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"Postscript on the Societies of Control"
Gilles Deleuze
1. Historical
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the
twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The
individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another,
each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are
no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no
longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital;
possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment.
It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some
laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim,
"I thought I was seeing convicts."
Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these
environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to
concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a
productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be
greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized
as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies
of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite
different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death
rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and
Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to
the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the
benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated
after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer
were, what we had ceased to be.
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of
enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an
"interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly,
professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing
supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries,
hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these
institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration
periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of
keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking
at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the
process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the
name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault
recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually
analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the
old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is
no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the
molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are
slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the
toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and
enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in 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. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new
weapons.
2. Logic
The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the
individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to
start from zero, and although a common language for all these places
exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control
mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable
geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily
mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls
are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously
change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will
transmute from point to point.
This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that
contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest
possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages;
but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and
the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already
familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply
to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual
metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic
group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so
successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great
precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the
double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and
the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly
presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent
motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs
through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of
"salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national
education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual
training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to
replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school
over to the corporation.
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. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at
the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the
most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the
disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless
postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation)
are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is
hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to
enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature
that designates the individual, and the number or administrative
numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This
is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these
two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses
together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a
body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault
saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the
priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn
and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the
societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer
either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password,
while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords
(as much from the point of view of integration as from that of
resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark
access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing
with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals,"
and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps
it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best,
since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as
numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange,
modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies.
The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the
serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one
animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under
which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with
others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but
the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.
Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.
Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not
that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms
capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of
sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the
recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving
energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of
sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type,
computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy
or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even
more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or
familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century
capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for
property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the
capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also,
progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the
worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered
sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by
lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism
is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third
World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil
production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer
buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the
finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services
but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for
production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or
marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to
the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no
longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an
owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and
transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders.
Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open
circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing
control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange
rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product
more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new
power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the
corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the
most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the
instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters.
Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous
and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and
discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true
that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of
three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for
confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers
but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.
3. Program
The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any
element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in
a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not
necessarily one of science fiction. F lix Guattari has imagined a city
where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's
neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a
given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given
day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the
computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects
a universal modulation.
The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at
their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is
already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of
enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older
methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to
the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are
at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to
find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and
the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at
home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms
of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the
corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of
the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital
system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that
singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way
attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual
or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be
controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money,
profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form.
These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better
understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is
to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of
domination. One of the most important questions will concern the
ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle
against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be
able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance
against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines
of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? 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 a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.
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