Periodizing With Control
by Seb Franklin
This essay is guided by the following question: what kinds of critical
possibilities become legible if one reads Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of
control societies both as a work of periodization theory and as a theory of
periodization? In other words, how might one read control in methodological
terms? One of the motivations for this inquiry is Fredric Jameson’s observation
that periodizing hypotheses “tend to obliterate difference and to project an
idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by
inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks” (1991, 3-4).
Jameson’s solution to this problem is to conceive of the “cultural dominant”
that replaces the concept of style within aesthetic analysis and that thus
allows for “the presence and coexistence of a range of different, yet
subordinate, features” (1991, 4). The features that Deleuze attributes to
control suggest the possibility that this analytical rubric can be extended to
the analysis of “dominant” features that occur not in spheres conventionally
described in aesthetic (or stylistic) terms, such as architecture, literature,
and visual art, but in material- discursive arrangements like governmentality,
technology, and economics. A close reading of Deleuze’s theorization of control
reveals those three threads to be knotted together in ways that both invite and
are irreducible to historical breaks. Because of this, Deleuze’s writing on
control societies points towards modes of historical analysis that can account
for complex assemblages of epistemic abstractions and the concrete situations
that undergird and (for worse and for better) exceed them.
It is certainly the case that periodizing gestures appear to ground the essays
“Having an Idea in Cinema” (1998; first delivered as a lecture at La Fémis in
1987) and “Postscript on Control Societies,” as well the conversation with
Antonio Negri published as “Control and Becoming” (1995; first published in
1990). [1] Across these texts Deleuze names and sketches the contours of a
sociopolitical and economic logic that diverges in important ways from the
earlier regimes of sovereignty and discipline theorized by Michel Foucault. In
the earliest of what one might call the control texts, ostensibly a commentary
on the cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Deleuze itemizes the
signature components of disciplinary societies—“the accumulation of structures
of confinement” (prisons, hospitals, workshops, and schools)—in order to
demarcate a period in which “we” were “entering into societies of control that
are defined very differently” (1998, 17). These newer types of societies are
signaled by a specific mode of social management: the age of control comes
about when “those who look after our interests do not need or will no longer
need structures of confinement,” with the result that the exemplary forms of
social regulation begin to “spread out” (1998, 17-18).
So, the dissolution of institutional spaces and the concomitant ‘spreading out’
of disciplinary power marks the first characteristic of control societies and,
apparently, establishes their difference from arrangements centered on
‘classical’ sovereignty or disciplinary power. The exemplary diagram here is
the highway system, in which “people can drive infinitely and ‘freely’ without
being at all confined yet while still being perfectly controlled” (1998, 18).
In “Control and Becoming” Deleuze once again speaks of the passage through
sovereignty and discipline and the breakdown of the latter’s sites of
confinement, but he adds a second valence in the form of a discussion of
technology that is only hinted at in the earlier piece’s allusions to
information and communication. In this conversation Deleuze again appears bound
to the notion of the historical break: he suggests that sovereign societies
correspond to “simple mechanical machines,” disciplinary societies to
“thermodynamic machines,” and control societies to “cybernetic machines and
computers” (1995a, 175).
These two intertwined narratives—of distributed governmentality and
technologies of computation—represent the two main vectors through which the
concept of control has shaped subsequent critical writing. For example, one
might read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of empire (2000) as
emphasizing the former, and Alexander R. Galloway’s Protocol: How Control
Exists After Decentralization (2004) as privileging the latter, although in
truth each addresses both technology and power in some ratio. Equally, one can
identify commonalities between the lineaments of control societies and a
still-growing body of periodizing concepts, both celebratory and critical, that
do not mention Deleuze’s concept but that define a similar set of historical
movements in more universal terms: the information age; digital culture; the
network society; post-industrial society; the age of big data; and so on, and
so on, and so on.
So many ways to dream a ‘pure’ economy of services and informatic exchanges.
But what do such imaginaries occlude? Does ‘real subsumption’ really describe
the full, evenly distributed inclusion and valorization of all social activity?
