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Title: One Analysis of Control Societies Author: Cherfa Date: 09/12/2020 Language: en Topics: Deleuze, postmodernity, post-industrial, post-structuralism, automation, neoliberalism, collapse Source: https://arlandasunsets.wordpress.com/control/
It was like the printing press all over again. Democratic streams of
information suddenly pierced through those archaic dams, vain
constructions of the affluent, a waning elite, and the âsystemâ cracked;
rotting scholasticism in medieval universities, decaying industrial
capitalism throughout the First World (and a perceived
state-bureaucratic cognate in the Second World). One now looks at the
former with the mild antiquarian curiosity of an amateur fossil
collector, and it will take little time before the same is true of the
latter. As the counterculture of the 1960s gentrified into the
cyberculture of the 1980s, a new assemblage of mythical figures arrives
on stage (Gates, Musk, Bezos, ect...), the Neo-Gutenberg; on a mission
to set information free, to let the transistor rip. The âSystemâ may
have outsmarted Lenin, Mao and the IWW, but the personal computer would
mark its downfall.
Almost half a century has passed since the Information Age began.
Yesterdayâs hackers are todayâs CEOs; attempts to connect the globe have
transmuted into colossal for-profit data harvesting schemes at best,
carbon copies of brutal primitive accumulation at worst; the whole
complemented by looming backdrops, lexicons of absolute climate
annihilation. Occasionally, some whistleblower emerges, and exposes the
misdeeds of the digital corporation, or perhaps even the war crimes of a
state, enacted within an endless war; all are outraged, most continue
business as usual, because, for the first time in recent memory, the
machines that repress us do so not via limitations on our potential
range of choices, but instead via expansions. One has been given the
ability to search every nook and cranny of an all-encompassing global
network, yet one cannot make use of it without being monitored, encoded,
divided, and harvested by its administrators. Every night, a stateless
dividual burns the blue light of the sharing economy straight into their
jaded retinas, and produces a service, fully detached from any
imaginable relation to reality: they do not go âhomeâ after work,
because they are never quite finished with work, and thus must never
stop working. Computers may have cracked the claustrophobic environments
of modernity, and yet they seem to have ushered in a darker form of
power; one that is not only far more insidious in its current form than
earlier iterations, but also one that functions as a warning
flareâforecasting a repression unwitnessed since pre-liberal despotism.
Such a turn of events naturally leaves us with a handful of possible
responses. One could double down on a reactionary past, through
populism, a capitalist past (the post-war welfare state, the End of
History), or even a leftist past (vanguards, syndicalism). One might
even give up on any delusion of political transformation, and instead
reluctantly settle for subverting the system, meekly renouncing any
hopes of smashing it; subverting it from the position of all things it
has yet to control. Cyberpunk, the CCRU, identity politics; many in
academia did so. But it is not the path their predecessor took.
A year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, LâAutre Journal
published an essay by philosopher Gilles Deleuze named Postscript on the
Societies of Control, building on concepts from Foucaultâs earlier
seminal text, Discipline and Punish. No other essay in recent memory has
managed to be so ahead of its time, to demonstrate such a sober and
lucid awareness of what the future holds for us; one where discipline
gives in to control, where power finally transcends this set of panoptic
systems it no longer requires to reproduce itself, where little is left
of the line that once separated freed choice and repression. We now
bathe inâorbit around a quasi-anarchic array of global circuits, that
have levelled the old ways of doing things, the schools, the prisons,
the factories; each is converging towards obsolescence in Deleuzeâs
analysis, and with several decades of hindsight this has only been made
clearer, both through the material realities of political economy and
the contemporary paralogisms of culture-production. Playing no small
part is the urgency of the task at hand: new institutions require new
forms of resistance, and these new forms of resistance must have the
same rigorous understanding of what they are up against as the old
anti-disciplinaries did. A form of praxis adapted to our context will
need to be effective in dissolving vertical power-structures and in
erecting the foundations of new horizontal potential; in this respect,
Deleuze prepares us for both a renewed struggle, adapted to rapidly
shifting institutions, and a constructivism of better worlds; with just
enough lucidity as to avoid itself turning into the next iteration of
power. And so, an analysis of control societies; decomposition of the
assemblages behind control and their underlying logic, a look at their
applied manifestations in financial, carceral, medical, and educational
institutions, alongside the critical material conditions that embedded
them into current world-structures.
