User:Tancre/RW&RM/Postscript on the Societies of Control
Postscript on the societies of control
- Author: Gilles Deleuze
- Publisher and date: "L'autre journal", no.1 , May 1990.
Abstract
In this essay Deleuze wants to show how our societies, after the 2ww, is in a period of transition to a new typology of societies that he calls 'societies of control'. Starting from a short excursus on the hisotry of the past 'disciplinary societies', from a theory developed by Foucault, he defines the logic of this new system in comparison with the past foucauldian paradigm. There is no possibility of escape
Synopsis
Analysing the thoughts of Foucault on the disciplinary societies and the way in which they shape all the inhabitated spaces (family, school, ..) as spaces of enclosure with their own laws, Deleuze states how all those environments, after the second world war, have fallen in crysis.
The administration in charge announced necessary reforms to manage those dying places, but this has been only a way to keep people occupied while a new kind of societies si where installing: the societies of control. Here, is not needed to ask which is the thoughest or most tolerable regime, because there is always a logic of freedom as well as a mechanism of control, that can be seen not only in the big scale of the produzioni farmaceutiche, formazioni nucleari e manipolazioni genetiche but also in the small scale of ordinary life. The only way to don't fell into despair is to search new weapons.
The internments (or spaces of enclosure) are indipendent variables, molds where every time you have to start from zero, and the only common language is analogical. The controlled are inseparable variation in a variable, numerical, system, and the controls are a modulation, continuously self-deforming.
In the factories of the past societies, the intarnal forces wanted the highest possible production and lowest possible wages, and for the benefit of the employer the individual workers is identified in a whole body, that oppose syndacates as a form of resistance.
In societies of control, the factories are substituted with corporations, and with the modulation of each salary, where the constant meta-stability becomes challanges and contests. While television's games are so successful for their being entrepreneurial and the revalry become sane emulation, induviduals are opposed one against each other without the capability of a mass resistance and in the same way schools becomes permanent formation (reflecting the metastability of a same modulation). Kafka, in the Trial, was in the middle of this transformation where the apparent acquittal, between two internments, becomes illimitated deferral, continuous variation.