on different paths. Not
predicting, but being attentive to the unknown knocking at the door.
Nothing reveals this better than a fundamental passage from The
Archeology of Knowledge (II, 5) that applies to all his work:
“Analysis of the archive therefore includes a privileged area: it is
both close to us and different from our current time. It is the edge of
time that surrounds our present, overlooks it and indicates its
alterity; the archive is what, outside of us, delimits us. The
description of the archive unfolds its possibilities (and the mastery of
its possibilities) starting with discourses that have just stopped being
ours; its threshold of existence begins with the break that separates us
from what we can no longer say and what falls outside our discursive
practices; it begins with the outside of our own language; its place is
the distance from our own discursive practices. In this sense it can
serve as our diagnosis. Not because it would allow us to draw a portrait
of our distinctive traits and sketch out in advance the aspect we will
have in the future. But it releases us from our continuities; it
dissipates the temporal identity where we like to look at ourselves to
avoid the ruptures of history; it breaks the thread of transcendental
teleologies; and while anthropological thought would examine the being
of humans or their subjectivity, it exposes the other, the outside.
Diagnosis in this sense does not establish the recognition of our
identity through the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are
difference, that our reason is the difference between discourses, our
history the difference between times, our self the difference between
masks.”
The different lines of an apparatus are divided into two groups: lines
of stratification or sedimentation, lines of actualization or
creativity. The final result of this method concerns Foucault's entire
work. In most of his books, he determines a specific archive with
extremely new historical means, the General Hospital in the 17th
century, the clinic in the 18th, prison in the 19th, subjectivity in
ancient Greece and then in Christianity. But that is only half of his
task. Out of a sense of rigor, to avoid confusing things and trusting in
his readers, he does not formulate the other half. He only formulates it
explicitly in the interviews given alongside the publication of his
major works: What are madness, prison, sexuality today? What new modes
of subjectivation do we see appearing today that are certainly not Greek
or Christian? This last question haunted Foucault until the end (we who
are no longer Greek nor even Christian...). Foucault attached so much
importance to his interviews in France and even more so abroad, not
because he liked interviews, but because in them he traced lines of
actualization that required another mode of expression than the
assimilable lines in his major books. The interviews are diagnoses. It
is like for Nietzsche, whose works are difficult to read without the
Nachlass that is contemporary to each. Foucault's complete works, as
Defert and Ewald imagine them, cannot separate the books that have left
such an impression on us from the interviews that lead us toward a
future, toward a becoming: strata and currentness.