Out of control (part one: intensive history)
A close reading of Gilles Deleuze’s "Postscript on Societies of Control" shows us a way of approaching the increasingly chaotic times.
Tl;dr: disciplinary societies did not give way to societies of control in a linear, step-by-step process. The history of their transformation is a history of acceleration, of intensification, which, like the acceleration of rhythm at a certain point creating a continuous tone, changed the form of the system of organization, liquefying the spaces that the previous one had delineated. For this reason, since the transition between systems and their clear division did not occur, we also cannot speak of a change in the goals that guided them, because in doing so we would confuse the tools with their purpose. Every system discussed in Deleuze's essay aims to administer subjectivity — specifically, to construct an image of reality by means of the entire space inherent in how we think.
Our image of the world arises in the process of spatial metabolism
In this essay, I would like to take a closer look at the way Deleuze constructs a description of the transit between two modes of organizing life in Postscript on the Societies of Control — and consider what lies ahead. Problematizing the vision of a linear transition from a disciplinary society to a society of control (and arguing that we should not speak of the former in the past tense, since it has not disappeared), I attempt to draw attention once again to the material constitution of the political subject — an ever-present abstraction that moves in a complex symbolic sphere. The methods the two social formations use, although different, have much in common and affect something Deleuze did not explicitly state in his text: the imaginary reality of the subjects created in the spaces that they belong to.
I use the close reading method, staying close to the text and trying not to interpret in the manner of Deleuzean exegetes such as Ian Buchanan (that is, not at all — Buchanan has said nothing creative throughout his career). On the contrary, I intend to approach the text in a subversive way, coming to conclusions that the author himself might not agree with, but which nevertheless have their roots in what I read. In the style of Deleuze, I want to create a monstrous child in whom, despite everything, everyone will recognize the father — if only by its long, twisted fingernails. I intend to go through the short text sentence by sentence and build a new picture of an old issue, starting with how Deleuze described Foucault's concept of disciplinary societies (praising it on the one hand and criticizing it on the other, as we'll see — though I'm not sure he knew that) and ending with a new concept — societies beyond control. I argue that we have entered an era in which we cannot control our own methods of control. The whole process resembles a philosophical divination, which I enjoy incredibly, because it forces me to simultaneously seek original interpretations and stick strictly to what the author I am currently abusing actually said.
I use the English translation of the Postscript, but I have also consulted the original French version in order to best capture the sense of the statements and to stay, in the spirit of my chosen method, as close to the original as possible, even if I intend to approach it in a heretical way and destroy a good part of what the author has built. French does not belong to the languages I speak fluently, which I believe provides an advantage in this case — unfamiliarity with words and sentence constructions forces me to look carefully at their many meanings and to put together into a coherent whole the context the sentence gives to the words. Thanks to the bilingual approach, I can look at the text as a double outsider, simultaneously breaking through to its depths and thus completely demolishing the dichotomy of inside and outside.
The very first sentences of Deleuze's essay show that we no longer deal with a simple presentation of the history of the concept on which the author wants to build his considerations. Under the cloak of praise for Foucault, we can see a subtle critique, emphasizing the movement between spaces, rather than their enclosed nature itself. "The individual never ceases passing from one enclosed environment to the other," Deleuze writes in the first paragraph, outlining the core of what I consider an opposition to Foucault's concept and historical analysis. He outlines a picture of the space in which disciplinary societies emerge: tattered, segregated, ordered. However, one detail deserves attention — despite the construction of the world as a sum of closed spaces, the focus of the sentence falls on the individual moving between them; never ceasing to pass, leaving and entering, moving from enclosure to enclosure. Its movement constitutes the sense of both closing and opening. Closed spaces, then, do not constitute the essence of discipline, as it might seem: the movement that results from them comprises it; a movement organized in the same way that dog poop lying on the ground organizes the flow of a crowd as people change their route to avoid stepping in it. The presence of an object influences their ideas about the available possibilities.
Disciplinary societies, although historically preceding control societies, appear to us in light of the sentence quoted above as something remarkably similar — the older sibling of what would come later. The object of the power flowing from their action, is freedom, not enslavement. They manage freedom — the flow of bodies from place to place, the building up of opportunities to leave confinement, and the threats of moving to another, stricter disciplinary area. Control, then, takes place using negative management — exerting influence over those subject to it by means of what it does not control; by creating conditions of freedom that lead straight into pre-prepared snares bearing strict rules of conduct.
