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Foucault's Dispositif and the City

John Plger Planning Theory 2008 7: 51 DOI: 10.1177/1473095207085665 The online version of this article can be found at: http://plt.sagepub.com/content/7/1/51

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Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) Vol 7(1): 5170 DOI: 10.1177/1473095207085665 http://plt.sagepub.com

F O U C AU LT S DISPOSITIF A N D THE CITY

John Plger
Roskilde University, Denmark

Abstract Michel Foucault was concerned with the role of urban planning in bio-politics. Only a few authors, however, emphasize the crucial role of the dispositif in his thinking about space and discipline. This article emphasizes the dispositif ensemble as exemplary to understanding urban planning and to one of Foucaults main themes: the constitution of disciplinarian forces through relations of power, knowledge and space. The article explores the dispositif both categorically and in its common use, and indicates Foucaults understanding of dispositif by looking at his writings on the healthy city and the Panopticon. Keywords dispositif, Foucault, space, the social, urban planning

Michel Foucault was one of the rst scholars to see cities as a place for the connement of deviants in psychiatric hospitals, prisons and asylums, beginning in the 17th century (Foucault, 1977, 2003). His studies include examination of the role of urban planning in this bio-politic or political control of the body. Since Foucault wrote, several authors have used this bio-political perspective in relation to urban planning studies (Hegna, 1998; Philo, 2000). Other scholars (Gromark, 1987; Rabinow, 1989) were inspired by Foucaults spatial perspective to regard urban planning and architecture as forming an apparatus of normalization through the production of a disciplinarian space, using both diagrams and the gaze as means in a purposeful spatial ordering of everyday lives. There is now also a substantial literature on the dark side of planning power such as ethnic segregation (Yiftachel, 1996) and opinion manipulation (Flyvbjerg, 1991). A further reading of Foucaults reections on space is the
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focus on heterotopia and spaces of otherness (see, for example, Genocchio, 1996; Hetherington, 1997; Soja, 1996) and agonism (Gunder, 2003; Hillier, 2002, 2003; Wennam, 2003). Only a few authors have emphasized the crucial role of the dispositif in Foucaults thinking about space (Deleuze, 1988), and how his writing from this perspective can enrich our understanding of the role of spatialization in urban politics and planning (Brenner, 1994; Huxley, 2006; Plger, 2002). In this article, I will demonstrate how Foucaults understanding of the dispositif is especially crucial to urban planning. Urban planning concerns several dispositif problematics: rst, urban planning concerns the relation between the articulated and the visible; the discourse and the material. Second, urban planning is predetermined on relations and connections between the said (plans, texts, communication) and the unsaid (strategies, intentions with regard to effect and affect, prejudices and so on). Third, urban planning is, due to its public activity, truly dependent on relations between an ensemble of lived discourses, institutionalized discourses and architectural discourses, which are all dimensions of the spatialization of a populations living together with plannings regulatory decisions (plans), scientic statements (on the effect and affect of things), and (not least) the institutionalization of the public participatory planning process. In this article, I emphasize the generativity of the dispositif ensemble as exemplary to urban planning (see Huxley, 2006; Osborne and Rose, 1999, 2004; but also Joyce, 2003; Rabinow, 1989). My aim is to use Foucaults own writing on the urban dispositif as core to this discussion. Most commentators regard the term dispositif as having technical connotations and prefer its English translation as apparatus. However, as I will argue, the term must be seen as closely connected to one of Foucaults overall themes; the constitution of disciplinarian forces through relations of power, knowledge and space, where to Foucault, space is active. It was through the city that societies developed ideas about how to discipline life through space. This recognition in part followed medical experiences with uncontrollable diseases threatening cities. Governments discovered that forms of bio-politics building on techniques of surveillance, registration, classication, division of inhabitants, and, if necessary, exclusion from space made it possible to control the spreading of diseases. European cities were then constructed according to the same principles or ways of thinking, most notably seen in the great hygiene projects from the 1820s in France and in Scandinavia from about 1880 to 1930. Through cities, architects and planners recognized the social power of space and especially its normalization forces. Hence the interest in the ethics of organized space. The city became a laboratory for the emergent disciplinarian society, which Deleuze calls the society of control (Deleuze, 1995). While cities and societies saw or experienced the power-potentials of space for the exercise of discipline, order and control, the question is how does space work, have effect or produce affect? What lies in between spatial (symbolic) expressions and space effect? Semioticians would say that space is a text to be

