9- Postcript on the Societies of Control

In “Postcript on the Societies of Control” Gilles Deleuze (1992) recapture some concepts developed by Michel Focault about the disciplinary societies to reach the notion of Societies of Control. From eighteenth to twentieth century society was embedded in “environments of enclosure” (3) organized to discipline people’s bodies and minds. Schools, factories, prisons, and hospitals are some of the closed environments which an individual would pass throughout his life according to Foucault. However, Deleuze (1992) argues that after changes brought by Napoleon’s government and after World War II the model of disciplinary society was no longer beneficial to the power in charge and its replacement was made by what he called society of control (4).   

Deleuze says that in the disciplinary societies the social institutions had their rules and independent variables. These places of enclosure have functioned as molds while in the society of control these institutions work with modulation (4). This modulation mode is a control system working with numerical variations and “doesn’t necessarily binary” (4). This way of thinking the relationships within the society can be associated with the work from Bernard Stiegler about grammatization. In his essay “Memory,” Stiegler (2010, 70) posits grammatization as the process whereby the molds shaping our lives become discrete elements. For Stiegler (2010), after the industrial revolution, the grammatization surpassed the language to encompass gestures, affects, and behaviors. Maybe we could say that the development of the apparatus to “grammatize” (or modulate) all forms of knowledge is what we encounter currently regarding society control. 

Later in the text, Deleuze mentions that the factory was replaced by corporation and the corporation is “a spirit, a gas” (4). This description of corporation is probably indicating the invisible connections and associations existing within the social and what he and Guattarri defined as assemblage in their book A Thousands Plateaus (1980). By assemblage, the authors (1980) considered the fluidity and the exchangeability through social entities (313). This relationship between social actors and corporations can be explored also by the “agency-versus-structure” debate in the Janet Benett article “The agency of assemblages.” In Benett (2005) work, structures are described as powerful entities that work with and against human purposes. For her, human and nonhuman have always performed together at some level. However, Benett highlight that the intrinsic relationship established between human and machines has become harder to ignore after the developments occurred in the last decade.

Having those changes in mind, Deleuze (1992) postulated a socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control looking to traditional institutions and attempting to find the changes in their functionalities, what he called the “crisis of the institutions” (6). In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze’s final concerns are about whether people will adapt themselves to the new rules of the emerging control of society or will resist to them.   People should “…discover what they’re being made to serve” (6).

Cited Works:

Bennett, J. (2005) “The Agency of Assemblages.” Vibrant Matters, A Political Ecology of Things. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010. 20-38.

Deleuze, G.(1992) “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, from OCTOBER59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.3-7.

Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. R. Beardsworth, G. Collins, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.