Closed spaces function merely as characteristic elements of the landscape. An individual who never stops moving between them — fluid, fluctuating — sees them as future and past. Their present is defined by memories of transition and anticipation of transition, involving both pleasure and fear; depending on the closures before them. Prisons operate on the realization that there lies a world of freedom outside their walls, unconstrained by the strict rules that govern them. Regardless of whether exiting them falls within the realm of possibility, an individual chained in disciplinary space becomes themselves only in the moment of breaking out of its order - and continually leaving its arrangement behind, moving on to the next, physically or in thought. It belongs to the task of such enclosures, whether we speak of school, work, or prison, to draw the boundaries of external space and to sketch the contours of the individual's imaginative ideas about what they leave behind and where they can go, remaining in constant motion from place to place within the entire conglomerate of "vast enclosures" that make up the externalized image of their imaginative possibilities.
The spatial organization of disciplinary societies also includes a linear definition of movement between enclosures: "the school ('you are no longer in your family'), then the barracks ('you are no longer at school') (...)". The identity of a person who hits one of the designated stops on their journey comes about based on where they came from — where they find themselves no longer and where they will end up later when they leave the walls of the current enclosure. We can see how, in each case, the arrangement of space reveals the real purpose: to adjust imaginations; to plant a mental virus (to expand Burroughs’ idea of control a bit) that, capturing the members of bodies and thoughts, will point a person in the “right” direction without depriving them of autonomy. Disciplinary societies take the same interest in our insides as the control societies that will follow. Taking away and giving autonomy to an individual in constant motion shapes the horizon of the world they perceive. We deal, then, with a spatial manipulation of the image of how things could change.
"It's the prison that serves as the analogical model". The prison, as a space, restricts freedom of movement, consisting of smaller enclosed, heavily coded spaces. However, if we consider the elements of how Deleuze presented Foucault's concept, the restriction on the freedom of bodies has further consequences: the imaginary exterior, the dream of freedom, constitutes the basic element holding people in check. The control of imaginations — but not their realization! — also manifests itself in strictly guarding that no one gets out ahead of time. Regaining freedom occurs under the rules that the confinement space dictates. Before that, dreams of freedom hold the prisoner with an invisible hand. Not everyone can get out. Many also return, unable to find themselves years later in a world that refuses to bend its boundaries to help them get back on their feet in an environment to which they have become strangers. The spatial organization of ideas of possibility influences the future outside the prison and makes it increasingly murky. As a model for other confined spaces, the prison shows us a mechanism for shaping minds — not through brainwashing, but through simple control of the environment, which, it turns out, plays an incredibly important role in how we think about the world. It's not enough to change perceptions when their material structures remain intact, because — quite literally — we think with space.
Deleuze further presents the factory as an example of society's ideal disciplinary project. Among its features, and also its goals, lies the concentration and dispersion in space-time of a productive force that outgrows its constituent elements - going beyond the simple production of objects and acquiring a less defined, elusive spiritual force. The factory, as the second model of disciplinary society, constructs not only what comes out of it, but also the entire reality in which it resides and which it shares with other similar places. Its organization contributes to a certain abstraction: an image of the world operating like a microcosm of the factory floor. By means of its internal, spatial organization, the factory transcends itself as individuals in motion spread its logic throughout their world. They arrange it according to what they experience in space: this is why Deleuze mentioned the family alongside the factory and the prison as an example of a disciplinary institution and territory.
The model elements of a disciplinary society also influence time — hence why I mentioned space-time above. The reality that emerges from their tightly organized walls extends like an alien entity, taking over and redefining what preceded it and setting the boundaries of what comes after it. The effect of its actions, Deleuze writes, is to become greater than the sum of its parts: to work where disciplinary structures have never entered, completely shattering the concept of linear time. Influencing the past — constructing history — and creating the future, they define the present as eternal and inescapable, bound by the immutable laws of spatial organization. Immutable until the situation begins to demand a different approach. But then the same mechanism will begin to operate, projecting the present, resulting from the material conditions of the system, onto other temporal planes. Thus, the space-time of any system of social organization becomes like a Moebius strip — it loses its beginning and end in the continuous act of producing social perceptions of the world. Did the hunter-gatherers "work"? I don't know, but one can't think about what they used to do without using the categories that the current arrangement of material reality offers us.
