Gilles Deleuze's Societies of Control

A Postscript to a Postscript

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a cross-post from

Inner Life

. The idea with this series is to kind of put myself (and you) through school, to read essays that are interesting and important and relevant in trying to figure things out.

Best,

Sam

A POSTSCRIPT TO THE POSTSCRIPT OF THE SOCIETIES OF CONTROL

I can’t exactly remember how I first came across Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ but it’s one of these pieces of writing that’s stuck with me since then, where just about everything that happens around me feels as if it’s confirming Deleuze’s essential thesis. 

Deleuze is following from Foucault’s methods of analysis in Discipline and Punish. Foucault describes modern “disciplinary” societies as “vast systems of enclosure,” power operating in ways that are dedicated to constraining the individual. But, Deleuze writes, Foucault “recognized as well the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty.” If the disciplinary societies replaced another model (Foucault identified the critical period of transition as occurring around the time of Napoleon and continuing through the Industrial Revolution), then the disciplinary societies could also be supplanted — and Deleuze believed that he was starting to perceive the outlines of a new system. 

This was the ‘society of control.’ If the disciplinary societies were marked by the passage of the individual “from one closed environment to another” — from the school to the barracks to the factory and sometimes the hospital or the prison — the society of control was ostensibly looser, more free-flowing, but, in fact, even more successful methods of constraint.

Gilles Deleuze — melancholy about the societies of control

Deleuze felt that he was writing fairly early in the lifespan of the new system and could only describe it suggestively. Here are a few of the ways in which he attempts to characterize it:  

Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

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.

Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold in as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies.

I didn’t pay all that much attention to Deleuze’s essay — just thought of it as an interesting, if grandiloquent piece of French theorizing — until I read The New York Times’ famous 2015 exposé on working conditions in Amazon. Amazon was a behemoth of a company; it was considered beyond-desirable to work there. Compensation was high, all sorts of perks were offered, but, as one employee quoted in the article, said, “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.” All the much-bruited freedoms of Amazon — most conspicuously, the ability to work remotely — were deceptive. Employees recalled the impossibility of ever taking a vacation — being ‘on a beach’ in Florida really meant finding the nearest wifi connection and working all day. And ‘off-hours’ were equally meaningless. E-mails tended to come late at night and to be followed moments later by text messages demanding why the e-mail hadn’t been immediately replied to. Clearly, working at Amazon was a particular sort of psychological hellscape — “Nearly every person I worked with I saw cry at their desk,” said one employee — and it was also very much designed to be that way. As The New York Times wrote, “The company is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers.”

David Loftesness — a sad Amazon employee

The answer to that battery of tests was that you really could push white-collar workers very far. It wasn’t just money that was the reward; it was the feeling of being part of the “culture” that Jeff Bezos worked so hard to instill and maintain. And that culture was predicated on ‘control,’ on ‘never finishing anything’ — exactly as described by Deleuze. As one of the Amazon employees told The New York Times, using office slang, “If you’re a good Amazonian you become an Amabot.” So long as one was willing to surrender all sense of autonomy and personal identity, there was virtually no limit to productivity and to immersion in the society of control. 

Deleuze was writing in 1990. The New York Times’ expose was written in 2015. Since then, the world has evolved pretty much exactly in the direction Deleuze forecast. Over the pandemic, offices — the image of enclosure par excellence — vanished, but ‘work from home’ did not, as in the older dispensation, imply freedom. It meant the collapse of evenings, weekends, holidays. It meant that the identity of a worker was seamlessly fused with the task that they were part of — although work had evolved as well so that even high-end workers, if they burned out, could be swiftly replaced and the task continued. 

Deleuze wrote: 

The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass…..In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code….a password. 

This strikes me as being one of the more directly prophetic lines in Deleuze’s essay. In our current society what defines a person isn’t presence within some institutional structure or even individual identity but the possession of the right keys and passwords. In a scene in the TV show Sherlock — which captures our era well — Moriarty breaks into the Crown Jewels, takes nothing, allows himself to be arrested — and makes the very Deleuzian point that what matters isn’t at all the material wealth of the jewels but whatever password it is that gains him access to them. “Nothing in the Bank of England, the Tower of London or Pentonville Prison could possibly match the value of the key that could get you into all three,” says an impressed Holmes. To which Moriarty responds: “In a world of locked rooms the man with the key is king.”

Professor Moriarty — Deleuzian

All of us are at all times only a few letters, numbers, and symbols from having complete access to someone else’s life, someone else’s bank account, etc. The fact that passwords are an intrinsically vulnerable system is not lost on the keepers of power, and the switch is being made to biometric data — to retinal scans, fingerprints, etc — but they only add to the continuing dislocation of the self. The self is transformed into a signature, identity inextricable from social credit — and social credit increasingly expanded across the span of one’s life, as in social devices like the social security number, the credit score rating, or China’s Social Credit System.

If Deleuze’s line about passwords is the most obviously prescient, the line that has really stayed with me is the following: 

The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.

I think about this line all the time. And especially so because I find myself, maybe more so than I would like, drifting into that sensibility. The ‘laptop class,’ which I am a part of, is a sort of walking embodiment of Deleuze’s ideas. In the coffee shops where I like to work, there is no real sense of location: everybody there is their own island of social credit, linked to each other only accidentally by space, but really plugged in on their identical devices to their separate networks; and everybody (years after the devices have become commonplace) displaying a certain satisfaction every time they pull out their laptop or smart phone — with the irresistible feeling of being a portable, functional member of a society-wide power grid. And that sensibility continues well beyond the coffee shop. I had an odd sense of epiphany recently when I realized how arbitrary concepts like the work day, work week, etc, really were. What mattered to me in structuring my time was the energy I had; calibrate the amount of energy right (and there are all sorts of hacks at the moment dedicated to this) and it was possible to do whatever one project one wanted to work on in ‘continuous motion.’ 

The writing I’ve been doing on this platform participates deeply in that idea. More and more, ideas like ‘deadlines,’ ‘publication calendars,’ and so on, feel like they belong to the older institutional structure; have become obsolete. Speaking personally, I do find there to be something liberating in writing on my own schedule, in keeping with my own biorhythms, posting when I want, etc. At some level it may not be great to contribute, in this small way, to the shift towards ‘undulatory motion’ (and there are plenty of people who are very resistant to this whole phenomenon, who are dismayed by the round-the-clock working habits of freelancers as opposed to the predictable working schedule of the older labor regime), but I find this aspect of it to be a done deal.

I am encouraged by a line of Deleuze’s in which he writes:

There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

In this frame of discourse, what matters isn’t really the mode of power that is at the fore; there is no point in being nostalgic for the disciplinary society (which had its own tools of oppression). The way to be is to try to understand the shape of power in its current manifestation, and to angle for the scope of individual freedom that can be negotiated from the current power regime. For me, I don’t mind the sense of being a ‘continuous producer of energy’ — I actually like that and prefer it to the old work/leisure binary. What does matter to me, though, are questions about who the work is for; about work being tightly fastened to the social credit system. And at the moment my personal negotiation is all about that; carving out time to work ‘in continuous orbit’ on projects that I (as opposed to the power system) happen to find meaningful. 

But the shape of negotiation is different for everyone. Deleuze, in an oracular peroration, compares the disciplinary societies to ‘a molehill’ and the ‘control’ societies to a serpent.

The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other….and it is up to young people discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.

Which is a useful warning. The more one struggles against a serpent, the tighter its hold tends to be. It’s important, to some extent, to flow with its movements but to do so — no easy task —without making oneself completely constricted.