There is an immense similarity between Flusser's use of apparatus and that of Michel Foucault's, which denotes strategic constellations of tangible and intangible tools, institutions, and discourses that are inscribed into politics of knowledge and power.Apparatus/Dispositif, according to Foucault,is “a set of strategies of the relations of supporting, and supported by certain types of knowledge."14 Foucault uses the term apparatus in order to move beyond discourses to include material, behavioral, and institutional elements for describing formations of structures of knowledge. The term frequently appears in relation to his studies on governmentality from the mid-1970s.
Foucault uses the prison as an example of an apparatus by emphasizing its optic attributes that are configured based on Bentham's Panopticon architecture. The prison in this view is simultaneously a technical medium designed for seeing without being seen and consequently a tool for subjectification by internalization of surveillance. As Agamben succinctly describes, the apparatus “is first of all a machine that produces subjectifications, and only as such it is also a machine of governance" (Agamben 2009: 20). As a result, the term apparatus provides a very useful vantage point for studying mechanization of mind withanintegrated focus on its technical, industrial mediations such as the division of cognitive labor as a disciplinary formation and its constitutive socioeconomic conditions.
Consequently, the analysis of the evolution of the industrial cognitive labor apparatus from its imaginary Enlightenment conceptual prototype to large-scale computable social systems in postindustrial capitalism needs to take into account the neoliberal grounds of its emergence.
The transfer of the functionary role of the cognitive laborapparatus from the privileged labor of the Enlightened subject to unqualified crowds of the neoliberal cognitive capitalism is primarily enabled by the digital networks of the 21st century. This transfer further extends the effect of the foreclosure of the semiosis for the cognitive worker by microdivision of cognitive tasks and its distribution across cultural, temporal, and geographical zones.
Return of the Crowds
Crowdsourcing is a hybrid concept that merges the neoliberal outsourcing paradigm with the crowds on the digital networks. In the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, Jeff Howe evangelized the concept to its technologically savvy neoliberal audience as follows:
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InterrogatingModes of Digital Labor