Milieu 08 of 12
Control after discipline
The enclosures Foucault described were already dissolving as he wrote, and what replaced them does not enclose you at all, it modulates you continuously.
- Years
- Roughly 1990 onward
- Location
- France and Britain
- Funder
- Not a funded programme. University scholarship, written after the institutions it describes had begun to dissolve.
- Institution
- UNKNOWN. No single institution houses this cluster.
The insight
Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990) is six pages and the highest-yield short text in this whole project.
Discipline operated by enclosure and by moulds. You passed from the family to the school to the barracks to the factory, each one a separate casting, each with a threshold you crossed and a point at which you were finished with it.
Control operates by Glossary / DeleuzeControl by continuous adjustment rather than by enclosure: rolling assessment, perpetual training, no graduation and no discharge.Full glossary: continuous assessment, perpetual training, rolling credit, no graduation and no discharge. The factory was a body. The corporation is a gas. The signature of discipline is the signature and the file. The signature of control is the password and the code. The individual becomes a Glossary / DeleuzeA person split into data attributes and scored in pieces, rather than dealt with as a whole individual.Full glossary, split into data attributes and scored in pieces.
He wrote it before the web, and it is unnervingly accurate about it.
Follow-ons worth the time
- Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul (1989) and Powers of Freedom (1999), on how psychology as a discipline made the self governable, and how advanced liberal rule works through freedom, choice and self-management rather than against them. Rose and Peter Miller, "Political Power beyond the State" (1992), is the compact statement. This is the most useful extension of Foucault's governmentality.
- Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (2015), on the conversion of citizens into human capital and of political questions into questions of competitiveness.
- Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics" (2003), on what biopower looks like from the colony rather than the metropole, where the power in question is the power to expose to death. These techniques were frequently developed at the periphery and reimported, which is the largest gap in this project and is recorded in the open questions.
- Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (2010) and Psychopolitics (2014). The shift from a disciplinary society to an Glossary / HanA society where the subject exploits itself voluntarily and experiences the exploitation as freedom.Full glossary, where the subject exploits itself voluntarily and experiences the exploitation as freedom. If one text in this project is going to land immediately with a reader under forty, it is this one.
What it adds
It updates the whole framework. Read Discipline and Punish, then read the Deleuze essay the same week rather than two years later, and the argument arrives in the present tense: the continuous assessment, the score, the training that never ends, the subscription that never lapses.