Dispositif Analysis in Eastern Europe: The Outline of a Research Program

The article discusses uses of dispositif analysis inspired by Michel Foucault’s late works, in a context different from the original one. The author presents the main methodological assumptions of dispositif analysis and the factors which result in its critical and interdisciplinary potential not being fully exploited at present. Based on a literature review of dispositif analysis in post-socialist Eastern Europe, the author formulates an interdisciplinary research program aimed at adapting this approach to the study of East European power networks, taking into account both its different historical, cultural, and geopolitical context – compared to the one of West European countries – and Foucault’s conception of neoliberalism. Methodological recommendations are presented in two research areas: 1) labor in the Polish post-transformation society; and 2) reactions to pedophilia in the Polish

Florence. He writes that the leitmotiv of his analyses is "a systematic skepticism about all anthropological universals" (Florence 1988:14). Then, he enumerates three methodological principles. First, one should "avoid as much as possible the universals of anthropology (…) in order to investigate their historical constitution" (Florence 1988:15). Second, instead of ascending toward the object of knowledge, "we must descend to the study of the concrete practices through which the subject is constituted within a field of knowledge." Third, one needs to "address »practices« as the domain of analysis, and to take up the study in terms of what »we do«" (Florence 1988:15).

Dispositif Analysis: Its Sources and Development
In the perspective of the two decades which have passed since the first attempts at a crystallization and operationalization of Foucault's notion of the dispositif in empirical research (e.g., Keller 1998;Cruikshank 1999;Peeters and Charlier 1999), one can look at the dispositif approach lightly skeptically as at a kind of methodological dispositif, whose function is "that of responding to an urgent need" (Foucault 1980:195), in which discourse analysis has found itself. Although discourse analysis should be Dispositif Analysis in Eastern Europe: The Outline of a Research Program regarded, especially epistemically, as an interdisciplinary perspective, on the theoretical and methodical level its practical applications usually appear to be rather multidisciplinary, with the dominance of linguistic research tools (cf. Czyżewski et al. 2017:9-13). This is because at the turn of the century one could more and more often hear the postulate that discourse analysis should depart from just analyzing text as a product of practices and social norms toward analyzing the whole process of production of discourse as well as its material determinants and communication practices as such.
Dispositif analysis -first treated as a supplement to discourse analysis, and later as an independent method which had grown out of Foucault's theory of discourse and power -was an answer to the domination of the linguistic perspective in research on discourse (especially visible in continental Europe) and an attempt at "socializing" it by giving up on isolating discourse from the nexus of relations between legal, political, economic, educational, and cultural institutions (including religious ones) as well as those connected to the production of knowledge. This attempt was undertaken first by researchers belonging to linguistic and pragmatic traditions, who were using the achievements of these disciplines in a critical way. Soon they were joined by sociologists, political scientists, and educationalists. However, they were all still facing the main problem of post-structuralist studies of discourse: on the basis of quantitatively limited empirical (usually textual) material, which is fragmentary and characteristic only of a given discourse, one not only draws conclusions about the properties of discourse as a whole, but also frames these conclusions as theoretical categories which become a part of scientific meta-discourse and a reference point for studying other fragments of discourse.
The main methodological issue lies in the questions about, as Johannes Angermuller (2010:77-78) puts it, "how to pass from formulating problems concerning research material, characteristic for the scientific discourse or meta-discourse, to object-centered discourse? What should be the transition between the »micro« and »macro« levels of object-centered discourse, and how to reintroduce the theory of object-centered discourse into scientific meta-discourse?" The answer to this question is to make the dispositif in the particular meaning given to it by Foucault, i.e. a meta-category of studying power relations in a society. In Foucault's works, the dispositif is not precisely defined. In general, it refers to the network of strategic relations connecting different kinds of social discourses, institutions, architectural, legal, and administrative solutions, as well as scientific knowledge, social philosophy, and ethics (Foucault 1980:194). The dispositif, though it points to the complexity of the production process of discourse, serves as an initiator of "sense reduction processes" (Angermuller 2010:90) and dilutes discourse through excluding many possible meanings and interpretations or through delegitimizing them as being untrue or immoral. The dispositif's task is to explain and neutralize sudden situations which threaten the political, economic, cultural, or populational status quo by means of such a reorganization of the discursive and non-discursive order which would put an end to a crisis or limit the risk of turbulence. A non-discursive order functions owing to non-discursive practices (material artifacts, institutional procedures, routine non-verbal actions, etc.), which can be performed and valid without their discursive representation; however, they are usually accompanied by discursive practices of enunciation.
The dispositif should be understood as a mechanism of dispersed power and a tool for governing people according to both historical and contemporary forms of governing. Based on Foucault's texts, one may differentiate between three types of the dispositif of power: legal dispositif, i.e. the system of prohibitions and sanctions connected to sovereign power; disciplinary dispositif connected to disciplinary power, which forces individuals to behave according to a system of norms; and the dispositif of security, corresponding with the (neo) liberal governmentality (rationality of power), according to which individuals become both subjects and objects of power, and are supposed to discipline themselves, implementing in their lives optimal or at least average models of conducting themselves (Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, and Thaning 2011;. Dispositif analysis usually refers to the latter type, perceiving it as a tool of neoliberal power, promoting the model of a resourceful citizen, responsible for themselves and their role in society (Bührmann 2004). Actors of "governmental" social reality are not seen as autonomic producers of discourse, but as products of discursive power relations who generate discourse. One can compare them to prosumers consuming contents, practices, and artifacts in the capitalist economic and media system, and, as a result, producing other contents, practices, and artifacts (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010). Dispositif analysis assumes that the dispositif is a system that is able to be identified empirically (Bührmann and Schneider 2008:152) owing to the abductive analysis of connections between the orders of knowledge, orders of discourse, and their materializations within the broad field of social practice. The research program includes synchronic and diachronic analysis of relations between the components of the dispositif and a genealogical reflection on the sources and changes determining power relations. Dispositif analysis poses not only questions about the relationship between discourse and non-discursive levels of reality, but also one about relations between orders of knowledge and a different social genesis (Jäger 2012:113-115). To sum up, for dispositif analysis, discourse serves as a crucial empirical category. Still, as an element of a theoretical model of power relations, discourse is essential no less and no more than other elements of the apparatus.
The research style of dispositif analysis is based on two pillars: 1) reconstructing the orders of knowledge on the basis of discursive utterances, 2) observing non-discursive elements and determinants of the studied problem, such as social practices, institutional solutions, material and architectural infrastructure, and cultural symbolism. What is highlighted is studying non-discursive practices as complementary mechanisms or even as mechanisms preceding the production of discursive utterances. Reiner Keller (2005:250-252) distinguishes between 1) discursive and non-discursive practices of (re)producing discourse (customary discursive formulas or culturally determined reactions to discursive utterances, e.g. a handshake, or crossing oneself), 2) discourse-generated model practices (e.g. a doctor formulating their diagnosis according to a given schema or people sorting waste according to an administrative regulation), 3) extra-discursive practices, or customs and routines independent from discourse (e.g. eating and personal hygiene), including verbalized ones (such as occasional small talk).
The main reference point for scholars using dispositif analysis is the research program of Andrea Bührmann and Werner Schneider (2008). These authors define the dispositif as an empirically palpable mechanism for solving social problems, in which Dispositif Analysis in Eastern Europe: The Outline of a Research Program dispersed and anonymous power is expressed (Foucault 2000). For the sake of empirical research they operationalize this category as a dynamic set of relations between discursive formations (specialist, colloquial, etc.), non-discursive practices (e.g. institutional ones), symbolic and material objectivations (e.g. statues, paintings, buildings, objects of everyday use, social rituals, etc.), and ways of forming/positioning subjectivity, resulting in specific types of subjects, optimal from the perspective of the rationality of power (Bührmann and Schneider 2008:94-96).
Abduction serves here as the main logic of reasoning, which enables drawing the research conclusions. The applied form of abductive reasoning follows a post-structural premise that formulating a hypothesis constitutes a fundamental rule of intellectual consideration (Eco, Sebeok 1984). Apart from pure logical reasoning, abduction needs the observation of the external reality. It allows us to infer dispositif's characteristics however it is conceptual-