Or does it describe the complex of material conditions, conceptual operations,
and imaginaries that organize social life around abstract principles for the
efficient extraction of relative surplus while remaining structurally premised
on the regulatory function of surplus populations and, increasingly, the
second-order extraction of residual value from these populations? Can one
really disaggregate the general and generalizing notion of “free floating,”
decentralized, and computer-enabled control societies from such imaginaries,
even if Deleuze’s intent is ostensibly critical if not revolutionary? Based on
the general tendency with which the Deleuzian concept of control has been
deployed in critical writing, the answer must be no, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
suggests when she writes that the notion of control risks sustaining the very
discursive formation that it sets out to critique (2006, 9). Across the control
texts, though, it is possible to identify a more complex system of
periodization, one that is less concerned with linear (albeit staggered and
layered) progression than with the multiplication of different, often competing
systems of historical knowledge that make the absolute novelty and specificity
of control societies impossible to sustain even as it is defined and deployed
as an explanatory periodization theory. This movement, which starts to appear
with a couple of passing remarks in “Control and Becoming” and that comes more
fully into view across the six pages of the “Postscript,” suggests that Deleuze
is concerned not only with extending Foucault’s periodizing project but also
complicating the kind of historical thinking that produces the various
totalizing concepts listed above. Could it be that the final sketch of control,
the “Postscript on Control Societies,” encrypts the kind of multithreaded
historical method that is necessary for engaging with the epistemic demands of
the period it ostensibly defines? Might this, rather than the specific
characteristics that Deleuze attributes to control, represent the real import
of his intervention? The remainder of this essay examines the intersections of
the three strands touched upon in this introductory discussion—power,
technology, and economy—in order to foreground these historical-methodological
possibilities.
1. Power
As cleanly as the discipline-control sequence appears to function, it becomes
clear across the control texts that the relationship between the two terms
cannot be reduced to one of direct succession or linear extension. In “Having
an idea in Cinema,” for example, Deleuze points out “there are all kinds of
things left over from disciplinary societies, and this for years on end” (1998,
17). In the conversation with Negri he further complicates the relationship
between the two periodizing concepts by stating that Foucault was “one of the
first to say that we’re moving away from disciplinary societies, we’ve already
left them behind” (1995a, 174). And in the “Postscript” he writes that “Control
is the name proposed by Burroughs for this new monster, and Foucault sees it
fast approaching” (1995b, 178). So control is: a discrete period full of
leftovers from a previous one; an episteme that is at once being approached and
that has already been fully entered; and a period that is yet to be entered but
that will be soon. There is nothing like a consensus across these three
temporal relations. Each, however, makes it clear that the relationship between
the periodizing terms cannot be understood in terms of a break. This opens up a
series of questions that have methodological, as well as historical
implications. What is the temporal relationship between discipline and control?
What role does sovereignty play in the two ‘later’ periods? What drives the
Globally uneven movement between disciplinarity and control, and how can the
latter function as a periodizing device if it cannot be detached from the
former? The only possible answer is that the logic of control does not invent
new relations, but mobilizes and reorients techniques and technologies whose
origins predate it. Such techniques and technologies must thus be understood as
recursive; they both originate in and belong to a specific regime and perform
essential functions within subsequent regimes. Because of this, historically
attentive analyses of control cannot remain in the twentieth century, but must
set about gathering the threads that, in the appropriate combination and at the
correct level of development, constitute apparatuses of power that are
distinctive in character even as they retain objects and practices that first
become legible in earlier moments. One way of doing this is by considering the
specific phenomena Deleuze implicates when he suggests that Foucault already
identified the roots of control in disciplinary societies.
