Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 14:45:32 -0500 (EST)
From: John Ransom <ransom-AT-dickinson.edu>
Subject: re: continuing deleuze on dispositif


List members,

I left out a line from the second paragraph of the Deleuze article last
night! Sincere apologies. Here is corrected version:

    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] in turn can be traced to lines of enunciation over which the
differential positions of their elements are distributed; and, if the
curves are themselves 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. 




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< Political Science      4 <
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