Postscript on the Societies of Control - Gilles

Deleuze
In this short essay Deleuze looks to move beyond Michel Foucaults historical understanding of
disciplinary societies, where power is exercised within discrete institutions, towards the concept of
'societies of control'. In many ways it parallels the ideas of the Italian radical left around the concept
of the social factory, providing an intersection between post-structuralist philosophy and
autonomist Marxism.
1. Historical
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach
their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure.
The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own
laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you
are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the
pre-eminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical
model: at the sight of some labourers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I
thought I was seeing convicts."
Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly
visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a
productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its
component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it
succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite
different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life);
the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from
one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new
forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society
was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure - prison, hospital,
factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors - scholarly,
professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary
reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone
knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a
matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the
new forces knocking at the door.
These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies.
"Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault
recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of
free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system.

There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular

engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is
no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and
enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of
enclosure, neighbourhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but
they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of
confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.
2. Logic
The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are
independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common
language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control
mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of
which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings,
but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one
moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.
This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at
the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of
wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a
spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the
corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual
metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most
idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation
with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of
the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass
resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of
emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs
through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not
failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory,
perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination.
Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.
In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the
barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the
corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one
and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had
already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the
most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two
incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation)
are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because
we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the
signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates
his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility
between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is,

constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each
member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the
priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make
itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer
either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand
disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as
from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to
information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair.
Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is
money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred
back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates
of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old
monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of
control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system
under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The
disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in
orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.
Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining,
but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. 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. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of
capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows:
nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It
therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of
production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the
worker's familial house, the school).
As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization,
sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer
involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of
textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys
raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles
parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a
capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is
essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the
army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner - state
or private power - but coded figures - deformable and transformable - of a single corporation that
now has only stockholders.
Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. 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. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become
the centre or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the
most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control
and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover,
but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and
discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has
retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too
numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the
explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.
3. Program
The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open
environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an
electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where
one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighbourhood, 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.
The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have
to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary
sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed
from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary
modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the
attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars
that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. 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. For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out
potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but
substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In
the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through
the old factory form.
These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant
by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new
system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the
unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of
enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance
against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms,
capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being
"motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover
what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of
the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

Originally published in the journal OCTOBER 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 37.