[-empyre-] whose "our systems" & body weather

[Simon Biggs]

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.Birringer at 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
simon at littlepig.org.uk  |  @_simonbiggs_ 
http://www.littlepig.org.uk  |  http://amazon.com/author/simonbiggs

simon.biggs at unisa.edu.au  |  Professor of Art, University of South Australia
http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/staff/homepage.asp?name=simon.biggs

s.biggs at 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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