Gilles Deleuze - Postscript on the Societies of Control

1. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; theyreach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces ofenclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, eachhaving 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 thehospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's theprison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine ofRossellini'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 begreater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was thetransience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal andfunctions 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, andNapoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But intheir turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were graduallyinstituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what wealready 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 supposedlynecessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces,prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of theirexpiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping peopleemployed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societiesof control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the nameBurroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as ourimmediate 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 closedsystem. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, themolecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the newprocess. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them thatliberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospitalas environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at firstexpress new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that areequal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look fornew weapons.

2. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes areindependent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a commonlanguage for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different controlmechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the languageof which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinctcastings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuouslychange from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from pointto point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internalforces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowestpossible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced thefactory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar withthe system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of eachsalary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, andhighly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it'sbecause they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constitutedindividuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each elementwithin the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporationconstantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellentmotivational 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 totempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetualtraining tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Whichis 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, fromthe barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished withanything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable statescoexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In TheTrial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of socialformation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of thedisciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of thesocieties 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 theother. 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 becauseat the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those overwhom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of thatbody. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--theflock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itselflay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longereither a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other handdisciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view ofintegration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codesthat mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with themass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data,markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the twosocieties best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold asnumerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated accordingto a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal ofthe space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed fromone animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, butalso in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was adiscontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in acontinuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines aredetermining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them andusing them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys,clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involvingenergy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies ofcontrol operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jammingand whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolutionmust be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiarmutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism ofconcentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space ofenclosure, 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, theschool). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes bycolonization, 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 ofhigher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finishedproducts: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services butwhat it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for theproduct, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and thefactory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are nolonger 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 onlystockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuitsof the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer bydisciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, bytransformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption therebygains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We aretaught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. Theoperation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed ofour masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous andwithout limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is nolonger man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant theextreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous forconfinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with theexplosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

3. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an openenvironment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, aswith an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Félix Guattari hasimagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one'sneighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but thecard could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts isnot the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects auniversal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, wouldhave to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for thedisciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that oldermethods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but withthe necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In theprison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and theuse 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 perpetualtraining, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the"corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine "withoutdoctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no wayattests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body thecode of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handlingmoney, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are verysmall examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by thecrisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a newsystem of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of theunions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within thespaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new formsof resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of thecoming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangelyboast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up tothem to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not withoutdifficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that theburrows of a molehill.