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read (Barthes, 1999). Architecture theorists would say that architecture is intentional. In both cases space expresses collective schemes of values or discourse references. To Foucault representation is not equal to language or the word, because there is no single representational condition (Colebrook, 1999: 179) such as language or words. If we read his sayings about architecture, Foucault would, however, agree that architecture is ideological as well as symbolic intentional. While Le Corbusier did work from intentions (Foucault, 1989: 265), Foucault never said that these intentions must build on cultural symbols or other signicative signs in the linguistic sense. Foucault seems not to discuss how signicative symbols are transformed to praxis: is it unconsciously, through the culturalized body or a sense of place, ontological grounded? Space must be interpreted, or . . . ? Foucault is ambivalent about this discussion (see Foucault, 1980, The Confession of the Flesh). I discuss this ambivalence below looking at Foucaults writings on urbanism and especially at how his reections on urbanism involve the concept of dispositif. Most use of Foucaults writings on space takes as a point of departure his writing on connement and carceral spaces, for instance, the prison and the connement of the mad. In both cases the effect of the gaze is crucial to Foucaults work. In these studies he seems to underline the body as the core of disciplinarian space, and the individuals sense of space rather than the reading of space. But how is the body able to understand space as normative, as signifying certain ethical codes or expected rules of conduct? Recent discussions, following Deleuze, would say that space becomes active through connections, relations, assemblages producing effect and affect (Hillier, 2006). Others talk about an ontology of encounter and togetherness based on the principles of connection, extension and continuous change (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 27). An obvious answer for architects and planners is that space represents/signies/ symbolizes something and that effect is a matter of being able to read these signs or symbols. This may be done by people sensing space bodily, where spaces are recognizable for a culturalized body shaped by the taken-for-granted deep culture of society; a body socialized or intuitively understood. As I develop below, Foucault disputed any kind of hermeneutics which would argue for a hidden meaning or for the single point of a subjects interpretation. But he also rejected a pure naturalism (pure body). I therefore argue that his term dispositif, in relation to space, relies on a social, discursive, reading meaning into space, and this is what makes plausible a certain relation between forms and norms (Rabinow, 1989). However, events and eventualization play substantial roles in the ows, uxes and juxtapositions in space, and Foucault himself thought it important to say that the architect has no power over me (Foucault, 1984: 247); people can choose to use space otherwise. Use of space is a mindbody wechelwirkung or folding where perception and recognition are at play. As Hillier (2007: 188) says, meaning is relational, emergent from the dynamic interaction between meaningful elements in complex open systems. Foucault did not believe in a secret or unconscious meaning hidden behind actors acts, but he did accept through his reading of Nietzsche that people are acting within inter-subjective meaning-relations

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(Hjelmar and Germer, 1994); within collective schemes of signications. He recognized as did Heidegger that the world exists as a text: it exists as a series of occurrences, that only can be understood, if we take them as an expression of something meaningful (p. 94). Foucaults Nietzschian inspiration also led him to follow Nietzsches hermeneutics, that there isnt one objective point of view, only a world of interpretations (Schmidt and Kristensen, 1986). But does this Nietzschianism apply to his concept of dispositif ? If so, why and how? Readings of Foucaults dispositif are most often reductionist, seeing it as an attempt to dene a functionalist concept as the basic unit (Brenner, 1994: 687). This is a reductive reading that may allow one to understand the orderly aspect of a dispositif, but not its generative or framing perspective. It therefore ignores Foucaults writing on the dispositifs of sexuality, sex or power as performed. A functionalist reading also misses the moral aspects of planned space and its way of politicization and subjectication, simply because one misses the generative aspects of Foucaults thinking on dispositifs and refers to it only as a matter of installing the dispositif as a disciplinarian apparatus or device. It is here that a translation of dispositif as assemblage (Valverde, 2007) would be more helpful. Although Brenner (1994) can nd several statements in Discipline and Punish conrming a reading of Foucaults Panopticon as a functionalist apparatus for order and discipline,1 we should note that Foucault also regarded it as a spatial dispositif to reform the moral (Foucault, 1977: 185). A (spatial) dispositif is not a functionalist imperative, and Foucaults point is that there is always an ensemble of socio-spatial dispositifs from which a disciplinarian and moral space eventuates. The possibilities or effects of space emerge out of specic constellations of the said and un-said, because space is only one element in exercising a normalizational authority (Foucault, 1977: 273). It helps his argument little that Brenner tries to say that Foucault uses the term functionalist as the functionalist imperatives (urgent needs), because there is a target or tactics inherent in a dispositif (Brenner, 1994: 687). A dispositif is a plurality; a multiplicity. Intentions in planning or politics or architecture can build on targets or tactics, but in any case the effects depend on specic interplays between circumstances (constellations, connectedness, forms of relations, discourses at play, readings at play and so on). I therefore argue that we need to see a dispositif as generative (see Huxley, 2006) or as inertia (including the will) instead of functionalist, not least because a dispositif to Foucault is a modality possible of effecting both visible and non-visible signications at play. We have to recognize how Foucault understands space as active; as a dispositif among other dispositifs. The aims of this article are therefore: rst, to explore the dispositif categorically, because its English translation seems to exclude some of Foucaults own meaning of the concept and its (social) epistemology. Second, to discuss the common use of the dispositif as a technical term and a bodily term, that would seem relevant, following Foucaults own studies on urbanism. This discussion leads to, third, a section exemplifying Foucaults use of dispositif as more than

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a spatial, bodily technical term, as found in his attempt to explain how urban planning relies on a spatial dispositif, outlined in his writings on the healthy city and the Panopticon.

Dispositif, apparatus, dispositive

It appears as if the English translation of Foucaults term dispositif has been commonly accepted as that of apparatus. This emphasizes the technical meaning of the concept of dispositif, or as Rabinow says, the concept denotes tools and devices (2003: 50). Tools and devices to Rabinow seem to mean an institutionalization of praxis, as he writes about economic management of the social, and also a device whose purpose is control and management, most notably perhaps seen in the 18th century where the politics of health was a politics of apparatus (Rabinow, 2003: 50). In an interview where Foucault is explicitly asked what he means by the concept of dispositif, it is translated as apparatus. Foucaults answer is that a dispositif is:
. . . rst, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble2 consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientic statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of apparatus [dispositif ]. The apparatus itself is a system3 of relations that can be established between these elements. Second, what Im trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of the connection4 that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thus, a particular discourse can gure at one time as the programme of an institution, and at another it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary re-interpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new eld of rationality. In short, between these elements, whether discursive or nondiscursive there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modications of functions which can also vary very widely. Third, I understand by the term apparatus [dispositif ] a sort of shall we say formation which has its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. The apparatus [dispositif ] has a dominant strategic function. (Foucault, 1980: 1945)

