A material-discursive configuration that enacts phenomena by setting the conditions under which differences matter, boundaries are drawn, and properties become intelligible.
In agential realism, apparatus refers to patterned practices and arrangements that do not simply measure a pre-given world but actively participate in its becoming. Building from Bohr and elaborated by Barad, an apparatus is the concrete set of relations through which agential cuts are enacted—local resolutions that delineate “subject/object,” “signal/noise,” and “property/observer.” Apparatuses are not only instruments but also concepts, categories, bodies, spaces, temporalities, protocols, and habits; they are historically sedimented, iteratively reconfigured, and always ethical-political because their cuts distribute visibility, accountability, and value.
This notion resonates with Haraway’s situated worlding and with Deleuze & Guattari’s attention to how concepts and practices co-compose fields of possibility, as well as with new materialist emphases (Bennett) on the vibrancy of matter in shaping events. In this view, changing the apparatus changes the phenomenon. Research and pedagogy are thus world-making practices: they produce the very realities they inquire into, and the design of the apparatus is inseparable from questions of justice, responsibility, and response-ability.
Apparatus foregrounds method as ethico-onto-epistemology. Postqualitative inquiry treats design choices—recruitment criteria, prompts, interview protocols, analytic software, coding schemas, spatial arrangements, timelines, and theoretical lenses—as constitutive of the phenomena they elicit. Analysis becomes tracing how the apparatus configures what can be sensed and said, which artifacts stabilize, whose experiences become legible, and what exclusions are enacted. Accountability shifts from representing an object to specifying and justifying the cuts a study makes, including how those cuts redistribute agency and consequence across human and nonhuman participants.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, the pedagogical apparatus includes assignment designs, rubrics, platform affordances, integrity policies, access constraints, model parameters, classroom norms, feedback workflows, and instructor dispositions. Together, these elements enact what counts as authorship, creativity, learning, and evidence. Adjusting any element—inviting LLM brainstorming, requiring prompt-chains in process logs, citing model contributions, or restructuring formative feedback—reconfigures the cut between “student text,” “AI output,” and “instructional guidance.” Apparatus analysis clarifies how affective climates of risk, curiosity, or suspicion take hold; how originality is made legible; and how artifacts like version histories, chat transcripts, and annotation layers anchor specific accountabilities. Treating pedagogy as apparatus supports intentional redesigns that redistribute agency, open new learning pathways, and make evaluative criteria materially explicit.