Deleuze

This paper, a triptych divided into categories of Historical, Logic, and Program, interrogates a new set of forces and processes termed ‘societies of control,’ which Deleuze puts forth as the society displacing the ‘disciplinary societies’ of the twentieth century, which, in turn, displaced the ‘societies of sovereignty’ of the eighteenth century. This displacement of disciplinary societies, the speed of which has accelerated post war, is identified as a movement from enclosed spaces and closed systems built on processes of concentration and distribution to open systems based on a control model of a network. The existing environments of enclosure are all in crisis—always in the process of reform, which serves only to keep people employed until new forces have replaced the old.

Control systems, a term borrowed from William S. Burroughs’s “The Electronic Revolution” in which he attempts build up language absent of certain falsifications that have the capacity to word-lock a civilization for a thousand years is coupled to Paul Virilio’s assertion that control is a matter of movement and circulation. This distinction between control systems and disciplinary systems is clearly seen in the differences between monetary systems: gold standard versus floating rates of exchange; between forms of production: the factory and closed spaces verses a capitalism of a higher-order production based on selling services with actual production being moved to the third-world; between products: specializing in production verses transforming and assembling products that have been purchased; and between underlying logic: concentration versus dispersive.

As disciplinary societies give way to control societies “man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” Man no longer needs to be molded or confined in space; man—his actions, his life, his means of domination is modulated within a web of “socio-technological . . . mechanisms of control.” Michael Deleuze, in a conversation with Italian philosopher Toni Negri in 1990, sees this form of control as becoming hegemonic extending even to speech and imagination and where control is no longer an exercise in confinement but in continuous control and instant communication.

I’m fascinated by his thoughts on speech, imagination, and instant communication. Isn’t this what the Internet does—provides for instant communication and what it communicates is words—basically language—basically text. Controlling text in this age isn’t the Internet but rather the protocols that define the Internet. And Kelly notes, in her blog, that the controlling apparatus is protocol, and protocol is dangerous. The relationship of text (words) and the hegemony of protocol in relationship to the dissemination of text would make, I believe, for an interesting discussion.