In the “Postscript” Deleuze identifies two particular tendencies in the systems
of management unearthed by Foucault: the first centers on the production of the
individual subject through techniques of discipline, and the second addresses
the biopolitical formatting of a given society as a mass delineated by
statistical models and confined by thresholds or filters. Where disciplines saw
“no incompatibility at all” between masses and individuals, so that signatures
could stand in for the latter while lists or registers accounted for the
individual’s place in a mass, control reformulates masses as “samples, data,
markets, or banks” and recasts individuals as “dividuals” (1995b, 180). The
resonance with Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics and biopower is marked:
what are samples and data if not computational technologies for the production
of the “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures” that Foucault
positions as emblematic of biopower (Foucault 2003, 246)? What are markets and
banks if not electronically augmented examples of the “subtle, rational
mechanisms” of biopolitics that include “insurance, individual and collective
savings, safety measures, and so on” (Foucault 2003, 246)? What is the dividual
if not the subject mapped in terms of generalized, discrete predicates (race,
class, gender, sexuality, ability, age), none of which can metonymically stand
in for the ‘whole’ person? How, in other words, does control differ from
biopower?
The proximity between Deleuze’s theorization of the cybernetic movement from
masses to data and Foucault’s conceptualization of mechanisms that seek
“homeostasis” (249) is registered in the odd way in which Hardt and Negri
introduce the two in Empire: they write that “Foucault’s work allows us to
recognize a historical, epochal passage in social forms from disciplinary
society to societies of control.” (2000, 22-23), Only in the footnote to this
claim do they reveal that this epochal passage is “not articulated explicitly
by Foucault but remains implicit in his work,” an observation that is only
guided (rather than prefigured) by “the excellent commentaries of Gilles
Deleuze” (2000, 419n1). Within Foucault’s oeuvre The Birth of Biopolitics
(first delivered in lecture form in 1978 and 1979; English translation 2008)
might be the book in which a genealogy of control is most explicitly
articulated, although it is notable that this text focuses on the imaginaries
of political economists rather than those of governments. “Society Must be
Defended” (delivered in lecture form in 1975 and 1976; English translation
2003) and volume I of The History of Sexuality (1976; English translation
1978), both of which center on techniques of governmentality, disclose
connections between discipline, biopower, and control that make theories of
linear succession unworkable.
So, the identification between biopower and control appears so overt that Hardt
and Negri more or less conflate the two and are able to attribute the
definition of the latter to latent content in Foucault’s writings. They then
make the claim that “[i]n the passage from disciplinary society to the society
of control, a new paradigm of power is realized which is defined by the
technologies that recognize society as the realm of biopower” (Hardt and Negri
2000, 24). So control societies come about when the ratio of biopower to
discipline shifts in favor of the latter. What, then, is revealed about the
historical specificity of control societies when one recognizes that Foucault
locates the emergence of the techniques of biopower, in concert with those of
discipline, in the eighteenth century? For this is the claim that grounds
Foucault’s introduction to the concept of biopower in “Society Must be
Defended,” where he states that “the two sets of mechanisms—one disciplinary
and one regulatory [biopolitical]” are “not mutually exclusive, and can be
articulated with each other” (2003, 250). This is restated in volume I of The
History of Sexuality, in which Foucault writes that power over life evolves in
“two basic forms” from the seventeenth century onwards (1978, 139). These two
forms again correspond to the regimes of discipline and biopower. While the
second of these appears “somewhat later” than the first, it is clear that
Foucault does not theorize the two as discrete, successive developments. Nor
are they theorized as “antithetical” (Foucault 1978, 139). Rather, they form
“two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of
relations” (1978, 139). This diagram—two poles linked by intermediary
clusters—suggests that control emerges not from a waning of disciplinary power,
but rather through a shift in the articulations of discipline and biopower that
is much more complex than a simple passage through which a given society
becomes increasingly intelligible as graspable through the terms of the latter.
Equally, although the former might appear to be organized around inclusion and
exclusion and the latter around integration, thinking the two as articulated
logics emphasizes a more complex relationship: biopower is organized around
thresholds that render and occlude populations, while disciplinary techniques
both regulate the education, productivity, and health of ‘normal’ individuals
(above the threshold) and manage the bodies that fall below the line separating
the normal from the abnormal, or that which should be made to live from that
which can be left to die.
