Periodizing With Control
by Seb Franklin
This
essay is guided by the following question: what kinds of critical
possibilities become legible if one reads Gilles Deleuze’s
conceptualization of control societies both as a work of periodization
theory and as a theory of periodization? In other words, how might one
read control in methodological terms? One of the motivations for this
inquiry is Fredric Jameson’s observation that periodizing hypotheses
“tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical
period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable
chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks” (1991, 3-4).
Jameson’s solution to this problem is to conceive of the “cultural
dominant” that replaces the concept of style within aesthetic analysis
and that thus allows for “the presence and coexistence of a range of
different, yet subordinate, features” (1991, 4). The features that
Deleuze attributes to control suggest the possibility that this
analytical rubric can be extended to the analysis of “dominant” features
that occur not in spheres conventionally described in aesthetic (or
stylistic) terms, such as architecture, literature, and visual art, but
in material- discursive arrangements like governmentality, technology,
and economics. A close reading of Deleuze’s theorization of control
reveals those three threads to be knotted together in ways that both
invite and are irreducible to historical breaks. Because of this,
Deleuze’s writing on control societies points towards modes of
historical analysis that can account for complex assemblages of
epistemic abstractions and the concrete situations that undergird and
(for worse and for better) exceed them.
It is certainly the case
that periodizing gestures appear to ground the essays “Having an Idea in
Cinema” (1998; first delivered as a lecture at La Fémis in 1987) and
“Postscript on Control Societies,” as well the conversation with Antonio
Negri published as “Control and Becoming” (1995; first published in
1990). [1] Across these texts Deleuze names and sketches the contours of
a sociopolitical and economic logic that diverges in important ways
from the earlier regimes of sovereignty and discipline theorized by
Michel Foucault. In the earliest of what one might call the control
texts, ostensibly a commentary on the cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and
Danièle Huillet, Deleuze itemizes the signature components of
disciplinary societies—“the accumulation of structures of confinement”
(prisons, hospitals, workshops, and schools)—in order to demarcate a
period in which “we” were “entering into societies of control that are
defined very differently” (1998, 17). These newer types of societies are
signaled by a specific mode of social management: the age of control
comes about when “those who look after our interests do not need or will
no longer need structures of confinement,” with the result that the
exemplary forms of social regulation begin to “spread out” (1998,
17-18).
So, the dissolution of institutional spaces and the
concomitant ‘spreading out’ of disciplinary power marks the first
characteristic of control societies and, apparently, establishes their
difference from arrangements centered on ‘classical’ sovereignty or
disciplinary power. The exemplary diagram here is the highway system, in
which “people can drive infinitely and ‘freely’ without being at all
confined yet while still being perfectly controlled” (1998, 18). In
“Control and Becoming” Deleuze once again speaks of the passage through
sovereignty and discipline and the breakdown of the latter’s sites of
confinement, but he adds a second valence in the form of a discussion of
technology that is only hinted at in the earlier piece’s allusions to
information and communication. In this conversation Deleuze again
appears bound to the notion of the historical break: he suggests that
sovereign societies correspond to “simple mechanical machines,”
disciplinary societies to “thermodynamic machines,” and control
societies to “cybernetic machines and computers” (1995a, 175).
These
two intertwined narratives—of distributed governmentality and
technologies of computation—represent the two main vectors through which
the concept of control has shaped subsequent critical writing. For
example, one might read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of
empire (2000) as emphasizing the former, and Alexander R. Galloway’s
Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004) as
privileging the latter, although in truth each addresses both technology
and power in some ratio. Equally, one can identify commonalities
between the lineaments of control societies and a still-growing body of
periodizing concepts, both celebratory and critical, that do not mention
Deleuze’s concept but that define a similar set of historical movements
in more universal terms: the information age; digital culture; the
network society; post-industrial society; the age of big data; and so
on, and so on, and so on.
So many ways to dream a ‘pure’ economy
of services and informatic exchanges. But what do such imaginaries
occlude? Does ‘real subsumption’ really describe the full, evenly
distributed inclusion and valorization of all social activity? Or does
it describe the complex of material conditions, conceptual operations,
and imaginaries that organize social life around abstract principles for
the efficient extraction of relative surplus while remaining
structurally premised on the regulatory function of surplus populations
and, increasingly, the second-order extraction of residual value from
these populations? Can one really disaggregate the general and
generalizing notion of “free floating,” decentralized, and
computer-enabled control societies from such imaginaries, even if
Deleuze’s intent is ostensibly critical if not revolutionary? Based on
the general tendency with which the Deleuzian concept of control has
been deployed in critical writing, the answer must be no, as Wendy Hui
Kyong Chun suggests when she writes that the notion of control risks
sustaining the very discursive formation that it sets out to critique
(2006, 9). Across the control texts, though, it is possible to identify a
more complex system of periodization, one that is less concerned with
linear (albeit staggered and layered) progression than with the
multiplication of different, often competing systems of historical
knowledge that make the absolute novelty and specificity of control
societies impossible to sustain even as it is defined and deployed as an
explanatory periodization theory. This movement, which starts to appear
with a couple of passing remarks in “Control and Becoming” and that
comes more fully into view across the six pages of the “Postscript,”
suggests that Deleuze is concerned not only with extending Foucault’s
periodizing project but also complicating the kind of historical
thinking that produces the various totalizing concepts listed above.
Could it be that the final sketch of control, the “Postscript on Control
Societies,” encrypts the kind of multithreaded historical method that
is necessary for engaging with the epistemic demands of the period it
ostensibly defines? Might this, rather than the specific characteristics
that Deleuze attributes to control, represent the real import of his
intervention? The remainder of this essay examines the intersections of
the three strands touched upon in this introductory discussion—power,
technology, and economy—in order to foreground these
historical-methodological possibilities.
1. Power
As
cleanly as the discipline-control sequence appears to function, it
becomes clear across the control texts that the relationship between the
two terms cannot be reduced to one of direct succession or linear
extension. In “Having an idea in Cinema,” for example, Deleuze points
out “there are all kinds of things left over from disciplinary
societies, and this for years on end” (1998, 17). In the conversation
with Negri he further complicates the relationship between the two
periodizing concepts by stating that Foucault was “one of the first to
say that we’re moving away from disciplinary societies, we’ve already
left them behind” (1995a, 174). And in the “Postscript” he writes that
“Control is the name proposed by Burroughs for this new monster, and
Foucault sees it fast approaching” (1995b, 178). So control is: a
discrete period full of leftovers from a previous one; an episteme that
is at once being approached and that has already been fully entered; and
a period that is yet to be entered but that will be soon. There is
nothing like a consensus across these three temporal relations. Each,
however, makes it clear that the relationship between the periodizing
terms cannot be understood in terms of a break. This opens up a series
of questions that have methodological, as well as historical
implications. What is the temporal relationship between discipline and
control? What role does sovereignty play in the two ‘later’ periods?
What drives the Globally uneven movement between disciplinarity and
control, and how can the latter function as a periodizing device if it
cannot be detached from the former? The only possible answer is that the
logic of control does not invent new relations, but mobilizes and
reorients techniques and technologies whose origins predate it. Such
techniques and technologies must thus be understood as recursive; they
both originate in and belong to a specific regime and perform essential
functions within subsequent regimes. Because of this, historically
attentive analyses of control cannot remain in the twentieth century,
but must set about gathering the threads that, in the appropriate
combination and at the correct level of development, constitute
apparatuses of power that are distinctive in character even as they
retain objects and practices that first become legible in earlier
moments. One way of doing this is by considering the specific phenomena
Deleuze implicates when he suggests that Foucault already identified the
roots of control in disciplinary societies.
In the “Postscript”
Deleuze identifies two particular tendencies in the systems of
management unearthed by Foucault: the first centers on the production of
the individual subject through techniques of discipline, and the second
addresses the biopolitical formatting of a given society as a mass
delineated by statistical models and confined by thresholds or filters.
Where disciplines saw “no incompatibility at all” between masses and
individuals, so that signatures could stand in for the latter while
lists or registers accounted for the individual’s place in a mass,
control reformulates masses as “samples, data, markets, or banks” and
recasts individuals as “dividuals” (1995b, 180). The resonance with
Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics and biopower is marked: what are
samples and data if not computational technologies for the production of
the “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures” that
Foucault positions as emblematic of biopower (Foucault 2003, 246)? What
are markets and banks if not electronically augmented examples of the
“subtle, rational mechanisms” of biopolitics that include “insurance,
individual and collective savings, safety measures, and so on” (Foucault
2003, 246)? What is the dividual if not the subject mapped in terms of
generalized, discrete predicates (race, class, gender, sexuality,
ability, age), none of which can metonymically stand in for the ‘whole’
person? How, in other words, does control differ from biopower?
The
proximity between Deleuze’s theorization of the cybernetic movement
from masses to data and Foucault’s conceptualization of mechanisms that
seek “homeostasis” (249) is registered in the odd way in which Hardt and
Negri introduce the two in Empire: they write that “Foucault’s work
allows us to recognize a historical, epochal passage in social forms
from disciplinary society to societies of control.” (2000, 22-23), Only
in the footnote to this claim do they reveal that this epochal passage
is “not articulated explicitly by Foucault but remains implicit in his
work,” an observation that is only guided (rather than prefigured) by
“the excellent commentaries of Gilles Deleuze” (2000, 419n1). Within
Foucault’s oeuvre The Birth of Biopolitics (first delivered in lecture
form in 1978 and 1979; English translation 2008) might be the book in
which a genealogy of control is most explicitly articulated, although it
is notable that this text focuses on the imaginaries of political
economists rather than those of governments. “Society Must be Defended”
(delivered in lecture form in 1975 and 1976; English translation 2003)
and volume I of The History of Sexuality (1976; English translation
1978), both of which center on techniques of governmentality, disclose
connections between discipline, biopower, and control that make theories
of linear succession unworkable.
So, the identification between
biopower and control appears so overt that Hardt and Negri more or less
conflate the two and are able to attribute the definition of the latter
to latent content in Foucault’s writings. They then make the claim that
“[i]n the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control, a
new paradigm of power is realized which is defined by the technologies
that recognize society as the realm of biopower” (Hardt and Negri 2000,
24). So control societies come about when the ratio of biopower to
discipline shifts in favor of the latter. What, then, is revealed about
the historical specificity of control societies when one recognizes that
Foucault locates the emergence of the techniques of biopower, in
concert with those of discipline, in the eighteenth century? For this is
the claim that grounds Foucault’s introduction to the concept of
biopower in “Society Must be Defended,” where he states that “the two
sets of mechanisms—one disciplinary and one regulatory [biopolitical]”
are “not mutually exclusive, and can be articulated with each other”
(2003, 250). This is restated in volume I of The History of Sexuality,
in which Foucault writes that power over life evolves in “two basic
forms” from the seventeenth century onwards (1978, 139). These two forms
again correspond to the regimes of discipline and biopower. While the
second of these appears “somewhat later” than the first, it is clear
that Foucault does not theorize the two as discrete, successive
developments. Nor are they theorized as “antithetical” (Foucault 1978,
139). Rather, they form “two poles of development linked together by a
whole intermediary cluster of relations” (1978, 139). This diagram—two
poles linked by intermediary clusters—suggests that control emerges not
from a waning of disciplinary power, but rather through a shift in the
articulations of discipline and biopower that is much more complex than a
simple passage through which a given society becomes increasingly
intelligible as graspable through the terms of the latter. Equally,
although the former might appear to be organized around inclusion and
exclusion and the latter around integration, thinking the two as
articulated logics emphasizes a more complex relationship: biopower is
organized around thresholds that render and occlude populations, while
disciplinary techniques both regulate the education, productivity, and
health of ‘normal’ individuals (above the threshold) and manage the
bodies that fall below the line separating the normal from the abnormal,
or that which should be made to live from that which can be left to
die.
Once so-called disciplinary societies are understood to be
organized around both the ‘pure’ individualizing function of
disciplinary institutions and the massifying, averaging, and sorting
functions of statistical modeling and management, the historical
movement from the eighteenth, and nineteenth century articulations of
discipline and biopower to the phenomena Deleuze associates with control
must be understood in terms of shifts in scale and conceptual emphasis.
Furthermore, these shifts can be connected to the function of
particular technologies, which not only facilitate specific practices of
capture, representation, and management but also generate and modify
the dominant conceptual bases around which social formations are
imagined and normalized. Consider the following proposition, which draws
together the governmental and the technological valences of control:
the mutation of a regime organized around the hinged, lockable
thresholds of factories, plantations, and prisons into a regime
organized around logic gates and supply chain diagrams can be understood
as a movement between enclosures that are larger than and that enclose,
include, and exclude bodies and microscopic enclosures that are
premised on logics of selection and that position non-selected beings as
nonexistent or structurally invisible rather than aberrant but
existent. [2] Or, consider the ways in which the necropolitical regimes
identified by Achille Mbembe (2003) and the genealogical link between
panopticon and slave ship that Simone Browne traces so brilliantly in
Dark Matters (2015, 31-62) persist and are reframed or modulated through
the shifts in articulation sketched here. [3] These articulations,
modulations, and intensifications are organized around (but not
determined by) technological regimes. The relationship between the
individual and the dividual, for example, is intelligible as the
difference between the world rendered mechanically or thermodynamically
and the world rendered digitally—a shift that reframes Deleuze’s
comments about the signature technologies of sovereignty, discipline,
and control in epistemic terms.
2. Technology
Considered
in isolation, “machines don’t explain anything” (Deleuze 1995a, 175);
rather, they “express the social forms capable of producing them and
making use of them” (Deleuze 1995b, 180). At the same time, the
“language” of discipline can be specified as “analogical,” while control
operates through languages that are “digital (although not necessarily
binary)” (1995b, 178). So analogue and digital, while associated with
certain classes of machine, must be understood to exceed the technical
registers that shape them and to function as conceptual operators within
discursive-material fields (which might include systems of production,
management, and regulation). With this in mind, how might one derive a
non-deterministic theory of the relationship between technology, power,
and economy from the control texts? This question lurks in the
background of the “Postscript on Control Societies,” and it constitutes
one of the most telling ways in which that text can be read as an
encrypted theory of historical method as well as a diagram of a specific
period.
As is suggested at the end of the preceding section, the
shift in scale from the door of the enclosure to the gate of the logic
circuit circles around a technological development, but is also comes to
undergird epistemological claims about fundamental categories such as
thinking, the human, and sociality. And, as the discussion of discipline
and biopolitics at the end of the preceding section suggests, the
historical, concept-generating function of technology that Deleuze
sketches with his claim about “collective apparatuses” impedes linear
periodization by implementing a recursive temporality: specific
technologies give concrete form to collective social forces that precede
them, and in so doing intensify and reorient these forces, coming to
function as what Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) calls “epistemic things.”
In other words, a specific technology might come to concretize and
exemplify the abstractions undergirding a given political-economic
regime, but it does so by securing or amplifying certain conceptual
structures or operations that logically and historically precede it, as
well as by reorienting concepts and facilitating new practices and
relations that point (again, for better and worse) towards different
sociopolitical arrangements. For example, as Bernhard Siegert (2012,
2015) shows, the door permits a body to pass through when it is open,
thus both expressing and securing the inside/outside distinction (and,
by extension, the logic of disciplinary power), whereas the logic gate
permits a signal to pass through only when it is closed, thus securing a
conceptual system that permits conceptual mixtures of inside and
outside, and human and nonhuman, that exemplify distinctive regimes of
accumulation and management.
This recursive theorization of
technology as product, _expression_, and shifter of social forces is one
of the moments at which continuities between the control texts and
Deleuze’s earlier collaborations with Guattari become most overt.
Consider the similarities between the “collective apparatuses” of which
machines form one element and the “social machine” that Deleuze and
Guattari identify in their book on Kafka:
a machine is never
simply technical. Quite the contrary, it is technical only as a social
machine, taking men and women into its gears, or, rather, having men and
women as part of its gears along with things, structures, metals,
materials. Even more, Kafka doesn’t think only about the conditions of
alienated, mechanized labor—he knows all about that in great, intimate
detail—but his genius is that he considers men and women to be part of
the machine not only in their work but even more so in their adjacent
activities, in their leisure, in their loves, in their protestations, in
their indignations, and so on (1986, 81).
This claim, which is
redolent of the “social factory” thesis advanced by Mario Tronti and
taken up by many subsequent writers, makes it clear that “collective
apparatuses” centered on technology include concepts, systems of
management, and normative ways of living as well as procedures of
extraction, definition, and occlusion. The mechanical factory of
“gears,” “structures,” “metals,” and “materials” is one such apparatus,
and it is imbricated with specific orientations of “leisure,” “loves,”
”protestations,” and so on. What kinds of orientation center on
computation?
In Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Franklin
2015) I tracked some of the ways in which the electronic digital
computer functions both as a specific device and as a source of ideas
and metaphors within the shifting social and economic imaginaries of
capitalism. The genealogy I posit moves through the imbrications of
computation and socioeconomic imagination in Charles Babbage’s
interrelated work on computing engines, theology, and political economy
in the 1830s, Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machines of the 1890s, and
the diffusion of computer metaphors following the emergence of the
multi-discipline formation of cybernetics from the 1940s onwards.
Following this, I trace some of the ways in which these imaginaries
become visible in economic theories, systems of accumulation,
production, and circulation, management styles, psychology (including
mid-twentieth century developments in psychoanalysis and later practices
such as NLP), literature, and film. Across these analyses I focus on
the ways in which the articulations of human and (computing) machine,
sociality and (computer) network, produce normative visions that cleave
ever closer to the insistent but impossible ideal of capital as a logic
that promises to integrate the entirety of the social without remainder.
As I attempted to show in that book, there are a number of places in
which one can look for images of the collective apparatuses fantasized
under celebratory and critical accounts of control. The prehistory of
computing machines and their projected applications to workplace
organization, value extraction, and population management is one. The
Macy Conferences of 1946-1953 are another. The TCP/IP suite and Google’s
PageRank and AdSense technologies are others (Pasquinelli 2009). And
production and recruitment manifestos from the Toyota Production System
to the Netflix “culture code” are yet others. But one can also look to
an earlier project associated more than any other with the practice of
disciplinary power.
Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 essay “Panopticon, or,
The Inspection House” begins with a grand announcement: “Morals
reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—public burdens
lighted—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the
poor laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in architecture!”
Resisting the oft-repeated distinction between discipline and biopower,
Bernhard Siegert takes the universality of this claim as an opportunity
to locate an unexamined genealogy of digital-social technologies that,
perhaps surprisingly, includes the disciplinary technologies of
panopticon and penny post as well as the nascent computing machines
theorized and developed by Babbage and Ada Lovelace. “The Panopticon was
applicable to every kind of bio-politics,” Siegert writes of Bentham’s
pronouncement, because on it, like on the penny post and the analytical
engine, “contents and applications were programs that ran (or would
run)” only because “such machines were blind to them” (Siegert 1999,
126-127). This leads him to a theorization of power that is compelling
for thinking through the historical logic of technology that the control
texts insist upon:
That the machine or power became abstract,
Deleuze has said, merely meant that it became programmable. But power
itself became machinelike in the process. The rationality of
power—functionality or universality—requires the prior standardization
of the data it processes—via postage stamps or punch cards, it makes no
difference…Disciplinary machine, postal machine, adding machine: after
their interconnection was established, bodies, discourses, and numbers
were one and the same with regard to the technology of power: data, and
as such, contingent (Siegert 1999, 127).
The central figure here
is not enumeration but abstraction. In Siegert’s account one finds a
description of the disciplinary technology par excellence in which the
latter appears not as a thermodynamic machine (in line with Deleuze’s
periodization) but as a digital information processor which functions
through abstraction, remains structurally indifferent to the specifics
of the purpose to which it is turned, and thus formats its human
subjects as unmarked inputs and/or outputs. His theorization emphasizes
the necessity for analyses of technology and culture to take into
account the conceptual operations that both undergird and extend out of
particular machines, connecting them, in often surprising ways, to past
devices and practices as well as to current and future formations.
Siegert
does not speak of the value form in his theorization of panopticon,
penny post, and computing machine as abstract machines of power, but the
resonance between his account and that most central of Marxian concepts
is pronounced. With this provocation in mind, the theorization of
technology Deleuze sets out in the “Postscript” is suggestive of some
compelling direction for the integration of media theory and history
within studies of economy and governmentality. Siegert’s work on
cultural techniques (2015) will prove useful here, as might the writing
of Friedrich Kittler, Cornelia Vismann, Sybille Krämer, Wolfgang Ernst,
Markus Krajewski, and others. Equally, Galloway’s work on François
Laruelle (2014) points towards ways in which historically and
geographically specific modes of thought constitute a relationship
between modernity and digitality long before and far away from the
electronic digital computer. Amplified through these later
media-theoretical interventions, the mode of historical analysis
diagrammed in the “Postscript” invites one to consider the ways in which
investigations into cultural techniques, the materiality of signifying
systems, the conceptual character of digitality, and the
concept-generating function of technologies might intersect with
analyses of capitalism in ways that can illuminate the complexities of
the post-1970s period in which Marxian analysis appears both especially
vital and incessantly troubled by transformations in regimes of labor,
value extraction, and accumulation.
