Summary: Foucault identified societies of sovereignty, which were progressively replaced by disciplinary societies, with Napoleon being perhaps the tipping point. We are now seeing a crisis of the disciplinary institutions, which actually is another shift: from discipline to societies of control. The disciplines worked through a long-term, but discontinuous logic of enclosure, distributing humans in space and time to increase coordination and productivity, and thus creating something greater than its parts. In shaping or molding each individual, but at the same time creating a mass, disciplinary power was both individualising and totalising. Markets were won by specialisation, colonisation, and lower costs. Each discipline is independent, and each time one enters a discipline one starts anew. Control works through a short-term, continuous logic of modulation, letting humans roam space and time, but able to locate everyone and everything instantly. Barriers lose their importance, only the computer controlling them is important. No longer individual, people become indebted “dividuals” to be modulated, and masses become samples, markets, or databanks. It uses passwords to access information. Markets are won by fixing exchange rates, and product transformation. There is now a “soul” of the corporation, which is a terrifying idea, and it is marketing. Capitalism has come to be all about the product, its selling and its marketing, with production being delegated to the third world. The control mechanisms are variations of a single system, they can not be separated. Young people need to understand this new system. We need to look for new weapons.

Source: Giles Deleuze (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control. Published in OCTOBER 59. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

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