Once so-called disciplinary societies are understood to be organized around
both the ‘pure’ individualizing function of disciplinary institutions and the
massifying, averaging, and sorting functions of statistical modeling and
management, the historical movement from the eighteenth, and nineteenth century
articulations of discipline and biopower to the phenomena Deleuze associates
with control must be understood in terms of shifts in scale and conceptual
emphasis. Furthermore, these shifts can be connected to the function of
particular technologies, which not only facilitate specific practices of
capture, representation, and management but also generate and modify the
dominant conceptual bases around which social formations are imagined and
normalized. Consider the following proposition, which draws together the
governmental and the technological valences of control: the mutation of a
regime organized around the hinged, lockable thresholds of factories,
plantations, and prisons into a regime organized around logic gates and supply
chain diagrams can be understood as a movement between enclosures that are
larger than and that enclose, include, and exclude bodies and microscopic
enclosures that are premised on logics of selection and that position
non-selected beings as nonexistent or structurally invisible rather than
aberrant but existent. [2] Or, consider the ways in which the necropolitical
regimes identified by Achille Mbembe (2003) and the genealogical link between
panopticon and slave ship that Simone Browne traces so brilliantly in Dark
Matters (2015, 31-62) persist and are reframed or modulated through the shifts
in articulation sketched here. [3] These articulations, modulations, and
intensifications are organized around (but not determined by) technological
regimes. The relationship between the individual and the dividual, for example,
is intelligible as the difference between the world rendered mechanically or
thermodynamically and the world rendered digitally—a shift that reframes
Deleuze’s comments about the signature technologies of sovereignty, discipline,
and control in epistemic terms.
2. Technology
Considered in isolation, “machines don’t explain anything” (Deleuze 1995a,
175); rather, they “express the social forms capable of producing them and
making use of them” (Deleuze 1995b, 180). At the same time, the “language” of
discipline can be specified as “analogical,” while control operates through
languages that are “digital (although not necessarily binary)” (1995b, 178). So
analogue and digital, while associated with certain classes of machine, must be
understood to exceed the technical registers that shape them and to function as
conceptual operators within discursive-material fields (which might include
systems of production, management, and regulation). With this in mind, how
might one derive a non-deterministic theory of the relationship between
technology, power, and economy from the control texts? This question lurks in
the background of the “Postscript on Control Societies,” and it constitutes one
of the most telling ways in which that text can be read as an encrypted theory
of historical method as well as a diagram of a specific period.
As is suggested at the end of the preceding section, the shift in scale from
the door of the enclosure to the gate of the logic circuit circles around a
technological development, but is also comes to undergird epistemological
claims about fundamental categories such as thinking, the human, and sociality.
And, as the discussion of discipline and biopolitics at the end of the
preceding section suggests, the historical, concept-generating function of
technology that Deleuze sketches with his claim about “collective apparatuses”
impedes linear periodization by implementing a recursive temporality: specific
technologies give concrete form to collective social forces that precede them,
and in so doing intensify and reorient these forces, coming to function as what
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) calls “epistemic things.” In other words, a
specific technology might come to concretize and exemplify the abstractions
undergirding a given political-economic regime, but it does so by securing or
amplifying certain conceptual structures or operations that logically and
historically precede it, as well as by reorienting concepts and facilitating
new practices and relations that point (again, for better and worse) towards
different sociopolitical arrangements. For example, as Bernhard Siegert (2012,
2015) shows, the door permits a body to pass through when it is open, thus both
expressing and securing the inside/outside distinction (and, by extension, the
logic of disciplinary power), whereas the logic gate permits a signal to pass
through only when it is closed, thus securing a conceptual system that permits
conceptual mixtures of inside and outside, and human and nonhuman, that
exemplify distinctive regimes of accumulation and management.