I have quoted Foucaults answer at length to illustrate the impossibility of reducing the concept to something like a device in an institutional matter or functional system as does Brenner (1994). A dispositif is much more. If one wants to emphasize Foucaults work on the relations between elements, a translation of dispositif to assemblage (Deleuzes agencement) could be seen as relevant. In another perspective the Danish translation installations may be the most adequate translation, because it points to the technical aspect in relation to the societal institutionalization of dispositif ensembles (Foucault, 1978). If one emphasizes discourse, yet another translation is needed. Therefore, when translators say there is no equivalent word in English and use the term apparatus, it is a reductive translation in relation to Foucaults own intention to encompass both discursive practices, relations of discursive ensembles, and the institutionalization of discourses. A disciplined body may be the effect of a working dispositif, but this cannot be reduced to a technical or apparatus

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matter; a dispositif s bodily functionality. It is more, for instance, a matter of normalization or normation (Foucault, 2007: 57). A dispositif can contain both material/technical/textual forces, installations and congurations that, in certain relations or constellations, obtain power to regulate, govern, institutionalize or empower a specic element in space. According to Rabinow, Foucault in fact underlines that the apparatus is always linked to certain coordinates of knowledge which issue from it but, to an equal degree, condition it. This is what the apparatus consists of: strategies of relations of forces supporting and supported by, types of knowledge (Rabinow, 2003: 53; Foucault, 1980). Rabinow and Rose (2003) maintain, however, that Foucault used the concept of dispositif in a similar way to the English apparatus in order to resemble a device or utilities to produce something a machinic contraption (2003: 10). The authors refer to Foucaults writing that biological traits in the politics of health in the 18th century needed to be organized through an apparatus to assure maximation of their utility, but equally their subjection. Rabinow and Rose argue that Foucault himself said that the dening aspect of apparatus was their grouping of heterogeneous elements into a common network (rseau) (p. 10), operating against the background of discursive formations (p. 11). Rabinow and Rose here tend to reduce Foucaults writing on the dispositif to be a matter of government, the conduct of conduct, while Foucault himself stresses that a dispositif is a case of the episteme (1980: 197). Imprisonment, for example, had far more effect than simply being a device, apparatus or utility for (spatial) imprisonment. According to Foucault (1980: 195) the prison dispersed a moralization dispositif helped by the fact that discursive relations exist between the discursive statement and the non-discursive (Deleuze, 2004: 49).5 It is when it is turned into knowledge-based practices that an apparatus can be turned into a social technology; a regulatory device via law, school or imprisonment. In considering the nature of connections, there seem to be arguments for considering the meaning aspects of a dispositif and considering the role and signicance of schemes of signication (norms, values, culture, etc.) and discourse of and on space. We may turn to Gilles Deleuze (1988) to open up our further understanding of the dispositif. He connects the concept of dispositif to that of power in Foucaults writing, where relations of power constitute an act upon an act. A dispositif is a discursive or non-discursive force that disperses in space (Deleuze, 1988) both through discourses (speaking, words) and through regulatory installations (Deleuzes visibilities). In Deleuzes short article What is a Dispositif ? (Deleuze, 1992),6 he writes that Foucault regards a dispositif as a force of structuring light, to distribute the visible and invisible (the prison apparatus for instance was used for seeing without being seen). In this way a dispositif is both lines of forces and lines of subjectication; that is creating processes in which, in the line of subjectication, the Self is neither knowledge nor power. It is a process of individuation (Deleuze, 1992: 161) of discipline and order. [W]e belong to social

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apparatus [read dispositifs] and act within them (p. 164) in a permanent process of becoming within history as the archive that draws what we are, before we are in a ceaseless process of becoming an individual. Deleuze concludes that an apparatus [read a dispositif ] comprises truths of enunciation, truths of light and visibility, truths of power, truths of subjectivations. Truth is the actualization of the lines which constitute an apparatus (p. 166). Truth is, for Deleuze, an enunciation that is a matter of discourses. Truth is a dispositif that is constituted by, or institutionalized as, the belief in a collective system of signication. This is not a form of technical device. It is a power of discourse, of knowledge, of truth, that has to be transformed from the archive, from science, from myths or whatever to be meaningful to people. Although Deleuze denies a raw physicalism in the concept, physicality is often the threshold of that which is visible and that which can be stated (p. 167). The prison or schools teaching the curriculum are examples of this.7 Deleuze himself claims that our presentday reality takes on the form of dispositions of overt and continuous control (p. 164). This society of control relies both on non-visible surveillance as well as on schemes of signications (norms, values, discourses, etc.). If one looks at space, as one important aspect of understanding dispositif 8 as a regulatory apparatus, space must be seen as ways of regulating and ordering acts, that is shaping relations between acting elements in space. However, to Foucault, space is not a deterministic device or technology. He prefers to talk about space as quipement,9 arrangement, in other words, space as a dispositif-dispositive. When a dispositif is turned into relations of elements, an ensemble, it is part of something relational such as urban planning using design and material objects. The apparatus here involves a spatialization of a social eld of action through the installation of materialities in social space. However, materialities also have to turn into some kind of representation in order to have effect.

