File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1998/foucault.9801, message 22


Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 03:22:39 -0500 (EST)
From: John Ransom <ransom-AT-dickinson.edu>
Subject: continuing deleuze on dispositif


    The first two dimensions of a social apparatus [*dispositif*]--or
those to which Foucault draws our attention in the first instance--are
curves of visibility and curves of enunciation. The apparatuses are like
Raymond Roussel's machines, such as Foucault analyses them; they are
machines which make one see and speak. Visibility cannot be traced back to
a general source of light which could be said to fall upon pre-existing
objects: it is made up of lines of light which form variable shapes
inseparable from the apparatus in question. Each apparatus has its way of
structuring light, the way in which it falls, blurs and disperses,
distributing the visible and the invisible, giving birth to objects which
are dependent on it for their existence, and causing them to disappear.
This is the case not only for painting but also for architecture: like the
'prison apparatus' as an optical machine, used for seeing without being
seen. If apparatuses have a historical nature, this is to be found in
regimes of light, but also in regimes of enunciation. Affirmations
[e'nonce's], this is because e'nonce's are curves which distribute
variables and because a science, at a given moment, or a literary genre,
or a state of law, or a social movement, can be defined precisely by the
regimes of enunciations to which they give rise. They are neither subjects
nor objects, but regimes which must be defined from the point of view of
the visible and from the point of view of that which can be enunciated,
with the drifting, transformations and mutations which this will imply.
And in every apparatus [*dispositif*] the lines break through thresholds,
according to which they might have been seen as aesthetic, scientific,
political, and so on.




<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>><
< John S. Ransom     717-2 <
< Political Science      4 <
^ Dickinson College      5 ^
^ Carlisle, PA 17013     - ^
> ransom-AT-dickinson.edu   1 <
< Denny 107              7 >
<                        1 >
>                        6 ^
><^<>^^<>^<>^<>^^>><<>^<^^<`


   

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