The Interdisciplinary Potential of Dispositif Analysis and Its Limitations
In 1967, Paolo Caruso asked Foucault directly in an interview: "To which discipline do you think your research belongs?" (Foucault and Caruso 1999:91).
Caruso was determined to obtain a clear declaration. However, Foucault did not give him this satisfaction: It is hard for me to classify a form of research like my own within philosophy or within the human sciences. I could define it as an analysis of the cultural facts characterising our culture. In that sense, it would be a question of something like an ethnology of the culture to which we belong. I do in fact seek to place myself outside the culture to which we belong, to analyse its formal conditions in order to make a critique of it, not in the sense of reducing its values, but in order to see how it was actually constituted. [In addition, through analysing the very conditions of our rationality, I call into question our language, my language, and analyse the way it was suddenly able to emerge]. (p. 91) Taking Foucault's words at face value, one could call his strategy trans-and meta-disciplinarity. It is trans-disciplinarity, because his analysis is intended to transgress disciplinary ways of understanding power and go beyond culturally grounded practices of producing scientific truth. It is meta-disciplinarity, because its purpose is the study of the conditions of those possibilities that underlie the facts of culture which are the main subject of humanistic and sociological reflection. The object and tool of such research is social language, the language of the existing social analysis, and the researcher's own language. Foucault does not distance himself from the methodology of a philosopher, historian, historian of ideas, linguist, sociologist, or psychoanalyst. Although he is at times closer to multi-disciplinarity (putting together approaches stemming from different disciplines) than to interdisciplinarity, his works are grounded in many critical strands of humanities and social sciences.
I propose looking at dispositif analysis inspired by Foucault's words as at an interdisciplinary approach par excellence and, at the same time, a trans-, meta-, and multi-disciplinary one. By interdisciplinarity, I understand here a thoughtful encounter of different disciplinary perspectives. The encounter is based on the attempts to critically analyze, synthesize, and harmonize relations between the disciplines and work out a coordinated and coherent research approach. The trans-disciplinary approach refers to going beyond the existing frames of disciplines in order to offer a revision of well-known concepts. Meta-disciplinarity means that researchers maintain a critical awareness of the boundaries of the disciplines they refer to -and problematize -these limitations already in their studies' outline.
In contrast, multi-disciplinarity relates to heterogeneous research devices without transcending the Dispositif Analysis in Eastern Europe: The Outline of a Research Program boundaries of disciplines (see, e.g., Choi and Pak 2006:359;Schmidt 2008;Alvargonzález 2011:387-389).
Interdisciplinarity can serve as an umbrella term for all these aspects; however, the differences between them should be kept.
While discussing the interdisciplinary potential of dispositif analysis, one should distinguish between its epistemic and theoretical-methodical dimensions. Epistemically, dispositif analysis is interdisciplinary, because its object of interest is defined in a dialogue of different disciplinary ontologies. Simultaneously, the theoretical-methodical dimension of the interdisciplinary potential is The methodological and technical difficulties which limit the interdisciplinary character of dispositif analysis include at least three issues. The first of these is connected to the patterns of conceptualization and operationalization of the Foucauldian notions. In Germany, the most popular reference point is the above-mentioned approach developed by Bührmann and Schneider (2008), in which using the notion of the dispositif means adopting a research perspective in which non-discursive practices are not autonomic but are a result of the work of discourse and orders of knowledge which are its foundation. This path is followed e.g. by Brita Hoffarth (2013) and Nadine Rose (2013), who treat dispositif analysis as an opportunity to ground discourse in material reality and to demonstrate the interdependence of discursive and non-discursive practices, with the former one playing a superordinate role.
In turn, Norbert Ricken (2015) Marek Czyżewski (2012), referring to the example of the dispositif of the "society of knowledge," writes that it consists of two pairs of elements: the first one being scientific discourses and institutions, and the second -discourses within business and organizational practices and institutions in the field of practice (businesses, government branches, local government institutions, social assistance, and psychotherapy). In this approach, the dispositif also includes disciplines such as psychology, social care, education, and major parts of sociology. Therefore, different types of discourse are conceptualized as the key components of the dispositif.
The second limitation in making dispositif analysis more interdisciplinary stems from the practices of constructing the corpus of empirical materials. Despite declaring that the researchers' objects of interest are both discursive and non-discursive practices, the former take precedence, whereas knowledge about the latter is usually only derived from the analyzed discourse. For example, Imke Niediek (2010)