3. Economy
Deleuze
underscores the discursive effects of “information technologies and
computers” by insisting that such devices are “deeply rooted in a
mutation of capitalism” (1995b, 180). This mutation, he notes, “has been
widely summarized” (1995b, 180); its effects can be seen in the
movement towards the service-based, reticular ideals of production and
distribution touched upon in the opening passages of this essay. As
Deleuze puts it, the distinguishing features of movement results in a
dispersed mode of value extraction under which the most visible Global
North businesses seek to sell “services” and buy “activities,” directing
their activities towards “sales or markets” rather than the production
of goods (1995b, 181). These shifts constitute another vector along
which one might set out a periodization theory—the movement from
production to “metaproduction” (1995b, 181), or, from Fordism to
post-Fordism. This shift is directly correlated to the emergence of what
is often termed a neoliberal logic of competition that is theorized by
scholars such as Wendy Brown as “extending and disseminating market
values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself
remains a distinctive player” (Brown 2003, n.p.). As Deleuze notes, one
of the outcomes of the economic shifts with which control is associated
is the injection of “an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy
competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against each
other and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself”
(1995b, 179). Across the pages of the “Postscript” the economic
practices associated with control are said to: emerge in relation to
computer technologies; function within (a mutated) capitalism; limn the
contours of the dominant economic models of the day (many of which are
often theorized by orthodox Marxian scholars as subsidiary or even
antithetical to the production-centered tenets of capitalism); and
intersect with a mode of governmentality and sense-training. That
Deleuze presents these practices as part of the same historical regime
shows that the economic logic that he associates with of control
societies cannot be thought through without also addressing a number of
other historical frames, several of which function across quite
different durations and contexts. As stated at the outset, it may be
that the imposition of this multi-threaded, incommensurable historical
method is the real endowment passed on by Deleuze via the control texts.
“Today,”
Deleuze stated in a 1995 interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, “I can say
I feel completely Marxist. The article I have published on the ‘society
of control,’ for example, is completely Marxist, yet I write about
things that Marx did not know” (1995c). If the “Postscript” is
“completely Marxist” then it is remarkable for the challenges it poses
to classical Marxist categories of historical analysis. Perhaps this is
most overt in the theorization of spatio-temporal dispersion, the
movement from the “body” of the factory to businesses that are a “soul”
or “gas” (1995b, 179), the account of the movement of art away from
“closed sites” and into “the open circuits of banking,” (1995b, 181),
and the baleful description of “speech and communication” becoming
“thoroughly permeated” by “money” (1995a, 175). Each of these phenomena
resonates with recent theorizations that rest on and extend Marx’s
concept of real subsumption (Marx 1994, 93-116). In Hardt and Negri’s
exemplary version of such an extension, real subsumption describes
nothing less than the total enclosure of society by capital. For
example, they write that:
[w]ith the real subsumption of society
under capital…capital has become a world. Use value and all the other
references to values and processes of valorization that were conceived
to be outside the capitalist mode of production have progressively
vanished. Subjectivity is entirely immersed in exchange and language,
but that does not mean it is now pacific. Technological development
based on the generalization of the communicative relationships of
production is a motor of crisis, and productive general intellect is a
nest of antagonisms (2000, 386).
This notion of real subsumption
far exceeds that found in Marx’s writing, where it describes the
processes through which commodity production is restructured in order to
maximize efficiency, for example by increasing the proportion of
production that is automated by machinery (a process described as an
increase in the organic composition of capital). [4] An outcome of this
procedure is a general decrease in the surplus labor congealed in a
given commodity (a process Marx describes in terms of a decrease in
absolute surplus value extraction) and rising unemployment, all of
which, lead to a decline in profit derived from commodity production and
make it necessary for new sources of value to be sought in the sphere
of reproduction. The practices and theories glossed by the term
‘neoliberalism’ might all be understood as responses to this process.
