Collaboratory in Critical Security Methods
The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies is an ESRC funded project (RES-810-21-0072)
Discussion of Giorgio Agamben's methodological work
Hey guys,
I should begin by stating that there may have been some confusion over which chapters we agreed to read for this new thread. My contribution below draws most heavily on the first chapter entitled ‘What is an apparatus?’ contained in Agamben’s recent collection of the same name and, to a lesser extent, on the last chapter in this collection. I have not decided to discuss any part of Agamben’s The Signature of all Things only because a cursory examination of the text led me to believe that there was less to engage with in this text on our specific questions of genealogy, history and time. Anyone more familiar with this text is invited to bring it into our discussions if I have overlooked anything of significance.
I found the chapters within ‘What is an apparatus?’ to raise a number of questions and concerns of which I’ll have to limit myself to those dealing with methodology. To begin with, I found the etymological approach that Agamben takes in the opening chapter, ‘What is a dispositif?’, to be quite helpful in shedding light on a concept that I still find very difficult to get my head around. Agamben’s study of the term dispositif, firstly in its varied contemporary French usages followed by an examination (genealogy?) of the terms etymology (from the Greek oikonomia to the Latin dispositio), was very useful in clarifying a concept whose meaning is especially obscured for English-speaking audiences given its lack of adequate translation. That being said, I must admit that I am still confused as to what can, and what can’t be, included in this category of dispositif (which seems to include everything from confession, to prisons, to telephonino). Perhaps this is something we can discuss (and hopefully clarify) in future entries.
Also, I thought the chapter was pretty good at explaining how a dispositif operates—its strategic nature. The dispositif is strategic, firstly, insofar as it is always directed at a target which is articulated in the form of a problem. Secondly, it is strategic insofar as it is composed, and operates, according to a strategic logic of combination. This takes the form of a kind of bricolage: bundling a series of practices and forms of knowledge which aim to shape, or ‘conduct’, conduct. As such, Agamben sums up a dispostif as “a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge” (Agamben, 2009, 2)
What is lacking in Agamben’s analysis is a discussion of the role of problematization. This is significant insofar as it underemphasizes two important why questions: Why do dispositif form and evolve? And, more importantly, why study them? We know that dispositif are constructed in relation to historically specific problematics. These problematics are events. These event problematize rationalities and practices which are taken for granted, that are preformed without a great deal of reflection, calling them into question and thus making them available to thought. In doing so they open a space in which alternative approaches (ways of thinking and operating) can be introduced. All this is important because I think it helps us to better understand genealogy as an art of problematization.
Genealogy operates on the past in order to problematize the present. The contemporary thus represents the vanishing point in Foucault’s work. While it is often absent (apart of course from his many interviews) it is what orders, arranges and directs the genealogy so as to effect a counter-actualization of the past with the aim of problematizing the present. As Agamben notes in his final chapter on contemporariness (which echoes Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and What is Critique?’ (Foucault, 1997)
Finally I think this lack of engagement with genealogy and problematization manifests itself Agamben’s unsatisfactory critique of the telephonino. For Agamben the telefonino is a problem insofar as it alienates us from a more natural, or immediate form of sociability. This claim however is highly questionable. Indeed, mobile phones, and contemporary telecommunications more generally, are responsible for so many new forms of sociability which are themselves problematizing many contemporary practices of governance (take, as an extreme example, the role they have played in facilitating ‘Black Bloc’ manoeuvres such as those performed during the G20 protests in Toronto which have been used to legitimate the introduction of a host of new security measures and technologies) and forms of subjectivity (for an excellent discussion see Rotman’s ‘Becoming Beside Ourselves’). A genealogical critique of technology would instead be directed towards problematizing technology as practice which is performed unreflectively. This problematization aim to make this practice unfamiliar, to bring it to thought and, hopefully, to place it in a position where it can be thought otherwise. In this respect contemporary telecommunications may in fact offer assistance.
I’ll leave it at this for now. Looking forward, as always, to you responses.