It is worth, for those unfamiliar, summarizing the Foucaudian analysis
of disciplinary societies, or at least the way it is interpreted by
Deleuze, before proceeding to examining control societies. Disciplinary
society exerts both productive and repressive power (here productive and
repressive do not convey any moral connotations; there are positive and
negative examples of each) through an intimate relationship to
knowledge. Its fundamental structures are enclosed environments, each
with their own civil texts, modelled by analogy on incarceration: one
enters the educational system, then the military (or the household in
the case of cisgender women), then the industrial factory, with
irregular stops at the hospital, or perhaps the prison. Every stage of
life within a disciplinary society involves starting from scratch; since
new manifestations of power implies a new set of knowledge, in an
unfamiliar environment with a particular objective: to organise and
administer masses of potential energy (of which the atom is the
individual human subject) that form something greater than the sum of
their parts. It is no mere coincidence that the first machines making
use of energy, emerging from the Industrial Revolution, were key
features of discipline. But this is not all. In its most known iteration
(Discipline and Punish), the disciplinary blueprint is not only
rigorously analysed by Foucault, but also shown to be contingent, and
far less ânaturalâ than its advocates pretend. And in order to achieve
this, Foucault contrasted discipline with an anterior model. The
societal model of sovereignty preceding it did not use the same
constituents, nor did it have the same objectives; there was little
intention to organise production, but rather to tax it. Nor did the
feudal lords, or the early Leviathans, have any intention of
administering and organizing life: on the contrary, they were quite
content to rule on death. The things that made up a society of
discipline, prisons, policing, panopticism, academic examination; none
are eternal to society or intrinsic to humankind, but all fulfilled a
similar function. To carefully mold our individuality, to manipulate
both the dynamics of restless urban masses and the bodies of individuals
that constituted said masses; in short, to split the line of normality
and abnormality, not through the crude force of an antiquated Despot,
but through the very malleability and clustering of his subjects.
Fast forward to the limit of the 20^(th) century: both models previously
described are converging towards obsolescence. There are whispers of
âreformâ everywhere, archaic colonial relations are disintegrating, the
Trentes Glorieuses soon hit a hard limit. And nothing changes at once.
Nothing ever changes at once. But things begin fading from sight, the
worn-down apparatchiks, the industrial zones, the revolutionary vigour
of Mai 68. Year by year, the cement of new relations starts setting;
Thatcher and Reagan shackle syndicalism, and industrial production
hurtles towards the Global South. In short, control societies behave
radically differently than discipline. We no longer deal with enclosed
systems, but open environments where oneâs position is tracked
numerically. This has been made possible because the machines that
sustain our contemporary mode of production are no longer industrial
apparatuses processing energy analogically: they have been replaced by
computers, which process information numerically, and are inherently
open systems once connected to the Internet. They are environments of
variable size, because they transcend the tightly packed spaces of
disciplinary locations: a computer is a medium enabled to store an
unprecedented quantity of signifier-signified pairings, pairings which,
under the administration of discipline, were once taxonomised and
separated; yet are now entangled on a global scale and derive their
meaning from worldwide semiotic traces. Analogical energy was the kernel
of discipline, a kernel revolving around two poles: the individual and
the massâthe former is referred to through the use of a signature unique
to him, whilst his position within a mass is indicated by an
administrative number. Circumscriptions had existed in France since
absolutism (a period where the state mediated conflict between an
aristocracy of sovereignty and a relatively disciplinary bourgeoisie),
but it was the abolition of feudalism during the Revolution which
created the current départements we know today, where territory is
divided into numbered administrative divisions. Before computers, it was
common to see bored children on excruciatingly long car rides, having
memorised each departemental number, identifying which area the
neighbouring cars came from, in bureaucratic fashion, as it was then
mandatory to put oneâs home department on the license plate. In
contrast, control society abandons the signature and administrative
numeration in favour of cryptography: numerical codes, passwords, rather
than âdisciplinary watchwordsâ. Deleuze references money to
differentiate the two societal models, comparing the minted money of
discipline, which latches its value onto physical gold (the Gold
Standard), to the free-floating exchange rates of modern fiat
currencyâbut this also extends to the idea of obsolete signatures and
emerging passcodes. To make counterfeiting as difficult as possible,
both paper money and coins must be unique, signed by the government
issuing it (in the same sense that an individualâs administrative
signature must be a unique pattern). Yet with the development of
information technology, this signature was no longer effective, and a
new mechanism would be required to maintain control over the money
supply. Ever since 1996, a pattern of symbols known as the EURion
constellation can be seen on virtually all banknotes, and color printers
(alongside programs such as Adobe Photoshop) block copying attempts if
they detect this pattern: what protects money and stops counterfeit is
no longer a signature, but a code/pattern that, once detected, denies
access and cuts off a flow of information. In recent memory, this has
been taken even further with the advent of cryptocurrency, a form of
money that has no disciplinary central bank, no one central financial
institution issuing it: each transaction is recorded in a continuous
blockchain, and coins are transferred by signing a hash (cryptographic
hash function) which contains both previous transactions and the public
key of the next owner. The entire process is designed to keep third
party institutions out of all transactions, and it does so through
codeâone must not be misled by the use of the term âsignatureâ in the
bitcoin white paper, as it is actually a digitised password, rather than
the traditional signature of discipline. Encryption has created a system
beyond the reach of disciplinary finance, and yet it would be misleading
to believe that we have been freed from the rigid domination of a
central bank; in reality a new elite will soon fulfill the same
function. The security of the blockchain may very well be breached,
relatively soon, through the technique of quantum computing: one which,
at time of writing, has reportedly only yielded practical results
(practical meaning calculations realistically impossible for a standard
supercomputer) in one instance, overseen by Google. By the time those
busy celebrating the demise of archaic financial institutions come to
their senses, it seems that new administrators will already be in place,
ready to track their positions.