This recursive theorization of technology as product, expression, and shifter
of social forces is one of the moments at which continuities between the
control texts and Deleuze’s earlier collaborations with Guattari become most
overt. Consider the similarities between the “collective apparatuses” of which
machines form one element and the “social machine” that Deleuze and Guattari
identify in their book on Kafka:
a machine is never simply technical. Quite the contrary, it is technical only
as a social machine, taking men and women into its gears, or, rather, having
men and women as part of its gears along with things, structures, metals,
materials. Even more, Kafka doesn’t think only about the conditions of
alienated, mechanized labor—he knows all about that in great, intimate
detail—but his genius is that he considers men and women to be part of the
machine not only in their work but even more so in their adjacent activities,
in their leisure, in their loves, in their protestations, in their
indignations, and so on (1986, 81).
This claim, which is redolent of the “social factory” thesis advanced by Mario
Tronti and taken up by many subsequent writers, makes it clear that “collective
apparatuses” centered on technology include concepts, systems of management,
and normative ways of living as well as procedures of extraction, definition,
and occlusion. The mechanical factory of “gears,” “structures,” “metals,” and
“materials” is one such apparatus, and it is imbricated with specific
orientations of “leisure,” “loves,” ”protestations,” and so on. What kinds of
orientation center on computation?
In Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Franklin 2015) I tracked some of the
ways in which the electronic digital computer functions both as a specific
device and as a source of ideas and metaphors within the shifting social and
economic imaginaries of capitalism. The genealogy I posit moves through the
imbrications of computation and socioeconomic imagination in Charles Babbage’s
interrelated work on computing engines, theology, and political economy in the
1830s, Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machines of the 1890s, and the diffusion
of computer metaphors following the emergence of the multi-discipline formation
of cybernetics from the 1940s onwards. Following this, I trace some of the ways
in which these imaginaries become visible in economic theories, systems of
accumulation, production, and circulation, management styles, psychology
(including mid-twentieth century developments in psychoanalysis and later
practices such as NLP), literature, and film. Across these analyses I focus on
the ways in which the articulations of human and (computing) machine, sociality
and (computer) network, produce normative visions that cleave ever closer to
the insistent but impossible ideal of capital as a logic that promises to
integrate the entirety of the social without remainder. As I attempted to show
in that book, there are a number of places in which one can look for images of
the collective apparatuses fantasized under celebratory and critical accounts
of control. The prehistory of computing machines and their projected
applications to workplace organization, value extraction, and population
management is one. The Macy Conferences of 1946-1953 are another. The TCP/IP
suite and Google’s PageRank and AdSense technologies are others (Pasquinelli
2009). And production and recruitment manifestos from the Toyota Production
System to the Netflix “culture code” are yet others. But one can also look to
an earlier project associated more than any other with the practice of
disciplinary power.
Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 essay “Panopticon, or, The Inspection House” begins with
a grand announcement: “Morals reformed—health preserved—industry
invigorated—public burdens lighted—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the
gordian knot of the poor laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in
architecture!” Resisting the oft-repeated distinction between discipline and
biopower, Bernhard Siegert takes the universality of this claim as an
opportunity to locate an unexamined genealogy of digital-social technologies
that, perhaps surprisingly, includes the disciplinary technologies of
panopticon and penny post as well as the nascent computing machines theorized
and developed by Babbage and Ada Lovelace. “The Panopticon was applicable to
every kind of bio-politics,” Siegert writes of Bentham’s pronouncement, because
on it, like on the penny post and the analytical engine, “contents and
applications were programs that ran (or would run)” only because “such machines
were blind to them” (Siegert 1999, 126-127). This leads him to a theorization
of power that is compelling for thinking through the historical logic of
technology that the control texts insist upon:
That the machine or power became abstract, Deleuze has said, merely meant that
it became programmable. But power itself became machinelike in the process. The
rationality of power—functionality or universality—requires the prior
standardization of the data it processes—via postage stamps or punch cards, it
makes no difference…Disciplinary machine, postal machine, adding machine: after
their interconnection was established, bodies, discourses, and numbers were one
and the same with regard to the technology of power: data, and as such,
contingent (Siegert 1999, 127).