Best,
Chris
Sven Opitz says
Hi all,
Maybe it would be a good idea to follow Chris’ intuition and concentrate in our first round on the apparatus/dispositif, and then, in the second round, take into account the elaborations on the paradigm in “Signatura rerum”. A guiding question could then be: Can we conceive of dispositifs as paradigms? Do we get methodologically access to dispositifs through paradigmatic analytics?
I would like to begin with some conceptual history and address the problems of translation already pursued by Chris. Taking into account French publications from the late 1960ies and the early 1970ies, the term of the dispositif has been used by several authors at that time. Most notably, Jean-Louis Baudry used the term to revolutionize the study of cinematography. By describing the cinema as a “dispositif” he showed indifference towards the content of a cinematographic narration and analyzed, instead, the materiality of the apparatus: the way spectators are positioned in front of a mirror-like screen, processes of identification fostered by this technological architecture, the impact of the central perspective implied in the machinery of projection, the illusion of space it produces etc. I am not quite sure if Baudry (who has been part of the Tel Quel-collective) used the concept of dispositive consistently, but one of my Professors in Literature always stated that some kind of accident in translation occurred: the “dispositif” has become an “apparatus” in the English speaking world. In media studies, they talk about “apparatus theory” from the 70ies onward, and not about “dispositif theory.” Personally, I am not sure if this was really an “accident”, because allusions to Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses are more than clear. Therefore, it would be interesting to hear from a French native, if there was really a distinct usage of the dispositif in the original texts from the 70ies, clearly to be distinguished form the apparatus.
Some time ago, I found another text from that time that is also experimenting with the concept of dispositif: an essay by Jean-Francois Lyotard which is called (I translate form the German) “Painting as a Libido-Dispositif”. Lyotard develops the idea that forms of desire are produced by/flow though certain dispositifs. With regards to painting, he notes: “The dispositif is a circuit diagram, a diagram of connections, which regulates and canalizes chromatic energy, its supply and its removal.” (I don’t know if Lyotard really uses the Foucauldian notion of the diagram, in the German edition it is not “Diagramm” but something similar.) In treating photography as a historical dispositif in the same way as styles of abstract painting or forms of print, Lyotard often uses formulations such as. “This is a specific dispositiv, it operates, it functions.” Thereby, he points to the operative dynamics of processes.
Why are these historical sedimentations of the dispositif in the debates from the 70ies important for us?
I have the feeling that Agamben – although not referring to them openly – is somehow close to them. And maybe this can help us to rethink the dispositif in Foucault in a constructive way. At first sight, Foucault talks of the dispositif of sexuality, which is more or less a discursive formation orchestrated around the quasi-object of sexuality. To oversimplify a bit: the dispositif of sexuality is described (in the first Volume of the History of Sexuality) as a macro-sociological entity. Conversely, dispositifs in the sense of Baudry and Lyotard seem to be far more “local”. They seem to be materialized forms of thought and practice. They resemble what Deleuze and Guattari call “agencement” or “assemblage”. I think Agamben relates in a very peculiar way to this tradition. His dispositif bears traits of technology as “Gestell” in the Heideggarian sense (p. 12). It is something prosthetic. At the same time, by referring back to Hegel, he brings back in the notion of desire (see also p.17), more or less absent in Foucault.
If we now look at these two versions of the dispositif, however, one could come to the conclusion that they are not necessarily exclusive. What could it mean, if we brought them into a dialogue?
First: With Foucault, we can conceive of dispositifs as material actualizations of discursive regimes of intelligibility. Dispositifs are material forms that institute strategic relations of force and epistemic relations of knowledge. More than that: They let them become operative. They are material infrastructures for power/knowledge. They stabilize relations of force and relations of knowledge over time.
