#deletia

Postscript on the Societies of Control — Gilles Deleuze

“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

In this classic short essay, radical French philosopher Gilles Deleuze looks to move beyond Michel Foucault’s historical understanding of “disciplinary societies”, where power is exercised within a series of discrete institutions (the factory, the school, the home), towards the concept of “societies of control”, in which power is exercised through mobile “ultrarapid forms of free-floating control” at every point in the social fabric. In many ways Deleuze’s essay parallels the ideas of the Italian radical left around the concept of the “social factory”, providing an intersection between post-structuralist philosophy and autonomist Marxism. In any case, this essay offers an uncanny and prescient glimpse into the logic of the “societies of control” that have taken hold in the twenty-first century.

Against Students — Sara Ahmed

“...it is in the bodies of students that...failure is located. Students are not transmitting the right message or are evidence that we have failed to transmit the right message. Students have become an error message, a beep, beep, that is announcing the failure of a whole system.”

What does it mean to be “against students”?

In this essay, self-proclaimed feminist killjoy Sara Ahmed examines the “moral panic about moral panics” taking place within the university. Contrasting the supposed oppression of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” against the real neoliberal impoverishment of education, Ahmed shows how the university has already positioned itself against students and encourages us to pay attention to the “error message” of student critiques of university life.

Guy Hocquenghem — We Can’t All Die in Bed

“Homosexuality is first of all, and will perhaps for a short while continue to be, a category of criminality. Personally, I prefer this state of affairs to its probable transformation into a psychiatric category of deviance. The libidinal link between the criminal and homosexual figures ignores the rational concepts of law, the divisions of individual responsibilities and the distribution of roles between victims and murderers. A homosexual murder is a whole, complete unto itself.”

In this largely overlooked essay, the “father” of queer theory decries with eerie prescience the “respectablization” of homosexuality, and its complete integration into the circuits of bourgeois life. Written in response to the murder of Pier Pasolini at the hands of a “swindler”, Hocquenghem juxtaposes the brutal death of the openly gay Pasolini with the peaceful passing of the fascist Franco to make an impassioned case for holding together the “ancient, and very strong bond between the homosexual and his murderer” against the normalizing pressures of legality and respectability. As an early indictment of the push for gay assimilation from one of queer theory’s most radical voices, We Can’t All Die in Bed is essential reading for all current and aspiring criminal queers.

Penny Goring

“because i’m an artist people think i should be good at arranging flowers, furniture, funerals, i am not, i can’t even choose my own shoes.”