Postscript on the Societies of Control
1. Historical
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They
initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never
ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own
laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family");
then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time
to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the
enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at
the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could
exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."
Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of
enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to
distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the
dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its
component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of
this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and
functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to
organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the
transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale
conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines
underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted
and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we
already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of
enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an
"interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc.
The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary
reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces,
prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the
length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their
last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new
forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in
the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name
Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes
as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the
ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines
operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the
extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the
genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process.
There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of
them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in
the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics,
hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could
participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of
confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new
weapons.
2. Logic
The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual
passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero,
and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical.
One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable
variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is
numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). 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.
This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that
contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible
in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society
of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a
spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of
bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each
salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges,
contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game
shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with
great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the
double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the
unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents
the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational
force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each,
dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit"
has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the
corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the
school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest
way of delivering the school over to the corporation.
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. In The Trial, Kafka, who
had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social
formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent
acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the
limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation)
are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant,
itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other.
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. This is because the disciplines never saw any
incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power
individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it
exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that
body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of
the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn
and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control,
on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a
number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand
disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of
view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of
control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no
longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have
become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it
is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since
discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical
standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated
according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old
monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that
of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from
the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our
manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a
discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in
orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the
older sports.
Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that
machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable
of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of
simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies
equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of
entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate
with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and
whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological
evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already
well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows:
nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production
and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the
capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively,
the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial
house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by
specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of
production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in
production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex
forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of
higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells
the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What
it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no
longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for
being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has
given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are
no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state
or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single
corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of
enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests
of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary
training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by
transformation of the product more than by specialization of production.
Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the
"soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which
is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the
instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters.
Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and
without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and
discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that
capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of
humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not
only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within
shanty towns or ghettos.
3. Program
The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element
within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or
human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one
of science fiction. Félix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able
to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's
(dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just
as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is
not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or
illicit--and effects a universal modulation.
The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their
inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the
process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis
is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the
former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the
necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of
something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of
"substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars
that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the
school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of
perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research,
the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the
hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out
potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to
individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical
body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate
system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass
through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will
allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the
institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a
new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the
ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle
against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to
adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the
societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming
forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? 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 a serpent are even more complex that the burrows
of a molehill.
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