The episteme, dispositif and hermeneutics

The role of the episteme is important to Foucaults whole oeuvre (Foucault, 1998a) and as such to his conceptualization of the dispositif. The episteme is, so to speak, in between words and things, the articulable and the visible, the recognized and the experienced, as a mute materiality (May, 1993: 86) of life, practice or agency. In this way the ensemble dispositif contains epistemes which, in specic constellations, bear on the archives of experience (bodily, recognized), knowledge and forms of knowledge; the un-said and the say-able. As such the episteme forms conditions of possibility (May, 2006: 44), it effects and affects. Foucault, as a Nietzschean, was interested in how the episteme circulated and made ruptures, instead of simply attempting to locate the hegemonic episteme in place or as such. His perspective of investigation was on systems of appropriation and interaction, but even more so, on the thresholds of such, because this is where one can identify the archaeology over silence (Schmidt and Kristensen, 1986: 54); that is the exclusion or concealment of what is

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madness, Otherness or forms of dangerous knowledge. To Foucault every statement is an event that neither language nor meaning can completely exhaust (Foucault, 1998a: 308) containing, as it does, both articulations of words and representations as well as of memory and meaning, which will have effect according to certain temporary and situative constellations, strategies or other forms of dependencies. Effect and affect are always relational matters. To Foucault, the archive of urban planning, like that of medicine and government, is that of the institutionalization of a series of rules which determine the appearance and disappearance of statements (1998a: 309). The archive is thus seen as a discursive formation containing a set of practices codied in prescriptions (for instance, on treatment) (p. 313) or a type of enunciation (p. 314) always building on internally consistent concepts (p. 316). A discourse formation such as the episteme is seen as a controlled system of differences and dispersions (p. 321) that are invested in institutions, techniques, collective or individual behaviour, political operations, scientic activities, literary ctions or theoretical speculations (p. 324). Every concept and act resides in a morphology of knowledge, in the system of positivities, in the internal disposition of discursive formations (p. 325); that is an episteme. On this point, Foucault makes it clear that what I call apparatus [dispositif ] is a much more general case than the episteme; or rather that the episteme is a special discursive apparatus [dispositif ] . . . (1980: 197). In this manner he indicates that there is a knowledge or discourse-ordered (episteme) relation between the word and the thing, and that the effect of the ensemble in question is the eld of its actual history (1998a: 326). That is what we should concern ourselves about. Commentators on Foucault tend to overlook that he places his archaeology of knowledge and the episteme, his discussion of discourse formations and dispositif ensembles, in a general thematic of understanding [connaissance] (1998a: 331). The dispositif is generative and has an indissoluble inter-linkage with a hermeneutic problematic. It is, however, also clear that Foucault includes more than the episteme in his understanding of dispositif ; it could also include quipement or materiality (such as architecture, walls). It is clear that Foucault links the effect and affect of dispositifs to knowledge and discourse, and thus to representation, readings and interpretation. Reading the effect or affect of a dispositif is to approach the world and life phenomenologically and hermeneutically, whereas the episteme implies an unavoidable relational aspect to praxis. In hermeneutical terms (that Foucault would not use), one could say that he is concerned with the conceptualization of the world and the wording of the world (meaning, signication, understanding).10 We are not talking here about a dispositif as a word in the singular nor with a universal meaning. It is both discourse/said and non-discursive/un-said elements, which are signicant within a social eld shaped by in-between experiences, schemes of signication, meaning in an ever-emergent context of folding spaces, practices and signications. It is important from this perspective to recognize the inevitable contingency and opacity of a dispositif. Take architecture, for example:

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If desired, architecture may be considered as a text but (owing to the multiple nature of practices with which it is connected) the knowledge it comprises is not reducible to a general epistemology of the eld. (Teyssot, 1980: 92)

Architecture thus must represent knowledge, experience, use-value or memories if it should work (be desired). It must function as a text, something known (even only intuitively). The design will be read in multiple ways, because the social eld is a eld of multiple beings or readers. The effect of architecture is related to what schemes of signication, discursive formations, practices, body-memories or interpretations it touches. As Teyssot says, the architectural space must be seen as disposed and constructed (p. 92) and disposing (Huxley, 2006). It belongs to the semantics or semiotics rather than the body, because the ensemble of elements and their effect belongs to a formation of signications. As Foucaults friend and interpreter, Paul Rabinow, says:
Our claim . . . has been that everybody interprets whether they know or not, admit it or not, and by interpretation we basically mean a concrete diagnosis of the present situation and its present problems; questions that cannot be asked in objective terms. (Rabinow, in Hjelmar and Germer, 1994: 945)

Distanciation from things doing an analysis, trying to gure out how to use a place or space, etc. takes place through interpretation (Rabinow, in Hjelmar and Germer, 1994: 97);11 a statement which Foucault accepted. Translating dispositif to disposition or dispositional here seems in line with Foucaults own perspective, and also Deleuze (1988) reading, because dispositifs are intended, that is, generative, meaning-stimulating forces which produce truth, objectivity, the normal or a certain use. Dispositifs are concrete, situational ensembles of forces of becoming. Forces in and of life, for instance, where people are trying to grasp what they are seeing when talking about things in space. As Foucault states:
we should not restrict meaning to the cognitive core that lies at the heart of a knowable object; rather we should allow it to re-establish the ux of the limit of words and things, as what is said of a thing (not its attribute or the thing in itself) and as something that happens (not its process or its state). (Foucault, 1998b: 350)