The central figure here is not enumeration but abstraction. In Siegert’s
account one finds a description of the disciplinary technology par excellence
in which the latter appears not as a thermodynamic machine (in line with
Deleuze’s periodization) but as a digital information processor which functions
through abstraction, remains structurally indifferent to the specifics of the
purpose to which it is turned, and thus formats its human subjects as unmarked
inputs and/or outputs. His theorization emphasizes the necessity for analyses
of technology and culture to take into account the conceptual operations that
both undergird and extend out of particular machines, connecting them, in often
surprising ways, to past devices and practices as well as to current and future
formations.
Siegert does not speak of the value form in his theorization of panopticon,
penny post, and computing machine as abstract machines of power, but the
resonance between his account and that most central of Marxian concepts is
pronounced. With this provocation in mind, the theorization of technology
Deleuze sets out in the “Postscript” is suggestive of some compelling direction
for the integration of media theory and history within studies of economy and
governmentality. Siegert’s work on cultural techniques (2015) will prove useful
here, as might the writing of Friedrich Kittler, Cornelia Vismann, Sybille
Krämer, Wolfgang Ernst, Markus Krajewski, and others. Equally, Galloway’s work
on François Laruelle (2014) points towards ways in which historically and
geographically specific modes of thought constitute a relationship between
modernity and digitality long before and far away from the electronic digital
computer. Amplified through these later media-theoretical interventions, the
mode of historical analysis diagrammed in the “Postscript” invites one to
consider the ways in which investigations into cultural techniques, the
materiality of signifying systems, the conceptual character of digitality, and
the concept-generating function of technologies might intersect with analyses
of capitalism in ways that can illuminate the complexities of the post-1970s
period in which Marxian analysis appears both especially vital and incessantly
troubled by transformations in regimes of labor, value extraction, and
accumulation.
3. Economy
Deleuze underscores the discursive effects of “information technologies and
computers” by insisting that such devices are “deeply rooted in a mutation of
capitalism” (1995b, 180). This mutation, he notes, “has been widely summarized”
(1995b, 180); its effects can be seen in the movement towards the
service-based, reticular ideals of production and distribution touched upon in
the opening passages of this essay. As Deleuze puts it, the distinguishing
features of movement results in a dispersed mode of value extraction under
which the most visible Global North businesses seek to sell “services” and buy
“activities,” directing their activities towards “sales or markets” rather than
the production of goods (1995b, 181). These shifts constitute another vector
along which one might set out a periodization theory—the movement from
production to “metaproduction” (1995b, 181), or, from Fordism to post-Fordism.
This shift is directly correlated to the emergence of what is often termed a
neoliberal logic of competition that is theorized by scholars such as Wendy
Brown as “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and
social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player” (Brown
2003, n.p.). As Deleuze notes, one of the outcomes of the economic shifts with
which control is associated is the injection of “an inexorable rivalry
presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals
against each other and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within
himself” (1995b, 179). Across the pages of the “Postscript” the economic
practices associated with control are said to: emerge in relation to computer
technologies; function within (a mutated) capitalism; limn the contours of the
dominant economic models of the day (many of which are often theorized by
orthodox Marxian scholars as subsidiary or even antithetical to the
production-centered tenets of capitalism); and intersect with a mode of
governmentality and sense-training. That Deleuze presents these practices as
part of the same historical regime shows that the economic logic that he
associates with of control societies cannot be thought through without also
addressing a number of other historical frames, several of which function
across quite different durations and contexts. As stated at the outset, it may
be that the imposition of this multi-threaded, incommensurable historical
method is the real endowment passed on by Deleuze via the control texts.