Thus, we balance all the time on the edge of concrete, material arrangements and abstract images by means of which we orient ourselves in the world. The design of such enclosures — disciplinary spaces — creates a certain fiction that, once formed, continuously operates in the world. We cannot combat it with another fiction, because any new image of the world, created alone, no matter how beautiful and inviting, does not have its roots in materiality - not in the same way that the fiction that shapes our everyday life, focused in the centers that produce it and dispersed throughout the world, works, influencing people by the very organization of their movements, activities and sensory space. The dominant fiction does not exist as a proposition — you won't find a marketplace of ideas anywhere! — but as an inevitable consequence of the mode of being in the world imposed on us. To put it in Heideggerian terms, as an understanding creature, Dasein comes to know itself and the world on the basis of the milieu in which it finds itself. The transition from one mode of organization to another rests, therefore, on a change in the articulation of subjectivity in an ethical-aesthetic-productive way: by means of concrete actions in spaces with a concrete purpose.
Spreading within space-time and becoming one of the bases of the experienced world, the disciplinary model aimed, according to Deleuze, at a quite different goal from that of the previous organization — sovereign power, focusing on governance through taxation and the administration of death. Although the description says that a succession occurred between the two formations, it seems to ignore the content of the first paragraph, confusing the method of administration with its goal — the material cause with the product of its metabolism. The specific ways of allocating resources (human, machine, natural, etc.) sought to outline horizons, to delimit bodies and their spaces.
Thus, we can see that the way Deleuze constructed the initial image of disciplinary societies tells us a lot about how the spaces that constitute them actually work. We can also see that their purposes remain negative, managing movement between enclosures; demarcating the boundaries of a living space so that dwelling in it gives the impression of choice. In light of this interpretation, we must reject the idea of a linear transition between one type of society and another, leaning instead toward superposition, dispersion or metabolic transformation. Regardless of which metaphor we want to use, we must remember that no part of this process perishes. Institutions, reaching the end of their useful life, transform themselves into other creations, more relevant to the reality that has eluded their previous forms as their products begin to gain a life of their own.
What role does crisis play in all this? Deleuze, writing about the movement toward a new kind of social organization, said that the threat of decay affects all interiors — from the family to the factory. But why are institutions in crisis? What caused the need to capture something that had begun to escape the control of disciplinary, spatial arrangements? Deleuze doesn't give many specific examples, but we can infer from what he wrote that in addition to the general chaos World War II left behind, he also has in mind the effects of productive forces that outgrew the previous arrangement that made them possible. New configurations of matter, along with new possibilities, brought new threats to the capitalist order, forcing the search for new areas of expansion. Just as the period of primitive accumulation involved incredible violence, making it possible to change the image of the world as seen by the newly subjugated proletariat, so the accumulation of the information age sought to establish paths that would not threaten the circulation of capital and at the same time break out of the constraints of disciplinary space. Expansion first and foremost.
As examples of the changes standing at the threshold of neoliberalism, Deleuze mentions, leaving without interpretation, "extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulation," among others. Further, he also mentions the example of the transformation of hospitals: "the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements." Here again we find a reference, though not explicitly stated and not fully realized, to a common goal uniting the various modes of organization: to adapt the world to what has come out of it, in such a way as to capture and neutralize it, creating subjectivities based on the assumption of the naturalness of the existing state of affairs. Increasing atomization and the development of semiocapitalism have meant that the closed spaces that once enabled the emergence of a post-industrial, information economy have failed to keep up with what they have produced. Here the societies of control — an attempt to materially capture the imaginations that dislodge humans from the logic of disciplinary spaces — step in.
But how, in the search for expansion, can one break out of the mechanisms of closed systems? Deleuze, in presenting his vision of history as a matter of fact, skips the step of providing a plausible cause-and-effect sequence, which, counter-intuitively, benefits us, because where the author has not taken care of accuracy, the best part of interpretation begins. We know that Deleuze does not see history as a linear process. One can draw this conclusion from the way he rephrases Foucault's vision. Thus, we need to point out how matter came to be folded (I use here another concept that our author dealt with elsewhere) in a concrete way that opens up a gamut of new possibilities, both threatening order and fostering its transformation into something less graspable than a collection of coded spaces.
