User:Manetta/annotations-of-deleuze-control-society

ANNOTATIONS text: Deleuze - Postscript on the Societies of Control

Historical

Foucault introduces us into the idea of a disciplinary society, describing the organisation of enclosed environments and their own laws. Deleuze notices a transition after WWII: from then we already no longer were a disciplinary society but we were ceased to be so.

We are in crisis with spaces of vast enclosure, institutions as schools, hospitals & factories are finished, and will be replaced by societies of control.

Both systems describe confronting forces of liberating & enslaving.

Logic

Spaces of enclosure are

• analogical
• numerical
• molds

For example:

(disciplinary society —> control society)

factory —> corporation

corporation = spirit

worker that doubles the production —> rivalry as form of emulation

schools —> perpetual (continuos) training

examination —> continuos control

climbing the stairs (of training) —> never finished with anything

signature for individual + states position in the mass —> code/password + information

watchwords —> passwords

individuals —> dividuals

masses —> banks

Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best: gold = numerical standard —> floating exchange, according to a set of standard currencies

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society—not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them.

19th Century capitalism is of concentration for production and for property. Now, capitalism is no longer involved in production, (which often is relegated to the third world), but of higher order production: it wants to sell services, and to buy stocks (finished products).

The family, schools + army are no longer distinct analogical spaces, but coded figures (deformable and transformable) of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. (Even art left the enclosed spaces.)

disciplinary training —> grabbing control specialisation of production —> transforming of the product

corruption = new power marketing = center / soul of corporation corporation has a soul (AND THAT IS TERRYFYING!!!)

discipline society =

• long duration
• infinite
• discontious

control society =

• short term
• continious
• without limits

Program

The idea of a control society is not about a 'barrier' but about the computer that tracks each person's position and effects its modulation.