What Foucault points at here is that signication only exists for consciousness and events can only exist in time (p. 351). One has to carefully consider and respect this difference and its simultaneous force of spatial co-existence, encounters, assemblages, and connectivities. A dispositif s dispositive can then, as Foucault makes clear, be both word and things, and also everything in-between. In Foucaults work there is, according to Deleuze (1995: 85), a certain relation between forms and forces, such as relational and spatial situatedness, and the socio-bodily effects of being situated in spaces and places built intentionally. This is, as Deleuze observes (1995: 91), part of Foucaults vitalism,12 where the play of forces operates along a line of life and death, that is always folding and unfolding, tracing out the very limit of

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thought. The vitalism of life and the lines of life trace the limits of a dispositif as form and regulative force. There is, therefore, a permanent tension between the thresholds between limits and discipline/order of any kind. We have to remember that architecture has always been a political activity, which is one reason why we nd architecture saying we need a people (Deleuze, 1995: 158) in order to shape discipline and order, normativity and normalization. People are folded into the social fabric. Planned space needs people to have effect. Space can only be a texture materialities attempting to signify meaning because effect needs to be folded through forms of readings and interpretation folding into praxis. A spatial dispositif is thus more than a regulatory apparatus, a material installation or (spatial) ontology. One must argue against the common assumption that Foucault understands individualized conduct [as] to a large extent determined by the organization of a given space (Tonkiss, 2005: 135). This argument only spatializes the social and fails to maintain how important the said/discourse/meaning dispositif is within Foucaults understanding of the production of the social through space. Space does not determine; it signies, it disposes, allows more than forbids specic practices. In other words, space invites or stimulates certain actions without determining. As Foucault clearly states, as cited above, the architect has no power over me. Perhaps Foucault describes the spatial dispositif best when he responds to the question whether architecture can resolve social problems?. He says, I think it can and does produce positive effects where the liberating intention of the architect coincides with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom (Foucault, 1989: 265). The effect of space and its representations depends on its relation to a free individual, that is, of how it is read, but also its relation to performance and hence to the body.

Space and the social (body)

Foucault opens his book The Birth of the Clinic (2000: 23) by writing this book is about space, about language and about death; it is about the gaze. What is space and language here? Foucault is talking about the 18th-century visionary space and language of medicine and more precisely, the medical gaze the doctor, the chiropractor, the physiologist developing a new medicine discourse through new modes of observation of and communication with patients (Foucault, 2000) through the body, or observations and descriptions of the body. This is a very concrete space, because it is the space where the doctors speaking gaze comes into existence (p. 26) in such a way that it is a performative act where a space of disease and illness should be complemented by a surveillant gaze. This is a knowledge-power constellation established by complementing a previous knowledge space with new and improved, more rational knowledge about the body and the socio-spatiality of health and disease. Foucault (2000) denes three spatializations in 18th-century medicine (Osborne and Rose, 2004): a primary spatialization referring to a conceptualization within which discourses are understood, a secondary spatialization

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referring to perceptions of the patient, and a tertiary spatialization referring to the investigatory apparatus of illness. Osborne and Rose (2004: 21314) offer an interpretation of these spatializations for the social sciences. The primary spatialization becomes that of modelling, the conceiving of space within the space of thought, where the key idea is that all social and cultural thought presupposes a way of spatializing its objects (p. 213), for instance thinking the spatial order of life. The secondary is that of realization, that is the ways in which space is made thinkable, visions as spatialized, and space as materialized (p. 214). We might call this the space of practice and imagination. The tertiary spatialization is that of demarcation, the topographical eld and sites (p. 214). This is how space as location, borders, zones, ghettos or exclusion is thought, such as the prison and the hospital. Extended further, modelling is concerned with how urban life is thought in politics and planning, the secondary realization is the plan and its thought-representation of urban life, and the tertiary is the plans materialization in place. Architects and urbanists design the spatial forms that should ensure a certain allocation of people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations (Foucault, 1984: 253). This is a coding that, to Charles Booth, for instance, should produce a moral spatialization, an attempt to discipline and master it, to impose a kind of order upon it (Osborne and Rose, 2004: 215; see also Huxley, 2006). Foucault always regarded space, from his early writings onwards, as a place for congurations of knowledge, bodies and the shaping of human behaviour, a relation between body, gaze and discipline; all leading to powerful spatializations of specic (societal/situational/social) congurations. Urban planning builds on a will to knowledge; and the spatialization of life is end goal. Foucault indicates (1984, 2007)that medicine and planning together saw space as both rational and separating. On one hand, they employ space to implement a bio-politic, a sorting out through classications and on the other hand to separate what is normal and a-normal, the sick and the healthy, the good and the bad. In this way, urban space becomes important to the administration of city life and to a political modernizing of power (Foucault, 1980: 176). The emergent bio-medical episteme becomes an important societal dispositif of sorting out, dividing and dispersing people rationally in space through a certain coordination and institutionalization of certain schemes of signication. Such thinking about space in medical terms became a dominant way of thinking in The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century (Foucault, 1980: 16683) and the hygiene projects in cities (Hegna, 1998). Intertwining knowledge, space and the social (order, discipline) became one of urban plannings major and enduring issues. In the city this conguration becomes a sort of government (Osborne and Rose, 1998: 6). In his history of ideas Foucault (2007) nds, how urban planning or urbanism became political in the 18th century. Architecture and planning have always in a sense been political, used for political or military purposes, but it was in the 18th century that one sees the development of reections upon architecture as a function of the aims and techniques of the government of societies (Foucault, 1989: 257; 2007). The city should be ruled, governed and disciplined through the

