Legg, Stephen (2011). “Assemblage/apparatus: using Deleuze and Foucault”. Area, 43 (2), p. 128.
Abstract
In this commentary I would like to offer some reflections on the Deleuzian concept of ‘assemblage’ (agencement) from the perspective of my grounding in ‘governmentality studies’ and, secondly, on the latter’s central concern with the concept of the security ‘apparatus’ (dispositif). I would like to suggest that the two be thought of dialectically, both as concepts and as actually-existing things in the world. After outlining my use to date of these concepts, and their deployment in my research into colonial India, I will counterpoise Giorgio Agamben’s and Giles Deleuze’s reflections on Michel Foucault’s use of the term dispositif/apparatus. Deleuze’s obvious and acknowledged indebtedness to Foucault’s work, but his explicit re-rendering of the Foucauldian interest in order with the Deleuzian conceptualisation of dis-order, will be used to conclude with some methodological suggestions regarding how Deleuze and Foucault, agencement and dispositif, assemblages and apparatuses, can and should be thought together.
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Oh but this is definitive: ‘agencement’ and ‘dispositif’ should be considered as the same sourced conceptualization: Deleuze admiration of Foucault archeological viewpoint says a lot in this regard: while the notion of ‘agencement’ was firstly coined by Guattari, Deleuze complemented and matched it with Foucault’s original ideas about ‘discoursive sockets’ (there is even an early 1970’s article where Deleuze suggest this similarity between Guattari and Foucault). But it is interesting to see how Deleuze and Guattari initially developed the notion in terms of ‘dispositif’ in their 1975 book about Kafka, chapter 9, entitled ‘What is a dispositif?’. Then we see that later, in ATP, they would finally use the same ideas and almost the same words to define it, but now expressed in terms of ‘agencement’. Perhaps this leads to the break of Foucault and Deleuze friendship: Deleuze considered that the term ‘dispositif’ would still have some significant residues that would connotate ‘pleasure’ above ‘desire’, thus he dismissed the term and kept the guattarian notion ‘agencement’. In ATP, the word ‘dispositif’ is just simply inexistent.
To this point, despite Deleuze and Guattari developed the term ‘agencement’ in many respects, the basic notion of ‘collective agencement of enunciation’ could not but be ascribed to Foucault’s ‘discoursive sockets’. Can we say then that Deleuze took Foucault’s original ideas without his permission? Was this part of the reason why Deleuze went silently hostile to him? Could this explain why Foucault felt intimidated by Deleuze conceptual obsessions? The fact is that, after Foucault`s death, Deleuze was pretty obfuscated, he knew he was in debt with Foucault not only in terms of friendship but also in terms of his conceptual project and particularly with respect to the notion of ‘agencement’, which became very important. Feeling a lot of regret, we can see how Deleuze yielded tribute to Foucault by writing the most incisive and exponential book about him, and later -in the 1988 homage to Foucault organized by Canguilhem where he participated-, by writing an exalted lecture also entitled ‘what is a dispositif?’. The fact that the chapter 9 on Kafka’s and his 1988 lectured tribute would share the same title also says a lot: it is clear that Deleuze retrieved Foucault the credit he deserved regards to the notion of ‘agencement’, in a way to reframe all its foucaultian conceptual potency in terms of ‘dispositif’.
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