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Concept
Dispositif
Summary
Dispositif or dispositive is a term used by the French intellectual Michel Foucault, generally 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. 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.
Dispositif is translated variously, even in the same book, as 'device', 'machinery', 'apparatus', 'construction', and 'deployment'.
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 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."
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.
Official source
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