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division and graduation of space, the zoning and diagrammatization of space. Urbanism was seen as a tool to shape order, prevent epidemics and revolution, and produce morally virtuous families. This way urbanism became more closely tied to the political way of thinking about government and governing citizens through space. That politics at least in France became interested in urbanism and architecture, was because politicians came to see the city as exemplifying government rationality (p. 260) for society as such. The city was an example of efciently organized space, both administratively and territorially. The goal was to create a system of regulation of the general conduct of individuals whereby everything should be controlled to the point of self-sustenance without the need of intervention (p. 260). For instance, governments could regulate, moralize and normalize through the design of houses (Gromark, 1987). Architecture and the spatialization of everyday life focus on the body through the materialization of the use of space. Space represents intentions about practice which favour certain land uses, manners and values. As Foucault states:
I think it is somewhat arbitrary to try to dissociate the effective practices of freedom by people, the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they nd themselves. If they are separated, they become impossible to understand. Each can only be understood through the other. (Foucault, 1984: 246)

Patrick Geddes wanted to intervene in the consciousness of citizens to reach the civic self in order to shape a dynamic open, ethical notion of the city. Geddes saw himself as an intercessor of civic forms (Osborne and Rose, 2004: 219) using space and the spatialization of everyday life. Concerning the urban, every space can be studied under a perspective of how civic order and power over the social are spatialized by dispositional, generative rationalities, such as those of hygiene, zoning, the discourse on womens domestic roles and so on (Huxley, 2006: 784).

City space and the dispositif

It has been argued that although Foucault denitely focuses on space as a major aspect of the exercise of power, he is not obsessed with buildings per se, as much as he is with cities and how they operate (Wright and Rabinow, 1982: 16). Foucault is, in other words, more concerned with space than with architecture and more precisely, I would argue, with the dispositif of space. Discussing Foucaults views of the city, commentators tend to emphasize power rather than space, claiming that Foucault looks at how power is distributed in space, in building, institutions, everyday life routines and the corresponding discursive forms (Tygstrup, 2006: 175; see also Philo, 2000). In this case, the author is probably thinking of order and discipline of functionalist spatial diagrams, geometry and zoning (Brenner, 1994). Deleuze (2004) and Osborne and Rose (1998) use Foucaults concept of the diagram as a perspective through which to understand how to govern the city through space; that is, how to manage or govern the polis. Foucault saw the Greek agora as the locus of a communicative democracy, but at the same time

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he recognized cities as places where centres of power were multiple; in which the activities, tensions, the conicts were numerous (Foucault, 1986: 82). When cities developed to be the main force in societies, they did not depend on war or (political, economical) power per se, but that cities had wealth on their side, but also administrative ability, a mask, a certain way of life . . . innovative instincts, and its activities (Foucault, 2003: 235). In other words, the power of cities was that of being the place of the economic market and prosperity, power institutions (municipal, regional, national), and a concentration of innovative forces. Osborne and Rose (1998) argue that the Greek city-state was built on an idea of pure sociability, that is a kind of association that implies no prior interests (1998: 2). Moreover, the Greek city illustrates the rst attempt to make a certain diagram of power taking the city as its form. The spatial diagram of cities should produce a certain form of conduct that was selfgoverning. Osborne and Rose term this city diagram a spatial milieu of immanence (Osborne and Rose, 1998: 1) shaped by the immanence of form and socio-spatial relations in themselves. They thus seem to indicate that concentration on the agora may overlook the urban spatialized government of the body, life and mind. Foucault stated that late in the eighteenth-century . . . it becomes a question of using the disposition of space for economical political reasons (Foucault, 1980: 148). In addition, the interrelations between norms and forms are important to Foucault. When space is seen as a form of power in the social eld of interaction, it is important to be attentive to the underlying intentions behind designed spaces. These can involve everything from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat, for instance, that the house prescribes a form of morality for the family (p. 149). One cannot ignore a perspective of pure power or of space on reading Foucault. The issue of the relations between representation and language, the visible and invisible, and meaning and interpretation, seems just as important to Foucaults writing on space and power as on the city itself (Colebrook, 1999; Deleuze, 1988). The concept of dispositif represents this thematic. When Foucault indicates the city as a (mental) symbol of discipline, ethics or morality, this could be regarded as a problematic of the representative dispositif of space. I now turn to two of Foucaults prime examples of spatial dispositifs: the pure (healthy) city and the Panopticon. Foucault writes that from the eighteenth century on, every discussion of politics as the art of government of men, necessarily includes a chapter or series of chapters on urbanism, collective facilities, on hygiene, and on private architecture (1984: 240). How to govern societies and cities became a question of how to facilitate its life, movements, ows, private life and everyday life through space and for security (Foucault, 2007: 1118). Foucault indicates that from the 18th century, urban planning politics became aware of the possibility of making an art of government by constructing a collective space of order through collective equipments such as housing-schemes, hygienic practices, and other forms of collective facilities. Foucaults study on the 18th-century idea of the pathogenic city (Foucault, 1980: 175) illustrates the interrelations between

