User:Thalia de Jong/Synopsis Societies of Control

A postscript written by Gilles Deleuze on Michel Foucaults theory on 'Societies of Control'.

Our society was once a societey of vast controlled spaces, where people would push from one environment to another in the cycle of growing up and growing old. Foucault calls them disciplinary societies and describes how in the 18th and 19th century we were all brought up within a strict order of institutions. Starting with family, then school, then the military, the factory and eventually the hospital, with a possible detour along the way where one was most obivously in a disciplined environment: prison.

Todays liberal society is no longer directly controlled like that. These days, we are being steered by a more free floating "society of control". The factory is now a corporation and the fellow labourer a new colleague. A collegue that we are always competing with. And in order to do so, we have to continue improving ourselves and our skills, so that nowadays school is never out. In the "society of control", one is never finished with anything.

The shift in control is visble in all parts of our society. In justice, it becomes harder and harder to pinpoint crimes to the individual, since we are all part of an ever changing and ongoing mass. And it is extremely visible in money, that once was valued in the worth of gold. Now we have floating rates of exchange that are becoming harder and harder to follow.

The very computerized "society of control" thrives because it is able to work with abstract data, instead of tangible material. Production can be done in the third world, while the real money is made in selling and marketing the product.

It's hard to really see the way that our society is shifting, even though it has such a great impact on our lives. Control is no longer a shape that is static and unionizing like our elders once did, will probably not be durable.