Aisthesis and Dispositif: The Pulse and Its Analogues

Abstract

This chapter discusses Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of aisthesis, which he develops through an examination of the executing apparatus in Franz Kafka’s short story ‘In the Penal Colony’. Aisthesis provides scope for defining the ‘felt’ spectatorship of the pulse, which can be differentiated from the aesthetic spectatorship concerned with the rhythms of the apparatus. By examining the viewing conditions established for William Castle’s The Tingler (1959), which saw cinema seats wired with electric devices that would ‘tingle’ their occupants, this chapter finds that what this apparatus ‘exposes’ is the aisthetic sensations of the spectator. It considers how the ‘machine-like’ prescription of the apparatus breaks into the energetic work of the dispositif of cinema at the site of the spectator, and more broadly, where the dispositif stands as a social apparatus in what is, for both Kafka’s and Castle’s apparatus, a disciplinary act.