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discourse and space. Political campaigns on securing control over urban social space through what could be termed a programme of hygiene are exemplary here. The city became, in Foucaults words, a medicalizable object (p. 175). As Foucault makes clear, the emergence of this politics of urban health and its subsequent spatial mechanisms, is not due to care for the population, but a matter of maintaining power through socio-spatial order; that is security. The city was seen as a threat to politics, because of the existence of a poor population, or proletariat, that increased tensions in cities. The regime of health illustrates this point. The city had become a dangerous environment to society and to power regimes, not only because of a concentration of poverty and tensions, risk and illness, but also to a society that needed a stable, healthy work force and population growth. There was a need for an administrative system (regulations) and a machinery of security and power (prescriptions providing regulatory spaces) that could act as a medico-administrative tool against a pathogenic city fed by the poor conditions in prisons, ships, hospitals and housing, and the spreading of diseases. The family became the prime responsible actor in developing a healthy work force, but cities also underwent a spatial purication process and a diagrammatization through health regulations on public life and living conditions. The disposition of various quarters, their humidity and exposure, the ventilation of the city as a whole, its sewage and drainage systems, the siting of abattoirs and cemeteries, the density of populations, all these are decisive factors for the mortality and morbitity of the inhabitants, and this made the city a medicalizable object (Foucault, 1980: 175). Planning and architecture became a techne and a techno-politics developed as a tool to clean, shape, order and create a healthy and wellconditioned population. As Foucault says, urban panic was characteristic of the politico-sanitary anxiety (1994: 144) and public hygiene was a rened variation of the quarantine (p. 146). The spatialization of a healthy city also meant the surveillance of city spaces and its population. The surveillant gaze was conducted by policing the city through regulations and control arrangements, but the main goal was visibility through illumination; more open and clean spaces, light in streets, aesthetic regulations, building and housing regulations, renovation, etc. The police force was thus an institution that built on the ensemble of mechanisms serving to ensure order (Foucault, 1980: 170), not only by physical force, but by regulating through the lighting of streets, classication of citizens and control of housing regulations to secure health and welfare. Classications and regulations of space and behaviour are discursive options, and these discourses of the normal were part of the policing of the social body; a tool for the preservation, upkeep, and conservation of the labour force (p. 171) primarily by way of shaping everyday life habits. Deleuze reads Foucaults writing on the Panopticon as an example of a dispositif as a mixture of the visible and the articulable (Deleuze, 1988: 38). The spatial control of cities, for instance through zoning, can be seen as a principle of the visible ordering of buildings on a prison rationale, where order rules, everyone is prescribed his place, body, illness and death, his property . . .

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(Foucault, 1977: 178) in space. Foucault sees Benthams Panopticon as an allegory for the ordered form of a society, a clean and pure community, mastered by hierarchy, vigilant gazes and documents, a stationary city dominated by authorities that incontestably have the control over all individual human bodies it is the utopia of the perfect governed city (p. 178). The Panopticon is an architectural design or quipement that shapes control and domination independent of human force, dependent on the possibility of uncontrollable visibility. This invisible gaze is a spatialized gaze, an imaginary equipment or techne of normalization, that works through its spatial dispositif; a machine that divides that of seeing from that of being seen (p. 118). This play of the visible and non-visible is powerful because, as Foucault says, it gives the thought power over thought (p. 184). As Foucault writes, the Panopticon is the formula of power through transparency, subjection through illumination (1980: 154). Discipline is open, visible, and yet diffuse. Foucault also suggests that the Panopticon gives thought power over thought, and thereby emphasizes that a prison is also an installation13 of a way of thinking or a reection on how to normalize through space. If a dispositif can be signs and material forms and a staging of human behaviour for instance the spatialization of sexuality in the house then it must operate both as an apparatus and as a form of disposition. It is an apparatus both as a physical phenomenon with intentions; which intentionality represents the institutionalization of order and discipline in societies and cities through control regulations as well as normative discourses. The dispositif is a form of disposition, because the population has to read it as a sign of some kind of message. The dispositional coding of space cannot have its expected effect without an interpretation or re-coding.

The dispositif as relational

Foucault accepts that the dispositif ensemble is a signifying ensemble belonging to the discursive domain, but it is nevertheless also functional in a nondiscursive way, when institutionalized and embodied. Buildings might be discursive, but this is not a linguistic problem for Foucault as long as the buildings conform with the plan (Foucault, 1980: 198). Does this mean that Foucault is not interested in looking at the role of collective schemes of signication (values, norms) other than as pre-given in (building) intentions? It seems to be a difcult question for Foucault, maybe because of his desire to keep his thinking concerning the subject-question free from hermeneutical and linguistic constraints. However, writing about the birth of the medical gaze, so important to modern urbanism, he refers to Nietzsche saying that language crystallizes a meaning (Foucault, 2000: 31), yet meaning depends on the difference in the way it is articulated compared to other real and possible speech acts (p. 33). In other words, what matters is the surplus or connotations of the said in particular spaces of enunciations. Any word will thus contend a signicative potential that cannot be controlled, because that potential relates to its translation or interpretation rather than to its institutional speaking.

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Space, knowledge and power will always create relations and forms of institutionalized forces. Institutions are not only governmental institutions or knowledge apparatus, but also the installation of discourses in public and onto publics, which according to Foucaults work on the clinic, are always limited by the surplus of the signier. He was interested in the growth of normalization means (Foucault, 1977: 272) and more precisely, their transformation from a norm/normativity (a discourse) to operational techniques through institutionalized disciplines. Foucaults interest was not the word and meaning in itself, but their being part of a greater ensemble of the discursive and non-discursive in space. There is no such thing as the centre of power or language, but a net of different elements walls, institutions, rules, manner of speaking (p. 272). All are working dispositifs and possible signicative elements. Some would say that the form of dispositives is discourses (Christensen and Andersen, 1999: 26), but it would be more precise to say that a dispositif is a symbolization, a bringing together illustrations of prescriptive acts (Raffnse, 1999: 66) emphasizing the relation of the said and un-said, and social schemes of signication, reading or (re)coding. Foucault emphasizes that there is nothing prior to knowledge but knowledge is a practical assemblage, a mechanism of statements and visibilities (Deleuze, 1988: 51). The translation here uses mechanism for dispositif, whereby one might miss the in-between of statements and visibilities. The recognition of a relation between a statement (word) and the visible (thing) is either bodily (thing experiences) or discursive (meaning of word). We do not have to discuss the problem of representation at this point do words/discourses represent the real? but rather we have to accept that there has to be a signicant relation between the word and the thing in order to have effect.

