Further thoughts on 'Societies of Control'

George responds to the discussion in February's Reading Club with some further thoughts on Deleuze's notion of "societies of control"

Subject to ever-greater technological tracking and surveillance while we pass through the city (at least prior to Coronavirus) frictionlessly with our smartphones, the idea of a society of constant control and monitoring seems to correspond to our experience of life today. We are subject to incredible, and interrupted, levels of data capture, with that data held by tech giants and shared at every stage with state intelligence services globally. But what is a “society of control” and what does it mean for us to live in one?

Deleuze influentially distinguishes in his 1992 essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ between two forms of society: the disciplinary society that is passing away and a new, emerging form that he characterises as societies of control. The disciplinary society is that of discrete, enclosed spaces of control such as prisons, hospitals, factories, schools or the family. Each of these environments has its own set of rules, and citizens in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries pass between these closed and ordered spaces in the different parts of their lives. In response these different disciplinary contexts themselves reconstituted those individuals, primarily through the two characteristic individualising processes of the disciplinary society: the individual’s unique and identifying signature (used above all to give consent and enter into contractual relations), and the administrative number that placed that individual in a specific position within a larger mass.

The model of the disciplinary society, as analysed in depth by Foucault, itself replaced an earlier model of society in Deleuze’s account – the society of sovereignty that here corresponds to the European absolutist monarchies prior to the French Revolution in particular. Accordingly, it will also be succeeded by a newer model, and it is at this point of transition between the older disciplinary society and the coming society of control that Deleuze places capitalism in the early 1990s. Perhaps the most evocative parts of the essay are those in which Deleuze sketches out the contours of the new society. At its base, the logic of control is not one of discrete and articulated spaces with corresponding sets of rules; it is instead one of continuity, with a series of interconnected systems all applying a much more pervasive and inescapable logic of monitoring, tracking, and following. Relatedly, if punishment in older societies is a clear (and more or less spectacular) expression of power, from putting heads on pikes and public executions to locking those convicted of crimes out of sight or mind, then punishment in a society of control is instead a Kafkaesque situation of always being either apparently acquitted or having a punishment limitlessly postponed. In this context, the specific locus of authority (and moment of punishment) is much harder to identify, and individuals are always implicated somehow, always ready (and almost willing) to accept the punishments they feel they deserve. The signature and administrative number of the disciplinary society then come to be replaced by the password: in the society of control the ‘numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information’, as Deleuze puts it.

Deleuze’s account of power in a society of control loosely fits with a commonsensical understanding of contemporary “surveillance capitalism”. In this understanding, control is exercised above all through technology centred around a cluster of cognitive processes, communication, and information; individuals, addicted to information flows, often freely consent to a variety of technological processes that allow the non-stop tracking of movement and all kinds of behaviour. Many of the standard criticisms of post-structuralist accounts of power are applicable here, not least that it is not clear who holds control in the decentralised and unstructured societies of control. It is also far from apparent what options individuals have in a society of control, beyond either an embrace as “freedom” of the ideals of flexibility and mobility pitched to us as such today, or a rejection of emancipation as impossible and a turn to a watered-down and futile “resistance” to the technological modes of control set against us today. We can also note that the analysis of various social spaces in the disciplinary mode as “prisons” is still widespread (to the extent that a quick search can bring up contemporary accounts of playgrounds as a form of incarceration of children), and so the movement from the disciplinary to the control society is not absolute.

Nevertheless, there remains an intuitive appeal to the model of a “society of control” as the passing from a structured disciplinary society to one in which power is harder to identify. This is because Deleuze’s account speaks to (or, arguably, rationalizes) a real political change, namely the decreasing feeling of mass control over society through any exercise of popular sovereignty. In other words, its intuitive pull is explained by the absence of any feeling of power due to the hollowing out of any mechanisms of popular sovereignty. Without representation (either political parties or even reliable patronage relationships) or any organisation of the economic interests of the working majorities, there really is a material distance between us and power. The erosion of popular sovereignty, already well developed by time Deleuze wrote his essay, leads to the construction of a society of “control” as a “bad thing”, but it is of course the promise of any democratic society that we are able collectively to exercise control over political, social, and economic processes. The society of control, as Deleuze constructs it, refers to a real condition in which the state’s technological monitoring capacities have increased at the same time that its ability to solve citizens’ problems has fallen away. Beyond Deleuze’s conclusion that there is ‘no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons’ we can pose a much deeper challenge to those who feel themselves living in alienated societies of control: how do we move from control of us as a generalized, agentless condition to control by us as a distinctively modern political condition?