DEFINING TECHNOLOGY: TECHNOLOGY AS APPARATUS 25
significance, endowed with values and capacities, and incorporated into social
action and relations, and so our discourses on technology are always realized
through the interconnection of signification, material artifacts, techniques, and
cultural values. What this points to is the need to think of technologies as
more than mere things that serve practical purposes. Every technology not
only affords accomplishing some task or set of tasks, but it also carries with
it a set of expectations about who will use that technology, as well as when,
where, and why they might use it. Rather than understanding technologies
as being neutral, transpicuous tools, I should like to propose that we, instead,
think of technologies as a form of apparatus.
In his essay, “What is a Dispositif?” Deleuze (2006: 339–40) proposes that
an apparatus operates along three dimensions. First, there are what he terms
the “curves of visibility”; secondly, there are the “curves of utterance”; and,
thirdly, there are the “lines of force.” Each apparatus is made to be seen and
to be spoken about in historically and materially specific ways. The first two
dimensions relate to the relationship between knowledge and the apparatus—
what can and cannot be visible and spoken to in relation to the apparatus.
This means that within every technological apparatus or assemblage
there are possibilities but also limits as to how it can be represented.
The third relates to the relationship between power and the apparatus,
what trajectories or practices are circumscribed through the apparatus. In
other words, the technological apparatus organizes an associated range of
potential performances or techniques of socio-technical action. In this way,
technological apparatuses can be understood as semio-material mediators of
knowledge and action. In addition to these dimensions, Deleuze (2006: 340)
credits Foucault with discovering “lines of subjectivation,” which entails the
production of subjectivity in relation to the apparatus. Thus every apparatus
is constitutive of subjects specific to the dimensions of the apparatus itself.
Hospitals produce patients, mental asylums produce the insane, and prisons
produce prisoners.
Agamben declares in “What is an Apparatus?” that “I shall call an apparatus
literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient,
determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours,
opinions, or discourses of living beings” (Agamben 2009: 14). An apparatus
creates enduring relations between elements so as to produce a disposition
of gestures, behaviors, opinions, and discourses, which is embodied in the
technology-subject relation. A technological object never acts alone upon
the subject but rather always enters into a relation with the other elements
assembled within the apparatus. Agamben cites Foucault’s comment that the
apparatus can be understood as a formation or network of heterogeneous
elements including “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory
decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical,