Dispositif

Apparatus, dispositif, and machine are three terms that figure significantly in French theorizations of [Page 197]different forms of power. In English, apparatus (derived from Latin) translates as both appareil (apparatus, machine, device, camera) and dispositif (arrangement, disposition, device, or apparatus). The notion of state apparatus (or appareil d'état) is especially associated with Louis Althusser, a French structural Marxist, and his followers. Dispositif was first used in the study of the cinema but for present purposes is more often associated with Michel Foucault's analyses of power/knowledge relations. Machine is a broader term with many connotations, ranging from the machinery of state power to the desiring machine. The term has a key, albeit often loosely metaphorical, role in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, such as their 1972 work Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism et Schizophrenia.

In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser supplements Karl Marx's theory by identifying the state's key ideological as well as repressive functions in reproducing class domination. He distinguished a relatively unified repressive state apparatus (RSA) from a plurality of relatively autonomous ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). Although the former comprises the core of the state (executive, legislature, judiciary, and police-military apparatus), the ISAs include diverse institutions such as the family, education, organized religion, and the media. RSAs and ISAs operate in different ways to secure class power and social cohesion. Although the RSA relies more on coercion, it has an important ideological moment, and, although ISAs rely more on ideology, coercion remains in the background. Subsequent work has explored the changing articulation of the RSA and ISAs in different kinds of political systems, whether “normal” bourgeois democratic regimes or exceptional regimes such as military dictatorships, fascism, developmental states, or new forms of authoritarian rule (see, for example, Nicos Poulantzas's 1972 work, Fascism and Dictatorship).

Foucault introduced dispositif in an interview after Surveiller et punir (translated as Discipline and Punish) appeared in 1975; it also figured in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976) and, more prominently, in his studies of governmentality between 1976 and 1979. His most elaborate account presented dispositif as a general network or web of relations among a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble” of linguistic and nonlinguistic relations, discourses and institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements, philosophical and moral propositions, and so forth. More important for Foucault than a given dispositif's individual elements were (a) how their articulation in games of power, knowledge, and truth served strategic functions in addressing an urgent need; and (b) how the dispositif produced appropriate subjects for specific types of power/knowledge relations. In their very different ways, the arguments of these leading French scholars have influenced studies of power across many disciplines and regarding the most varied topics. The main theoretical and methodological interest in apparatus, dispositif, and machine concerns how relatively heterogeneous elements are combined to generate specific strategic effects in power relations across different sites and scales.