So how, in the simplest way, can one break out of the systems-enclosures that surround us? By creating open, mobile systems, allowing the surface of movement to become fluid, making the individual not remain in a constant state between one enclosure and another. One becomes an element creating mobile spaces around oneself. An entity in a constant state of transit can function as its own flexible and ritual-free space. A space itself that remains on the move and allows for the acceleration of a productive metabolism that can now occur anywhere and anytime, pouring into previously inaccessible spaces. Developing the potential of the disciplinary milieu is thus about managing fluidity. We carry the movement with us, changing ourselves into walking enclosures — something Gilles Chatelet has called "neurocattle". Free, but bound by flow.
The evolution of disciplinary society does not involve, as we see, a dramatic, qualitative change that came from outside. No crisis, by challenging the previously existing methods of organizing productive life, summoned or triggered it. This transition did not rest on a decision to change approaches because the previous one no longer worked. The crisis hinged on something else: the mastery and use of acceleration; the reduction of resistance. Miniaturization, atomization, informatization, individualization, privatization — all these constituted the natural conclusion of the spatial administration of identity in a concrete way. With the newly acquired mobility of disciplinary space, man — a solitary individual — controls it himself. He manages himself, sets his own goals. Of course, the new freedom remains only an illusion, just as Chatelet's concept quoted above tells us. The cattle whose pens we build inside our minds, by means of the imperative of self-control, self-discipline, productivity and, at the same time, hedonism and unlimited consumption, still lives at the mercy of capitalism.
The described changes associated with entering a new era hold a mirror up to people caught up in an increasingly daring neoliberalism. Fast, fluid space has made us simultaneously boats and sailors subject to a raging storm. Deleuze skimps on details about what the crisis looks like because the crisis did not come from outside. The crisis did not involve the destruction of any structures of dominant power. It represented their development. The shift to the formation of a control society represents the conclusion of post-war utilitarian optimization of governance, which only on the surface resembles greater freedom. In reality, we simply run faster, becoming a space between the previous closures. The society described in Deleuze's text represents an acceleration of a process that has been happening all along — increasingly on the verge of stumbling. The transition between one society and the other marks a quantitative change, producing the illusion of an entirely new quality.
"There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons" can stand for the motto of both revolutionaries and the people responsible for subordinating reality to systems of control. As soon as something appears in the overall production of the experienced world that threatens the accelerating, optimized process, new weapons must emerge — to protect against the subjectivities shaped in an unsupervised, rushing, changing space. The situation inside it looks hopeless — with no place to wait for a better future, because, knowing how the history of organizational systems has progressed, the future will not come; only the present will accelerate. It remains up to us to materially change the trajectory of the history happening before our eyes based on the acceleration of previous structures. Remaining in this kind of momentum, we will only reach the new world by losing hope and derailing the train.
Recommended reading
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble — I talk about compost all the time and I suspect that it influences the way I conceptualize other things. You can find composting at the core of my reading of Deleuze.
Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles, Globes and Foams — the whole trilogy, will help you understand how space-bound we really are.
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space — a kind of grandfather book to Sloterdijk’s trilogy. I wish Deleuze quoted him more, but I guess I can take Deleuze’s ideas in this direction with this series of essays. I aim to create deleuzean bachelardianism.
Thomas Nail, Marx in Motion — I took the idea for the method of reading from Nail. I mean, I’ve known it before, but really thought about using it after reading this book, because I loved the detailed readings of small texts he does. The whole thing felt like divination.
Negative Maps, Letters to Jack #3.5 — if you want to understand the spatial dimension of ideas about how to rule and organize, look no further. Maty elaborates beautifully on the deleuzo-guattarian examples of chess and go (another kind of chess), while adding some more contemporary examples of the Sonic/Mario game dichotomy. Cool stuff.
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics — things go fast. Sometimes going fast governs them. Enter dromocracy. Also, Deleuze references Virilio in passing in his essay, so you know he’s important.