Gilles Deleuze

Six pages, published in 1990, before the web. It is the highest-yield short text in this project and it should be read the same week as Discipline and Punish, not two years later.

Discipline works by enclosure and moulds. Control works by modulation. The factory was a body. The corporation is a gas.

What changed

Foucault's disciplinary society moved you between enclosures. Family, then school, then barracks, then factory, then if necessary prison or hospital. Each one a separate casting with a threshold you crossed and a point at which you were done with it.

Control does not enclose. It modulates: continuous assessment instead of the exam, perpetual training instead of graduation, rolling credit instead of the wage packet, the subscription instead of the purchase. Nothing ever finishes, so there is no point at which you are released.

Deleuze's signatures are exact. Discipline runs on the signature and the file, which identify an individual within a mass. Control runs on the password and the code, which grant or refuse access. And the person becomes a dividual, divided into attributes that are scored separately by systems that never meet you.

Why it is unnerving

He wrote it in 1990 and it describes a credit score, a rolling performance review, a platform subscription, an algorithmic feed and a device that asks for a code, none of which existed in their current form.

That accuracy is also the reason to be careful with it. Six pages of aphorism will fit any present you hold it against, which is a property of aphorism rather than evidence of prescience.

Serious objections

• It is an essay of assertions with no evidence at all, and its reputation rests on later events appearing to confirm it.
• Enclosures did not go away. Prisons, schools and detention centres expanded in many countries during exactly the period the essay describes as their dissolution.
• The vocabulary is seductive enough to substitute for analysis. Calling something modulation is not the same as showing how it works.