----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Johannes/Alan
I prefer the term dispositif to apparatus, even though the latter is more
evocative and descriptive, as it has less of a dualistic emphasis. In the
rhetoric around the term 'apparatus' the old 'us and them' narrative is often
foregrounded ('us' against the 'apparatus'). Dispositif, as Foucault intended
it, includes us in the apparatus. We can resist it - but we are always
implicit/complicit in it. We are always part of the problem - or not the
problem, when there isn't one (but there always is a problem - which is what is
interesting anyway).
In this context the concept of subjectivity is not very useful. Over the past
few years I've moved away from the idea of the self as an individuated being
and towards a view where the self is considered a contingent, temporary,
heterogeneous and motile assemblage that is dynamically integrated into other
equally blurry and difficult to individuate assemblages - you could use the
term dispositif here. In this context I find it hard to differentiate between
the memories in my brain (experientially encoded), the memories I've acquired
from books and media and the memories that reside not in my brain but on the
hard drives, flash sticks and RAM chips of my ancillary devices. Indeed, these
devices I am surrounded by are no longer ancillary - they are part of my
corporality, my hybrid flesh (just as my books are). As I tried to argue in two
papers of 2010 (2010) and 2011 (2011), we are now the Borg. Not the cyborg,
which retains it's human-like individuality (think Blade Runner replicants),
but the Borg of Star Trek (I agree, an inferior audio-visual artefact - but the
Borg is a great idea) where individuality is blurred out into the totality of
Borg plurality. Key in this has been the development of our network
technologies.
I know a lot of people will think I'm over-stating things. But consider how
society is changing as we (our corporalities/societies/technologies) evolve.
This is not a radically new thing - it's been happening since we started to
become human, which as I suggested in an earlier post, is an evolutionary
process that began with the development of our extensible capabilities
(initially language, fire, social and environmental management). We desperately
try to construct an illusory self that we like to consider as coherent - but
this is just an illusion cloaking our atomised (schizoid) condition that is
amplified as we evolve/extend ourselves.
2010, http://www.littlepig.org.uk/texts/BecomingBorg.pdf
2011, http://www.littlepig.org.uk/texts/TwitterChip.pdf
best
Simon
On 6 Jul 2014, at 00:18, Johannes Birringer <johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk>
wrote:
> Perhaps in discussion to come, we could clarify both the notion of the
> dispositif and the question of what controls whom/who controls what. As
> suggested, film theory since the 1970s, following Jean-Louis Baudry, has
> prefered the term dispositif, the French word meaning “disposition” or
> “arrangement”. Philosophers of media and social/political theory became
> interested in the notion of the dispositif already in the 1970s and 1980s,
> utilizing it as a conceptual category for examining environments (material,
> technological, medial) or regulating, strategic frameworks that are
> configured in certain ways making it possible for certain types of phenomena
> to occur (Foucault tended to emphasize the regulatory and panoptic formations
> that produce power, knowledge, and subjectivity);
>
> now Simon, if we were to say "we are it", how do you now address the kind of
> questions about memory/subjectivity that I felt are driving the kind of
> movement workshops Sue detailed? How would you
> recognize a singular or modulated gesture that had not been "maintained"
> already beforehand?
Simon Biggs
si...@littlepig.org.uk | @_simonbiggs_
http://www.littlepig.org.uk | http://amazon.com/author/simonbiggs
simon.bi...@unisa.edu.au | Professor of Art, University of South Australia
http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/staff/homepage.asp?name=simon.biggs
s.bi...@ed.ac.uk | Honorary Professor, Edinburgh College of Art, University
of Edinburgh
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/edinburgh-college-art/school-of-art/staff/staff?person_id=182&cw_xml=profile.php
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