The phenomena that Guy Debord theorizes in The Society of the Spectacle
furnish other examples, as does the exponential growth of the tertiary
(service) sector. None of these regimes of extraction are evenly
distributed; participation is subject to processes of gendering and
racialization, related constructions of physical and cognitive capacity,
and other procedures for selecting whose attention, rationality, and
affective capacities should be defined as valorizable, and in which
ways. As such, the notion that real subsumption progressively integrates
that which exists outside the capitalist mode of production is
impossible; indeed, the clean distinction between inside and outside
that would make such a movement possible is shown to be antithetical to
the logic of capital.
As Rosa Luxemburg writes, capitalism
“depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social
organizations existing side by side with it” (2003, 345). The essential
role played by so-called ‘non-productive’ domestic labor (childbirth and
child rearing, cooking cleaning) in the reproduction of labor power is
perhaps the most obvious example of this. With this in mind, for real
subsumption to be functional in concert with any periodization theory
the notion of a process through which capital in all senses encircles
“the world” must be replaced with specific, materialist examinations of
the dynamics of inside and outside, representation and occlusion, and
integration and suspension that are imbricated with the transformations
collected under the ideas of post-industrial or post-Fordist production.
In the “fully Marxist” pages of the “Postscript” Deleuze insists that
one account for both sides of this dialectic: on the one hand, he tracks
the shifts in labor relations and accumulation detailed above (e.g. in
the shift from the factory to the business, from goods to services, and
so on); on the other hand, he makes it clear that the forms of dispersal
and modulation that characterize these shifts are secured against the
“three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, too poor to have debts
and too numerous to be confined” (1995b, 181). Extending this relation
beyond Deleuze’s sketch, today one might observe that racialized and
gendered surplus populations serve as proxy, object, or raw material
within some of the newer modes of accumulation, from the “commodified
life” of inmates in private prisons and detention centers (Tadiar 2012)
to the forms of service, surrogacy, and outsourced labor that are
understood not to generate value directly but to facilitate the
valorization and reproduction of other, more directly valorizable lives
(Vora 2015).
In the end, it is this dialectical, materialist
impulse that grounds the movement between ‘clean’ periodization and the
coexistence of unmatched and even conflicting areas of inquiry within
the “Postscript.” Tracking the techniques and technologies of dispersed
sovereignty, mapping the affordances and discursive implications of
computing machines, and itemizing the emerging dynamics of an economy
without commodities are all necessary endeavors. But the analysis of
sociopolitical distribution must take into account the persistence of
violent corralling, much of which now operates through for-profit
providers and the legal and discursive framing of prisoners and
detainees as nonhuman. The analysis of computer media must remain
attentive to the historicity and materiality of devices, their users,
and the people that labor, often precariously and in deleterious
conditions, to produce them; it must also address the ways in which all
of these are abstracted, in the same way but with quite different
implications, by the cultural and technical operations of the media in
question. And, for now at least, the analysis of ‘immaterial’ economic
formations must think these relations in relation to the persistence of
older modes and against newer but less widely discussed methods for the
violent extraction of value from human life, many of which are also
presented as services. The radical promise of periodization lies in its
capacity to provisionally impose a set of historical markers against
which one can 1) capture and measure interactions between abstractions
and concrete sociality while also 2) registering the ways in which those
interactions produce a surplus that exceeds or is too faint to register
within those markers. Since abstraction, capture, and measuring are
themselves expressions of the social relations whose changing
articulations are registered in the passage designated as that from
discipline to control, the impossibility of absolutely clean
periodization is as important as—and registers the critical value of—the
diagnostic utility that periodization affords.
-------------------------------------------------------
Seb
Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at King’s College
London, where he co-convenes the MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture,
and Theory. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
(MIT Press, 2015).
Notes
[1] It is possible to
identify a larger archive of texts that, while not naming control as
such, certainly examine the same historical tendencies; see the chapter
“7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 424-473)
and the appendix to (Deleuze 1999, 102-110).
[2] This argument
can be extended to other discursive formations that operate in the
present. For example, one can follow Jord/ana Rosenberg and take the
molecule rather than the logic gate as the exemplary epistemic object in
order to examine a different valence of the contemporary moment
(Rosenberg 2014).
[4] For a rigorous account of real subsumption as it pertains to periodization see (Endnotes 2010).
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