Second: Agamben (alongside Baudry, the early Lyotard, …) can help us to go beyond the said and unsaid. Dispositifs relate regimes of the “sayable” to pictorial regimes of the visible, to affective regimes, to architectural regimes etc. The strategic moment of problematization, therefore, is without any doubt an organizing principle, very important for the “articulation” of each dispositif. But at the same time, the dispositif is something that arranges the discursive and the non-discursive, or better: the significant and the non-significant. It arranges the circulations of concepts with the circulation of precepts. Besides a linguistically articulated truth, it organizes the circulation of sympathies, fears, nervousness or indifference. It connects, for example, architectural forms with lines of visibility, streams of affect with techniques of registration. (Maybe we should pass this discussion to the materialities-cluster?)
At the same time, I definitely share Chris’ skepticism towards Agamben’s conclusions. This ultra-pessimistic, Adorno-like pessimism seems exaggerated and implausible. In his text on enlightenment, already put forward by Chris, Foucault’s dandyesque worldliness is much more appealing. But what went “wrong” in Agamben? I think the problem lies in his antagonistic conceptualization of the relation between living beings and technology/apparatuses.
At first sight, it seems interesting to conceive of the subject as a kind of war effect, emerging in the struggle between living beings and the apparatuses. Especially the concept of “capture” (p. 13) allows Agamben to say more about resistance (or even emancipation!) than Foucault. The reference to fleeing forces of life to be captured by dispositifs produces a two-fold idea of resistance: resistance means (a) to escape from the apparatus and (b) to halt or de-activate the apparatus. But there is a price to pay: Agamben comes close to an account of power to be mainly repressive, a traditional account that has been, as we know, deliberately discarded by Foucault. Moreover, this negative ontology of life brings back some classical figures of critical theory which somehow doesn’t appear to be timely: most of all the idea of alienation as being divided from itself (16). I am not principally against a re-examination of these critical concepts, but in Agamben’s case I have doubts. Indeed, maybe Agamben’s Don Quichottery against cell phones is not only ludicrous, but symptomatic for a philosophical argument gone awry. At least I would question my conceptual fine-tuning if I end up, by philosophical means, at the same resentment my grandmother has about the world.
But what is the conceptual alternative? I would say, one has to think technology as anti-prosthetic. Technology is not something external to living beings, but something interwoven. It doesn’t necessarily isolate and alienate individuals, but provide the common in a field of power relations.
Finally, I want to raise a question: Does anyone has an idea what Agamben’s final diagnosis could mean: the hypothesis that the contemporary mode of subjectivation is desubjectivation? (p. 20) With Foucault one would presume that desubjectivation could be an (albeit dangerous) critical strategy, to be achieved by techniques of the self. Agamben, conversely, considers desubjectivation to be the last and most disastrous form of subjectivation in Western civilization.
Okay, that’s all I can say. I am going into holidays tomorrow, but I am back in two weeks. Although I wasn’t interested in commenting Agamben’s little paper at first, I really liked re-reading it! And I am looking very much forward to your responses!
All the best,
Sven
PS: I found out that Baudry has published two texts on the dispositif, I discovered one reference in English: Jean-Louis Baudry, »The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema«, in: Filmtheory and Criticism. Introductory Readings, ed. by Gerald Mast/Marschall Cohen/Leo Baudry, New York/Oxford 1992, pp. 690–707.
For an electronic version: http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/1/1_1/104
14 July 2010, 11:12
Nadine Voelkner says
Hi Sven,
I just discovered your very interesting post on the etymology of and materiality in 'dispositif' and have copied it into our materiality thread on Agamben/Deleuze. You raise some very interesting/relevant points about the place of materiality in 'dispositif' that I've suggested the materiality cluster take up for discussion. Many thanks for this. Let's see what comes out of our upcoming discussion!
All best, Nadine
20 September 2010, 15:35
Andrew Neal says
Let me begin by saying how much I enjoyed reading both of your sets of comments. And then let me say how disappointed I was with the Agamben chapter! It is extremely short and barely scratches the surface of the issue. To anyone thinking of buying this little 'book', I would say don't! It's barely a pamphlet and certainly not worth the money.
