CONTROL SOCIETIES – DELEUZE

Time-Binding and Time-Scrambling

ANNOTATION

|…| Deleuze, Gilles, “Postscript on Control Societies” in, Negotiations, Columbia University Press, 1975 p.177-182

EXTRACT

|…| Rushton, Steve, “Playing Dead”, In, Experience, Memory, Reenactment, Bangma, Rushton, Wust (eds.), Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam /Revolver, Frankfurt, 2005 pp.87-88:

“According to Gilles Deleuze, the shift towards societies of control is underway and, as with previous shifts, the change is stratified – elements of the past persist in the present. The structural change, however, centers on the idea that in control societies we are controlled by codes that give us access to, or bar us from, information. This is in contrast to Michel Foucault’s disciplinary societies, which were governed by precepts – rules of form that confined individuals to particular places: factories, schools and prisons – that guided their actions. What distinguishes societies of control from disciplinary societies, therefore, is that they are deterritorialized and digital, they are not based on production but rather on the provision of services to those with the appropriate code – or to those who have been encoded (as with the prisoner who has been fitted with a tagging device). The site of control, in control societies, is not a particular place (like the secret lair of the Bond villain or NASA’s Mission Control), but is rather a matrix of sites to which the position of the subject of control [at informational intersections] can be related. In the society of discipline the eye is disembodied but the subject is situated; in the society of control the eye is disembodied and the subject, rather than being situated, is encoded.”