The Dispositif

3Discursive Productions and the Dispositive

In this chapter, it is mainly the discursive dimension of dispositives that is at the center of the discussion.

We have mentioned discursive aspects in the previous chapters without really dwelling on them. Yet, the documents and discourses circulating within a dispositive play an important role in this perspective. They take part in the dissemination of requirements, regulations, thereby communicating a different point of view of the operational actors. Some of them are part of the binding framework of the dispositive. We will come back to this in section 3.1 on the legal definition of the dispositive, which leads us to a programmatic vision mainly based on the discourse and prescriptive documents. The introduction of the normative and dramaturgical representation orders will qualify the place of teleological representation. We will also show how the dispositive is integrated into purely discursive environments.

Unlike the previous chapters, which were mainly dedicated to dispositives for the purpose of producing products and services, this chapter focuses on dispositives whose purpose is to produce discourses. Let us mention, for example, general public newspapers that can be considered as discursive products that give representations and meaning to the news or societal facts.

The dispositive also allows researchers to make phenomena visible by building a scientific discourse. Section 3.2 restricts this discursive production to ...