Agamben's chapter at the very least offers an interpretation of a key Foucault passage on the dispositif:
1. 'It is a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything'
2. it 'has a concrete strategic function'
3. it 'appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge'
It is the set of relationships between the elements of the dispositif that are important, not their materiality or immateriality as such, though the mingling of the two is novel. This set of relationships is ordered around a strategic purpose. And as we discussed previously, strategy does not necessarily assume strategists.
I recently read a chapter in the International Studies Compendium Project by Bigo et al. that discussed this very well (Balzacq, Thierry, Tugba Basaran, Didier Bigo, Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet, and Christian Olsson, (2010). 'Security Practices.' In The International Studies Encyclopedia. Edited by Robert A. Denemark. Blackwell Reference Online: Blackwell Publishing). The dispositif 'is not the program of the most powerful agents but a diagram of the relations of power and resistance'.
Bigo distinguishes dispositif from the Bourdieuian concepts of habitus and field quite helpfully too. While the latter two are more or less discernible homologous spaces, the first intersubjective and the second of objective power relations, dispositif has much less structural connotations and is applicable to transversal sets of power/knowledge relations.
In other words dispositif is a way of understanding the coherence of heterogeneous elements from heterogenous positions around a common strategic problem. One example, from recent work by our ICCM colleague Claudia Aradau (with Rens van Munster) is risk - a problematization around which a whole set of technologies, knowledges, institutionalisations, and positive/negative subjectivities have cohered. The dispositif of risk is not the product of any one structure or power position. (Aradau, Claudia, and Rens Van Munster, (2007). 'Governing Terrorism through Risk: Taking Precautions, (Un)Knowing the Future.' European Journal of International Relations, vol. 13, no. 1: pp. 89-115.)
Agamben only briefly discusses the historical aspect of dispositif, through the rather oblique connection of Foucault to Hegel through Hypolite. These latter two thinkers are in part concerned with the 'positivity' of 'the historical element'. Agamben characterises this as 'the rules, rites, and institutions that are imposed on the individual by an external power, but that become, so to speak, internalized in the systems of beliefs and feelings.' (p. 6). He doesn't tell us a great deal more, other than the simple point that Foucault is interested in studying these positivities rather than seeing them as a philosophical hindrance (unlike Hegel).
I might add that Agamben's description of the move from external relations to subjective beliefs is reminiscent of Bourdieu's understanding of the relationship between field and habitus. But what Agamben doesn't go into, which Chris quite rightly flags up, is how to select particular dispositifs for study. Clearly the loose definition/etymology of the concept is so expansive as to include any aspect of social life. But Foucault did not simply come up with a general social theory, but instead focused on specific empirical, historical examples of these positivities. And again, Chris is right to draw attention to the concepts of problematization and event as things which signal historical importance and draw and analytical attention.
While Agamben spends some time on the novelty of the 'economy' of dispositif and the relationships between its heterogeneous elements, I agree with Sven that he does end with a very negative view of the implications for subjectivity and power in his idea of desubjectivation. This seems to hinge on a very selective reading of Foucault (as found in Agamben's other works too) that ignores the productive elements of power. If we look at any of Foucault's works, even those where the concept of dispositif is not explicitly used, all historical sets of power/knowledge relationships that cohere around strategic problematizations help to constitute new forms of subjectivity which are not simply repressed or passive. For example, the problem of madness helps to constitute a whole branch of medical science, with its own buildings, institutions, knowledges, professional positions and so on.
A final thought. We have spent some time discussing the material/non-material relational novelty of dispositif. I have flagged up where this links in with Bourdieu's ideas. There is also some resemblance with Actor-Network Theory in this material/non-material, human/technological relationship. But it seems to me that both Bourdieu and Latour engage much more specifically with problems of method and case selection. Foucault seems somewhere between the two, but because of his historical focus, he never addresses those problems as systematically. This gives us lots of scope for creative inspiration from Foucault's work, but also presents problems in trying to distill and apply the method. If that is our aim, I wonder how far we can go with Foucault? For these reasons I am actually turning to Bourdieu in my own work when I need a much more explicit methodology.
29 July 2010, 11:43