Section by section paraphrase by Lois Shawver
of
Postscript on the Societies of Control
Gilles Deleuze
taken from:
Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of
Control", from _OCTOBER_ 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.
3-7. (This essay first appeared in L'Autre journal, no. 1 (May 1990),
click here to go
to the original document
1. Historical
In the disciplinary societies that Foucault
situated in the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries, the individual was
continuously located within one closed environment or another, each having
its own laws. First there was the family, then the school, then the
barracks, the factory, the hospital, and even the prison, each with their
own rules and order.
But, the disciplinary society was not the first society. Before
that we had the societies of sovereignty. In that culture,
the goal rule who was to die rather than, as in the disciplinary society,
how
people should live. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the
societiety of soverity, however, gave way to the disciplinary society.
It was a transition fostered by the changes wroght by Napoleon.
And, now, another transition is taking
place. This transition is not complete, but it began shortly after
WWII. In this new society, which we can call the society of control,
the closed environments (i.e., schools, factories) are given way to different
forms of power. These control societies control the population with
new technologies, molecular engineering, genetic manipulation, and so forth.
This shift to a society of control is not inherently
better or worse than the prior societies. All three kinds of society
(disciplinary, sovereignty, and control) have both liberating and enslaving
forces that confront one another. Nevertheless, the forces that fight
the enslaving forces are facing new means of control and need to discover
new weapons.
2. Logic
Let's look at the meaning of these changes. In
the disciplinary society, the enclosures (schools, prisons, and so forth)
are independent of each other. We might think of each of them as
presenting a kind of psychological mold that shapes the mind and behavior
of the people within them. There were controls in terms of wages
and discpline, but the molds of the enclosures were largely successful
in maintaining order. In a society of control, on the other hand,
the vestiges of these discplinary molds are accompanied by technological
controls that deform the original castings and monitor and shape the state
of things in an ongoing kind of way.
For example, think of the the factory as a mold and
wages as a control. In recent times the priority of the factory has
been replaced by the priority of the the corporation, which is much more
abstract and mythical. The corporation brings much more subtle methods
of control, implemeting new methods of wage control (the merit bonus, for
exmaple) that require continuous monitoring of wage related variables.
In the era of the discplinary society, the factory was more stable and
the laboring force formed a single cohesive body that could be mobilized
for mass resistance. By shifting to the corporation as a mold individuals
are set against each other, in competition, and are divided by such strategies
as paying people according to the corporate judgment of their merit.
Whereas in the past, people psyches were cast in the relatively stable
enclosure of the school education, now there is perpetual training within
the corporation especially since ongoing education is required for continued
employment.
In the disciplinary, one left one enclosure for another,
going from school, to the factory, to the barracks and so forth.
In the control society, one never completely leaves a particular enclosure,
or the different enclosues collaborate to create more control.
Because of this shift from a disciplinary to a control
society, we are in a kind of crisis today. In the former society
each individual had a signature
that represented that individual's
place within the cultural mass. In the new society, on the other
hand, the signature of the individual, her place in the masses, is no longer
important. What is important her access to information, her password.
The importance of the password over the signature
is enhanced by shifts in our system of of exchange. In the disciplinary
society mnted money was defineable. Today's floating rates of exchange
can be modulated by computers, markets can be made by altering the concentration
of property at a distance. Goods are no longer required to generate
money. Services and shuffling of stocks produces capital and modulates
capital.
And, just as the factory has given way to the corporation,
so the family has given way to the school and the army, and these new enclosures
are also yielding to new methods of control. They all bring new techniques
for continously managing the shifts of forces to produce markets and hence
capital. new kinds of corruption are possible which give us an impudent
new breed of masters.
3. Program
We can only imagine that the control mechanisms of today's
society will increase. It is not just science fiction that we might
imagine ourselves with an electronic collar. A computer could be
made to track our every position and effect a universal modulation of our
behavior. But, we are just at the beginning of this new form of control.
It is only just now disrupting the weapons against enslavement of the past.
But, in today society, unions, for example, will have difficulties serving
as a weapon against enslavement for they are tied to the whole history
of discipline with stable and closed spaces. It is not clear that
they will be able adapt themselves.
Neverthless, paradoxically, many young people boast
of being motivated by these new changes. They request apprenticeships
and permanent training -- and thus the new era is launched.
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