Page 149 - KATE_JOHNSTON_2017

question of power: the power to define and implement a discourse and lay out its

rules. This also returns us briefly to assemblages. However, perhaps Foucault’s term

“dispositif”, which is most often translated as apparatus, is more useful temporarily

because it brings discourse in relation to a wider assemblage through the coordinates

53
of knowledge . Dispositif is related to assemblage in that it calls attention to
heterogeneous elements and relations among them (Pløger 2008, p. 55). A dispositif is

first:

…a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses,
institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative
measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic
propositions – in short the said as much as the unsaid...The apparatus
itself is a system of relations that can be established between these
elements’ (Foucault 1980, p. 194)

Dispositif situates discourse as part of a wider ensemble, which can contain

‘material/technical/textual forces, installations and configurations that, in certain

relations or constellations, obtain power to regulate, govern, institutionalize or

empower a specific element…’ (Pløger 2008, p. 56). Furthermore, since ‘[d]ispositif

are concrete, situational ensembles of forces of becoming…where people are trying to

grasp what they are seeing when talking about things in space’ (Pløger 2008, p. 59),

we can say that there is always a connection to knowledge and what is considered

truth. Paul Rabinow (2003, p. 54) draws attention to an important dimension of a

dispositif. He says that a dispositif is a specific and dominating response to a

historical problem (Rabinow 2003, p. 54).

This is the case in an ocean sustainability crisis through which statements are

made that define the crisis and the response to that crisis, based upon particular forms

of knowledge. This is also the case for devices that measure and articulate

sustainability. Dispositifs are always inscribed in a play of power and also linked to

137