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Societies of Control - Analysis:

Deleuze was an self-proclaimed and life-long Marxist: “Félix Guattari and I have

remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any

political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed”

(Deleuze, 1995, p. 150). This quote was stated in an interview with communist Antonio Negri in

1990. In order more fruitfully appreciate Postscript on the Societies of Control, it is important to

consider the ‘revolutionary’ and liberating textures of his metaphysical corpus, which are best

expressed through a Marxist mode of political philosophy. His life with Felix Guattari radically

shaped his formative years which resulted in the works of Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and

Capitalism, A Thousand Plateaus, among others. The bricolage of Deleuze’s metaphysics of

difference as a radical departure from structuralism into a realm of immanence, and non-

essentialism in conjunction with, Guattari’s anti-Oedipal discourse is, in my opinion, a

consummation of two historically distinct approaches under the umbrella of Marxist thought

which services a veritable critique of societies of control proliferating under the conditions of

late-capitalist postmodernism.

This Marxistp perspective, however, is accompanied by Foucault’s touch and texture. All

together, a triumvirate is formed to lay the ontological underpinning for the work under

examination. According to Deleuze and Guattari (2004), power, originating in the Oedipal

family, is fascist in nature, which now due to technological innovation, has become, according to

Foucault, diffuse. Power is no longer expressed in the punishment of disciplinarian

authoritarianism, but now modulated into that of control. Control, for Deleuze borrows from

Guattari’s imagery of a future dystopia to illustrate what hyper-control in late capitalist

postmodern society will look like:

“Felix 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.” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 7)

This may seem as a radical hyperbolic projection of some far off dystopic future society,

but the facts indicate otherwise. The internet as a network has since its inception floated towards

a hexis of corporate interest. The internet is no longer a place curated by creators, but by

corporations, that turn a profit on monitoring analytics, traffic, and other personal data for the

purposes of marketing. According to Deleuze (1992), \societies of control are defined by code.

The code as imagined by Deleuze (1992) can be illustrated in the following way: The source

code of computing software, such as an operating system, sets the possible parameters, the logic,

the determinate outcomes or effects. Capitalism, to Deleuze (1992) is no different, in that the

corporate habitus and telos has effectively saturated every institution, taste, and individual

disposition. What has made this possible for Deleuze (1992) is marketing, he states “Marketing

has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation” (p. 7).

Marketing is central to control because it manipulates outcomes. Now, universities are

marketed to the consumer on the grounds that, you, the student, can now gain tangible skills that

can be monetized. This sentiment introduces a new sign that replaces the old sign that defined

the school as a place of disciplinary production and “learning.” Deleuze (1992) elaborates:
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“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.” (p.7)

Universities in late capitalist postmodern societies of control are marketed on the grounds

of higher-earning not higher-learning. This has led to a diminution of liberal arts (and philosophy

programs) and resulted in the proliferation of marketing and business-related courses, programs,

degrees, etc. This level of specialization is contingent on the “conquests of the market” into

everyday life. Deleuze (1992) elaborates:

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. (p. 7)

Value, in a market-driven economy, is now derived from the images it produces, not the

substantive product being advertised. Universities are no longer a sufficient product because they

have become pure marketing with limited after-market gain for the student, thus controlling the

“graduate” with egregious student debt. In a further aside, universities are an expression of the

ontology of transcendence, in that the student desires ascent, but is manipulatively mislead down

a marketing molehill into the coils of the serpent.

There is a multiplicity of disciplinarian institutions: the school, the hospital, the prison,

the neighbourhood, which are characterized as spaces of enclosure, now fall under the expansive

floating control of capital. According to Deleuze (1992), “Even art has left the spaces of

enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank” (p. 7). Circuitry now becomes an

important analogical term to Deleuze (1992) because it represents the following of information

in a closed system that shares a greater affinity with the computer:

“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.”

For Deleuze (1992) Computers online now serve as both the means for liberation and

control. Circuits of struggle can democratically express Marxist revolution and upheaval of

societies of control. However, piracy, in all it’s revolutionary texture, can be used as a tool for

disseminating great philosophical works, but also market illicit copies of corporate media.

Viruses introduced seek to undermine the order of computer networks, but also strengthen the

resolve of corporate control to disarm revolutionary act with more control and market a new

meaning of such as well. Finally, the revolutionary act has become a surplus leisure in a

simulacrum of revolutionary action itself as the societies of control market its image in mass

media and render it impotent as another product. Deleuze (1992) darkly concludes, as I shall

here: “The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.” (p. 7).
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References

Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7.

Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). Anti-Oedipus. A&C Black.