The term dispositif has been widely adapted in relation to assemblage and system as part of aesthetic, political, and social theories of power. It has also been used to refer to devices and processes of internal and external image production. In film and media studies, dispositif applies to objects that function both as material devices, and within discursive contexts.

Shifting away from its original emphasis on power/knowledge, we consider three epistemological polarities generated by the concept of dispositif. How can new approaches to dispositives be brought to bear on particular objects, e.g. devices of mediation, or ritual objects, involving their appropriation into self-reflective discourses of introspection?

1) Inner/outer. Mediation devices, ubiquitous in 19th-century culture, straddle the fields of science, technology, entertainment, and literature. Because these make viewers see the invisible or the impossible, they become endlessly serviceable as tropes for mental processes. In similar fashion, ritual objects from non-Western cultures are appropriated as self-reflective and introspective tropes, intersecting ethnography with autobiography, as in Michel Leiris's writings.

2) Archaic/modern. Modern technologies consistently overlay ancient mental formations. The convergence of archaic topoi with new technologies has attracted active media and literary scholarship in recent decades. The philosophical debates around artifacts collected during the colonial era express foundational anxieties about the persistence of magical thinking within cultures of modernity and secular modes of thinking.

3) Singularity/universality. Optical technologies tend to hybridize as well as move between science and entertainment. As Kember and Plunkett (2025) note, they borrow from each other in a “dense and tangled mixed media landscape.” In an analogous manner, severing ritual objects from their original context and repositioning them in a new relational system of viewing, experiencing, and representation, leads to a shift away from the culturally singular towards a universalizing form of symbolism.

We invite presenters to focus on one specific object or device, analyzing both its material uses and discursive properties, pairing objects with texts. Possible themes include:

• Optical mediation devices (magic lanterns, kaleidoscopes, microscopes, telescopes...) as both scientific instruments, toys, and tropes for introspective practices     
• Power figures set in new networks of viewing practices (artist’s collections, anthropological museum, photography) and discursive contexts (introspection, self-construction)
• The convergence and “intermedial reciprocity” (Groth 2012) between viewing and reading facilitated by new forms of mediated viewing
• Medium and media: the convergence of spiritual practices (and/or magical thinking in general) and new media technologies.