#control societies

Many young people strangely boast of being 'motivated'; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of the serpent are even more complex than the burrows of the molehill.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.

Control societies will no longer pass through places of confinement. Even the schools. We should closely watch the themes that develop over the next forty or fifty years. They will explain how wonderful it would be to pursue both school and a profession. It would be interesting to see what the identity of schools and professions will become with constant training, which is our future. It will no longer entail gathering children in a place of confinement.

It is true we are entering a society that could be called a control society. [...] Disciplinary society was defined—Foucault's analyses have remained famous, and rightly so—by the establishment of areas of confinement: prisons, schools, workshops, hospitals. Disciplinary societies needed them. His analysis gave rise to ambiguous interpretations for some readers because they thought it was his final word. Obviously not. Foucault never believed it and clearly said that disciplinary societies were not eternal. He clearly thought that we were entering a new type of society.

The ultimate coup of control society is not so much the continuous influence of the border crossing or the passport control, not so much data mining or facial recognition algorithms, but that it has eviscerated history, not by banning dissent, but by accelerating the opportunities and channels for critical thought to infinity and therefore making it impossible to think historically in the first place. Thus the central challenge within control society will be not simply to resist the various new nefarious control apparatuses, but to rescue history from its own consummation.

…if class locates dividuals rather than individuals, it’s no surprise that the way people think about their experience of class is often conflicted. What I would call vectoral culture encourages everyone to imagine that they are entrepreneurs of the self, playing the stakes of their own animal spirits in the great casino of life. […] The thing to aspire to own is a brand, starting with the branded self and branching out from there.

Recall that the French contrôle carries stresses in meaning that are slightly different from the English control. Contrôle means control as in the power to influence people and things, but it also refers to the actual administration of control via particular monitoring apparatuses such as train turnstiles, border crossings and check points. The notion, in English, of having to pass through 'passport control' gets at the deeper meaning of the word. So when Deleuze talks about les sociétés de contrôle he means those kinds of societies, or alternately those localised places within the social totality, where mobility is fostered inside certain strictures of motion, where openings appear rather than disappear, where subjects (or for that matter objects) are liberated so long as they adhere to a variety of prescribed comportments.

One of the most influential aspects of the 'Postscript' [...] is how it asserts so trenchantly that things are not getting any better. Computers are a curse not a panacea. Planetary neoliberalism is a boondoggle not a deliverance. The snake is even worse than the mole. For critics working in the shadow of the dot-com boom, such offerings from Deleuze furnished a welcome dose of fuel needed to combat the naive utopian babble of the California ideology.