Concluding remarks
Foucault is certainly speaking of forms of installations of institutionalized regulative processes, processes of exclusion and inclusion, through space. An institutional installation comprises both discursive and non-discursive processes in the form of the said and the un-said, and we know from architectural theory that norms speaks from the walls in Town Halls or in houses. The main point is that ideologies and subjectivation always assume an organization or system 14 within which they operate (Deleuze, 1988: 29), and one of these dispositifs is that spatial expressions must be signs that make associations to for instance the normal, the right thing to do here and now, punishment, surveillance and the like. Space for instance, as exemplied by the prison works through the form of the visible, as opposed to the form of whatever can be articulated (p. 29). As with prisons, the spatiality of cities is based on distribution in space, ordering in time and composition in space-time (p. 71) for citizens in their everyday life, for exclusion or work. These physical modalities need dispositifs in relation to the social eld. Is a dispositif then a given system operations or a functionality, as Brenner (1994) seems to argue? Both elements of the ensemble in a spatial dispositif architecture, materialization of space, things/objects in space can be said to

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serve functionalist intentions (behavioural order and bodily discipline). But other dispositifs are relational and situational dependent, because, as Foucault says, there are always ensembles of discursive and non-discursive forces at play; contextual situated and intertwined with history, bodies, schemes of signication and so on. To paraphrase Foucault, like power, a dispositif exists only when it is put into action (Foucault, 1982: 219). A dispositif is a relational phenomenon, an ensemble producing effect, but most commentators remain vague as to how. Foucault, as mentioned above, stated that late in the 18th century dispositions of space became used for economical-political (health, production) and socio-political (discipline, order, moralism) ends. Dispositif space could not and cannot have effect without a specic constellation of the discursive and non-discursive. This constellation is shaped by such things as experiences (including the embodied) and collective schemes of signications involved, telling people about how to use space. People may not recognize spatialized normativity, disciplinarian design, or socio-political meaning of places and things, and Foucault is right to question the hermeneutic expectation of a conscious reader. But space still needs to convince the architect has no power over me and therefore it must at least represent something for the subject located in space. The dispositif consists, as Foucault says, of an ensemble of elements and of relations between these elements (architecture, diagrammatization, division of social life, a discourse of diseases and its sources, the said and un-said). Something in between space and the body-subject must be at work to make the (institutionalized) apparatus perform, and that is a discourse or collective schemes of signication of, for instance health, normalization, reason or truth. Without a meaning-representation whether as a cultural, symbolic, discursive or bodily (socialization, manners) archive the effect of space could not be deterministically or even rationally expected nor less anticipated. There have to exist schemes of signication (moral, ethic, the given, the normal, etc.) and a reading of space in relation to this to make space dispose for acting.

Notes
1. In the recently published English translation of his lectures on Security, Territory, Population, Foucault in fact talks about the kind of apparatus of which Brenner speaks: A regulatory apparatus (appareil) that prevents . . . (2007: 69). 2. Rabinows translation is here grouping (2003: 51). 3. Rabinows translation is here network (2003: 51). 4. Rabinows translation is again network (2003: 51). 5. The sentence continues: But he never says whether the non-discursive can be reduced to a statement . . .. The Danish translation says: The question about precedence is decisive: the statement has a precedence, and we will later see why. But precedence never means reduction (Deleuze, 2004: 67). 6. Here the translator prefers the term social apparatus or apparatus (1992: 159). 7. And, of course, thereby institutions function as apparatus or as a kind of technical device for practice, for instance in enforcing religious rituals or if we talk about countries/places where ssures and fractures may mean punishment or death.

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8. Here seen from: A dispositif, an assemblage, or an agencement cannot be seen as either realized by or mapped within any singular form of thought (Osborne and Rose, 1998: 49). 9. Equipment is a tool or apparatus, but only disposable for use if one knows how to use it or desires particular effects from the equipment. 10. Remembering the impossible task of a pure, logical, absolute representation (Colebrook, 1999), of which Foucault was fully aware (Foucault, 1983). 11. Or as said by Dreyfus and Rabinow: Foucault uses the language to articulate an understanding of our situation which moves us to action (1986: 114). 12. On urban vitalism, see Plger (2006). 13. Suggestion of translation of dispositif from Sren Gosvig Olesen, the translator of Foucault (1980) into Danish. 14. Deleuze uses the word dispositif here.

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John Plger is Associate Professor at ENSPAC (the Department of Environmental, Social & Spatial Change) at Roskilde University, Denmark. His work currently centres on planning and urban theory and he is nishing a project on pragmatic agonism (with Lars Engberg, Danish Building & Research Institute, Denmark) and a textbook on urban and architectural theory (with Jonny Aspen, School of Architecture, Oslo, Norway). He is also involved in a two-year funded Urban Space Research project investigating the relation between space and the social (with Helle Juul, Juul & Frost Architects, Copenhagen, Denmark). Address: Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC), Roskilde University, PO Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark. [email: plo@ruc.dk]

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