Anne Lamb : Deleuze +

In Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, he outlines the different techniques used by the Disciplinary Society and the Society of Control. The first distinction made is the way in which people move from one era of their live to another. In the Disciplinary Society, people are routinely pushed from one isolated room to another. This goes on for the duration of their lives. For example, they move from the controlled family unit to the school unit, and from school they move into the factory, or to the prison: “The individual never ceased passing from one closed environment to another”(3). Each of these environments has a mode in which they regulate and control individuals from within. This is how the society is structured, and how the individuals are controlled. Alternatively, in the later Society of Control, the transition from one isolated area of control to another is more subtle. The control is a “free floating control”, and you are not controlled by the constraints of one room, like the classroom, or the family unit, but are controlled by all aspects of your life in a larger, looming authority like the corporation. The corporation is a structure that fills the area like a gas, and all are caught in it like a cloud. Further distinctions are made in regard to methods of “training”. In the Disciplinary Society, the individual received his training from his work in the room, like the factory of the classroom. In the Society of Control, the individual is perpetually trained by the free floating cloud of structure which has a constant influence on the individual. It seems that the most notable distinction is the view of the individual in comparison to the masses with in both structures. In the Disciplinary Society, there is a distinction between the mass and the individual, and the controlling mass is what shapes the individual. In the Society of Control, there is no distinction between the mass or the individual, because they are all seemingly working in the same cloud of restrictions. They thing that would separate the controlling masses from the masses of individuals would be money. “The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man on control in undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Every where surfing has already replaced the older sport”(6). The mechanics of this new Society of Control has a profound effect on the evolution of capitalism. “It’s a capitalism of a higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials, and no longer sells finished products: it buys finished products, or assembled parts. What it wants to sells is services, and what it wants to buy is stocks”. In this way, we see the authority of the factory being taken by the authority of the corporation, and in the Society of Control, the corporation has more power over the masses than the factory ever did. At this point in the text, we start to get predictions of how this Society of Control will work with capitalism. Capitalism will be backed up by the function of this society, and the effect will be large portions of the masses being trapped with in their debt, instead of being trapped with in a prison, or with in the factory: “Control will not only have to deal with erosion of (economic) frontiers, but with the explosion within shandy towns or ghettos”(7). As the Society of Control increases the overall debt, it will also challenge the ability of union to protect their workers. As young people have a desire to learn, they will sacrifice the need to be paid, and the protection offered by union in exchange or opportunity. All of these changes will be dramatised by the advancing modes of technology, machines, and in particular, computers and surveillance.