“Today,” Deleuze stated in a 1995 interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, “I can
say I feel completely Marxist. The article I have published on the ‘society of
control,’ for example, is completely Marxist, yet I write about things that
Marx did not know” (1995c). If the “Postscript” is “completely Marxist” then it
is remarkable for the challenges it poses to classical Marxist categories of
historical analysis. Perhaps this is most overt in the theorization of
spatio-temporal dispersion, the movement from the “body” of the factory to
businesses that are a “soul” or “gas” (1995b, 179), the account of the movement
of art away from “closed sites” and into “the open circuits of banking,”
(1995b, 181), and the baleful description of “speech and communication”
becoming “thoroughly permeated” by “money” (1995a, 175). Each of these
phenomena resonates with recent theorizations that rest on and extend Marx’s
concept of real subsumption (Marx 1994, 93-116). In Hardt and Negri’s exemplary
version of such an extension, real subsumption describes nothing less than the
total enclosure of society by capital. For example, they write that:
[w]ith the real subsumption of society under capital…capital has become a
world. Use value and all the other references to values and processes of
valorization that were conceived to be outside the capitalist mode of
production have progressively vanished. Subjectivity is entirely immersed in
exchange and language, but that does not mean it is now pacific. Technological
development based on the generalization of the communicative relationships of
production is a motor of crisis, and productive general intellect is a nest of
antagonisms (2000, 386).
This notion of real subsumption far exceeds that found in Marx’s writing, where
it describes the processes through which commodity production is restructured
in order to maximize efficiency, for example by increasing the proportion of
production that is automated by machinery (a process described as an increase
in the organic composition of capital). [4] An outcome of this procedure is a
general decrease in the surplus labor congealed in a given commodity (a process
Marx describes in terms of a decrease in absolute surplus value extraction) and
rising unemployment, all of which, lead to a decline in profit derived from
commodity production and make it necessary for new sources of value to be
sought in the sphere of reproduction. The practices and theories glossed by the
term ‘neoliberalism’ might all be understood as responses to this process. The
phenomena that Guy Debord theorizes in The Society of the Spectacle furnish
other examples, as does the exponential growth of the tertiary (service)
sector. None of these regimes of extraction are evenly distributed;
participation is subject to processes of gendering and racialization, related
constructions of physical and cognitive capacity, and other procedures for
selecting whose attention, rationality, and affective capacities should be
defined as valorizable, and in which ways. As such, the notion that real
subsumption progressively integrates that which exists outside the capitalist
mode of production is impossible; indeed, the clean distinction between inside
and outside that would make such a movement possible is shown to be
antithetical to the logic of capital.
As Rosa Luxemburg writes, capitalism “depends in all respects on non-capitalist
strata and social organizations existing side by side with it” (2003, 345). The
essential role played by so-called ‘non-productive’ domestic labor (childbirth
and child rearing, cooking cleaning) in the reproduction of labor power is
perhaps the most obvious example of this. With this in mind, for real
subsumption to be functional in concert with any periodization theory the
notion of a process through which capital in all senses encircles “the world”
must be replaced with specific, materialist examinations of the dynamics of
inside and outside, representation and occlusion, and integration and
suspension that are imbricated with the transformations collected under the
ideas of post-industrial or post-Fordist production. In the “fully Marxist”
pages of the “Postscript” Deleuze insists that one account for both sides of
this dialectic: on the one hand, he tracks the shifts in labor relations and
accumulation detailed above (e.g. in the shift from the factory to the
business, from goods to services, and so on); on the other hand, he makes it
clear that the forms of dispersal and modulation that characterize these shifts
are secured against the “three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, too
poor to have debts and too numerous to be confined” (1995b, 181). Extending
this relation beyond Deleuze’s sketch, today one might observe that racialized
and gendered surplus populations serve as proxy, object, or raw material within
some of the newer modes of accumulation, from the “commodified life” of inmates
in private prisons and detention centers (Tadiar 2012) to the forms of service,
surrogacy, and outsourced labor that are understood not to generate value
directly but to facilitate the valorization and reproduction of other, more
directly valorizable lives (Vora 2015).
