A Hyperized Story/Societies of control

In his 1990 essay "Postscript of the Societies of Control" Deleuze argues that the disciplinary societies, described by Foucault, have increasingly shifted toward what he terms societies of control.

Since the start of the twentieth century, and in a process which accelerated after World War 2, "disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted."

In conceptualizing this shift, Deleuze warns that we should not ask for what is a better or worse type of society, as in both of them "liberating and enslaving forces confront one another." Rather, he urges us to look for new manners in which societies of control can be subverted, to "look for new weapons."

In disciplinary societies, there were enclosed institutions, such as the family, the school, the factory, which have now entered into crisis. On the other hand, the control mechanisms in a society of control do not follow enclosures, but rather these mechanisms are modulated across different areas, "like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other."

Deleuze proposes that the corporation has replaced the factory, and he analyses or sketches the outline of control societies by using the corporation as its paradigm.