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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