In the end, it is this dialectical, materialist impulse that grounds the
movement between ‘clean’ periodization and the coexistence of unmatched and
even conflicting areas of inquiry within the “Postscript.” Tracking the
techniques and technologies of dispersed sovereignty, mapping the affordances
and discursive implications of computing machines, and itemizing the emerging
dynamics of an economy without commodities are all necessary endeavors. But the
analysis of sociopolitical distribution must take into account the persistence
of violent corralling, much of which now operates through for-profit providers
and the legal and discursive framing of prisoners and detainees as nonhuman.
The analysis of computer media must remain attentive to the historicity and
materiality of devices, their users, and the people that labor, often
precariously and in deleterious conditions, to produce them; it must also
address the ways in which all of these are abstracted, in the same way but with
quite different implications, by the cultural and technical operations of the
media in question. And, for now at least, the analysis of ‘immaterial’ economic
formations must think these relations in relation to the persistence of older
modes and against newer but less widely discussed methods for the violent
extraction of value from human life, many of which are also presented as
services. The radical promise of periodization lies in its capacity to
provisionally impose a set of historical markers against which one can 1)
capture and measure interactions between abstractions and concrete sociality
while also 2) registering the ways in which those interactions produce a
surplus that exceeds or is too faint to register within those markers. Since
abstraction, capture, and measuring are themselves expressions of the social
relations whose changing articulations are registered in the passage designated
as that from discipline to control, the impossibility of absolutely clean
periodization is as important as—and registers the critical value of—the
diagnostic utility that periodization affords.
-------------------------------------------------------
Seb Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at King’s College London,
where he co-convenes the MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory. He
is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (MIT Press, 2015).
Notes
[1] It is possible to identify a larger archive of texts that, while not naming
control as such, certainly examine the same historical tendencies; see the
chapter “7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 424-473)
and the appendix to (Deleuze 1999, 102-110).
[2] This argument can be extended to other discursive formations that operate
in the present. For example, one can follow Jord/ana Rosenberg and take the
molecule rather than the logic gate as the exemplary epistemic object in order
to examine a different valence of the contemporary moment (Rosenberg 2014).
[3] On the systemic practice and occlusion of slavery in supply chains see
http://eureka.sbs.ox.ac.uk/5847/1/REVISED_MSSCaproofed1format.pdf
[4] For a rigorous account of real subsumption as it pertains to periodization
see (Endnotes 2010).
References
Brown, Wendy. 2003. “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory
and Event 7:1.
Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: on the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Bentham, Jeremy. 1843. “Panopticon, or, the Inspection-House,” in The Works of
Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 4. Edinburgh: William Tait.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995a. “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin
Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995b. “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations,
trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995c. “Le ‘Je me souviens’ de Gilles Deleuze,” Le Nouvel
Observateur, 16-22 November.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. “Having an Idea in Cinema,” trans. Eleanor Kaufman, in
Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed.
Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Foucualt, trans. Seán Hand. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Endnotes. 2010. “The History of Subsumption,” Endnotes 2.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume I, trans. Robert
Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de
France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey. London: Allen Lane.
Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de
France 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Franklin, Seb. 2015. Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Galloway, Alexander R. 2004. Protocol: How Control Exists After
Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Galloway, Alexander R. 2014. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003. The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild.
London, New York: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1996. Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Richard Dixon, in Karl Marx Frederick
Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35. London; Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, Karl. 1994. Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, trans, Ben Fowkes, in Karl
Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 34. London; Lawrence and Wishart.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture
15:1.
Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2009. “Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive
Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect,” in Deep Search, ed. Konrad
Becker, Felix Stalder. London: Transaction Publishers.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Towards a History of Epistemic Things:
Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rosenberg, Jordana. 2014. “The Molecularization of Sexuality,” Theory and Event
17:2.
Siegert, Bernhard. 1999. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System,
trans. Kevin Repp. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Siegert, Bernhard. 2012. “Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic,” trans.
John Durham Peters, Grey Room 47.
Siegert, Bernhard. 2015. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other
Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Tadiar, Neferti X.M. 2012. “Life-Times in Fate Playing,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 111:4.
Vora, Kalindi. 2015. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced
Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