Post-Socialist Eastern Europe as an Area of Research
Whether researchers of the dispositif are open to interdisciplinary tools and the triangulation of methods or not, they tacitly assume that the conception of the dispositif can correspond with the studied power relations regardless of the local context in which they function. Can, however, the dispositif belong to a universal meta-language of power analytics, and can dispositif analysis be used in the same way regardless of the physical and symbolic localization of the fragment of social reality it is critically applied to? These questions should be posed in the case of specific, local applications of dispositif analysis. The case discussed below refers to empirical analyses of power relations in those East European countries which for many decades remained within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, or even constituted a part of it, and today are democratic republics with free market economies as well as they are members of the EU 2 . It is a case deserving critical reflection for at least two reasons: because of the dynamics, unique in Europe, of changes in the forms of power in these societies, determined by the conditions at the end of the socialist planned economy and the period of transformation at the turn of the 1990s, and because of the singular dynamics of 2 Post-socialist countries also include states which came into existence after the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. They have not been taken into account here, because this region was relatively independent from the Soviet Union in comparison to Eastern Europe, and the Balkans' passage to the post-socialist stage has been marked with the trauma of a civil war. This is why not all remarks concerning the historical and political context of carrying out dispositif analysis in Eastern Europe formulated in this article refer adequately to the countries of former Yugoslavia. Of course, dispositif analysis has been practiced by researchers of this region (e.g., Pezelj 2015; Mraović 2018). There are also dispositif analyses referring to the former Soviet Republics which have introduced a democratic system but are not part of the EU, such as Georgia (Ditrych 2011). applying the Foucauldian approach to analyses of changes in forms of power in this region.
Interest in this methodological perspective appeared in Eastern Europe approximately ten years after its first uses in Germany and the Anglosphere.
It would, however, be difficult to call dispositif analysis a popular approach among qualitative researchers from Eastern Europe, or even those analyzing this region. This limited interest probably stems partly from the fact that, in its presently dom-

The Program of 'East European' Dispositif Analysis
The following research program of dispositif analysis carried out in the context of post-socialist forms of governing society refers very loosely and modestly to the conceptions of the research programs by Imre Lakatos (1968;. This program is intended to serve the researcher as a heuristic Such a confrontation consists in uncovering the historical sources of discourse, reminding one of the contingency and a lack of objective necessity for the occurrence of particular discursive forms, and in de-constructing the material surroundings of the discourse, i.e. practices, artifacts, and institutional procedures which accompany it and whose role is to naturalize meanings produced in the discourse.

Example 2. Pedophilia in the Catholic Church in Poland
Although this second case is limited to a particular field, it remains closely linked to a phenomenon of juridical and symbolic power (pastoral power).