#control societies

[1000rh]

The ultimate coup of control society is not so much the continuous influence of the border crossing or the passport control, not so much data mining or facial recognition algorithms, but that it has eviscerated history, not by banning dissent, but by accelerating the opportunities and channels for critical thought to infinity and therefore making it impossible to think historically in the first place. Thus the central challenge within control society will be not simply to resist the various new nefarious control apparatuses, but to rescue history from its own consummation.

– Alexander R. Galloway, "Computers in the Superfold" (2012)

[yaoigagarinsblog]

"The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill"

— Gilles Deleuze, Postscript On The Societies Of Control (1990)

[1000rh]

It is true we are entering a society that could be called a control society. [...] Disciplinary society was defined—Foucault's analyses have remained famous, and rightly so—by the establishment of areas of confinement: prisons, schools, workshops, hospitals. Disciplinary societies needed them. His analysis gave rise to ambiguous interpretations for some readers because they thought it was his final word. Obviously not. Foucault never believed it and clearly said that disciplinary societies were not eternal. He clearly thought that we were entering a new type of society.

– Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?” (1987)

[1000rh]

Many young people strangely boast of being 'motivated'; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of the serpent are even more complex than the burrows of the molehill.

– Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990)

[1000rh]

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.

– Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990)

[1000rh]

Our own everyday lives and actions seem to be increasingly beyond our own control, and not even the experts who appear to be the guardians of ‘theoretical’ controllability are capable of creating the impression of control through calculation. The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it. We feel ourselves powerless or blameworthy in an unresponsive world.

– Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2020)

[1000rh]

Two of the most dominant concepts that persist in both practical and official consciousness are ‘Self’ and ‘System’. We imagine ourselves as Selves and interpellate the world in that way, and we imagine ourselves as a series of systems and as part of a series of systems. We are admonished time and again to perform ‘self-control’ but also told that we cannot control ‘the System’. The System, we are told, controls itself (its ‘Self ‘?) and runs the way it does because that is how systems run and hence how the System runs. We are told that our own systems are self-regulating, and yet also told that we should be doing all we can to maintain their self-regulation. It is no wonder, then, that we sometimes feel that we have lost our Self in Systems.

– Mark Neocleous, The Politics of Immunity (2022)

[1000rh]

...class means class antagonism. It's not a category, it's a relation. One that sometimes connects not individuals but what Gerald Raunig and others call dividuals, units of being smaller than an individual. It turns out that individuals can indeed be further divided. One could think of class locations as including contradictory ones if one thinks of the people located by class as individuals. Or you could think of classes as quite neatly creating locations for dividuals, which don't always correspond to the individuals of which they are parts.

– McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019)