A core issue in this literature is the tension between the
discursive and the
non-discursive, or the immaterial and material, composition of dispositifs. The prevailing tendency in the early reception of Foucault's term was to interpret it in a strictly in discursive manner. This discursive reading was popularized in
discourse analysis, which tended to reduce Foucault's insights to a largely
social constructionism framework. One of the most prominent examples is
Judith Butler's adaptation of Foucault's "dispositif of sexuality" to conceptualize
gender as a discursive apparatus: , 1819 Jemima Repo criticizes Butler for overlooking "the historically specific technology of biopower", including "the strategies and tactics of biopower", which were central to Foucault's account of the dispositif of sexuality. Giorgio Agamben traces the trajectory of dispositif (
dispositivo in Italian) to
Aristotle's
oikonomia () as the effective management of the household and the early Christian Church Fathers' use of the
oikonomia to save the concept of the Trinity from the allegation of polytheism. He argues that Foucault's dispositif is part of a larger, and broad-ranging "theological genealogy of economy," which he traces through the Christian theological
dispositio,
Hegel's notion of positivity, and Heidegger's
Gestell. This (
oikonomia) is "a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient—in a way that purports to be useful—the behaviours, gestures, and thoughts of human beings." In the next section of his essay, he defines dispositif as: Agamben provides a long list of examples, ranging from institutions such as prisons, factories, and schools to discursive devices such as pens, writing, literature, and cell phones. He also refers to "language itself" as "perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses—one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face." Matteo Pasquinelli has criticized Agamben for relying too much on
philological analysis.
Roberto Esposito traces the genealogy of dispositifs back to Martin Heidegger's theory of the
Gestell. In
Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought, Esposito draws from Heidegger's
Bremen Lectures to examine the "dispositif of the person." Heidegger's
Gestell, he argues, addresses a key tension in the human between ordering-positioning and producing-creating. Although the technical mechanisms threaten to obstruct the process of disclosure
(Aletheia), they also preserve the dignity of the productive and creative aspects of the modern human
(poiesis). This tension rests at the centre of many accounts of dispositifs in contemporary philosophy. In fact, the four main characteristics outlined in Esposito's reading of the Gestell—elusiveness, concealment, inclusionary power, and subjectification—are repeated by most philosophies of dispositifs. Others place their emphasis on how dispositifs are grounded in materiality. These readings focus on the mechanistic and productive dynamics of dispositifs. Key references here are Deleuze's description of dispositifs as "machines that make one see and speak",
Gilbert Simondon's work on technical objects, and Marx's "Fragment on Machines". This reading includes various Italian post-operaismo theorists such as
Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt in their in their
Empire trilogy.. Others include the anonymous collective
Tiqqun, Jacques Bidet, artistic persona
Claire Fontaine,
Maurizio Lazzarato, and
Hito Steyerl. A second, related, strain is also addressed by feminist and queer theorists who examine the material embodiment in dispositifs, which includes
new materialism figures such as
Karen Barad and
Catherine Malabou and critics such as Nikki Sullivan. A third, interrelated strain is found in
Assemblage (philosophy), and other philosophers of technology who adapted the paradigm of dispositifs into their research, such as
Bernard Stiegler and
Bruno Latour. Finally, in
necropolitics key theorists such as
Jasbir Puar and
Achille Mbembe use dispositifs to articulate their core ideas. For example, Mbembe characterizes the
slave plantation and the
colony as “racial dispositifs” [
dispositifs raciaux], and he describes race as a “security dispositif”: Drawing from Marx's "Fragment on Machines" and Heidegger's "
The Question Concerning Technology," Greg Bird argues that the "era of the dispositif is marked by an obsession with engineering," a "vast assemblage of machinery took hold of humanity.... [W]ays of thinking, seeing, desiring, doing, and being were radically reconfigured." Authors who use dispositifs continue to reproduce one central problematic, which he calls the "problem of engineering: human–machine, nature–culture, artifice–intelligence." This begins with a series of texts concerned with mechanical, technological, and biological engineering. It was further developed by a second and third generation of philosophers who have used dispositifs to examine human engineering projects, such as biopower, colonialism,
Orientalism, gender, and racialization. The initial iterations of dispositif thinking were concerned with the masculine conception of "Man-the-engineer," but subsequent thinkers adapted this problematic to address the relationship between embodiment and dispositifs in
feminist technoscience,
queer theory,
posthumanism, and
transgender theory. It does not matter whether the author emphasizes the discursive dynamics or the material-productive operations of dispositifs, because at its core, dispositif thinking is animated by the problem of engineering. == Other disciplines ==