If cryptography replaces the signature, codes replace watchwords, it is
only then logical to ask how the individual/mass distinction shifts
following the advent of control society. Tackling the first half of this
binary, Deleuze states that âindividuals have become dividuals...â. We
will soon no longer have any signatures that define us, nor an
administrative key, that allows discipline to locate us within a mass.
If the signature was superseded by passwords and codes, and the
signature once represented the individual, then there is only one
logical conclusion: the individual is no longer the atom of society.
They are instead divided further, into even smaller encoded
constituents. A signature is analogical, and can exist at virtually any
spatial perspective, yet a numerical code quantises, and leaves no room
outside of the finite glyphs that constitute it. Hexadecimal systems,
ASCII, or even Unicode; all codes can be reduced to a 2-base system, one
where only zero and one are possible, and if sections of the individual
do not tightly pack into the limits of such a system, if a certain
contiguous nuance cannot be satisfyingly expressed in the digital, then
it is discardedâwe are left with the aliased dividual; with incomplete
data loss and surplus artefacts. The property rights to your ontological
being are split between various parties: search engines own your online
presence (âyou are what you searchâ), banks own your credit score,
medical institutions are the proprietors of your genetic risk factors.
There is a shift from relations and motion, the thermodynamic actors of
discipline, to static essentialized identities: continuity, which is
formally defined by relating f(c) to the limit of f(x) as x approaches c
(and thus, because of the character of limits, implies a type of kinetic
operation, always getting closer and closer, âapproachingâ), is replaced
by discrete approximations: first difference, running sum, static
numbers. Instead of regulating a continuous thermodynamic cluster, they
regulate access to information: yes or no, and this not only applies to
artificial codes, but biological ones as well. What was once considered
to be an inalienable essence of the individual, the genome; productive
forces now have the ability to splice, cut, edit this code through Cas9,
CRISPR gene-editing, and the consequences of such operations shall play
a crucial role in advanced control societies. Previous combat techniques
focused excessively on mastering disciplinary energy, culminating in the
two world wars with the advent of chemical, biological and nuclear
warfare (WMDs); yet the first paradigm shifts already hinted at
something new on the horizon. Whilst science fictionâin many ways the
anterior mythology of controlâwas fashioning the future genetic
supersoldier, the last sputters of the 1945 war cycle were already
demonstrating the obsolescence of energy; the arrival of information.
Baudrillard, in his famously provocative piece The Gulf War Did Not Take
Place, outlines how a state-sponsored imperial atrocity was artificially
modelled into a âwarâ, through media-oriented simulations, repurposings
of war footage, and the intentional withdrawal of information from the
public sphere in the aims of legitimating military invasion. War was no
longer a Clausewitzian âduel on a larger scaleâ, where state-sponsored
belligerents amass clusters of potential energy and weaponize them in
the aims of politically destroying each other: it became a computer
game, a show of videos, images, flashing headlines. And its collective
actors, which were once âthermodynamicâ mass armies, had morphed on a
societal scale. âSamples, data, markets, or banksâ: whichever one
trialled, old logic was running out.
For the most part, all of what we have discussed so far has been
relatively abstract. What actually happens to the institutions of
discipline after the transition to control is underway? A worldwide set
of protests following the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd by white
police officers has brought the question of police and prison abolition
to the forefront once more, but what kinds of systems shall replace
these disciplinary institutions? Such a question does not stem from the
same malicious intentions as those of the right-wing blockheads also
asking it, whoâin bad faithâseem to believe that police forces and
carceral punishment precede the Big Bang itself. Rather it stems from a
different concern, a much more legitimate one: will the abolition of
police and prisons (something more than likely to happen at some point
in time) be a triumph for freedom or its downfall? In the 1960s, a group
of researchers at Harvard created a penal system they named âbehavior
transmitter-reinforcerâ, which transmitted data from a base-station
antenna to volunteers carrying portable transceivers, simulating âyoung
adult offendersâ. Initially suffering from a lack of interest (the
federal government of the 1970s had found an alternative of notable
discipline; mass incarceration), electronic tagging would kick off its
first commercial applications in the 1980s, when a former sales
representative of Honeywell Information Systems, Michael T. Goss,
created NIMCOS, or National Incarceration Monitor and Control Services.
Today, ankle monitoring based on GPS-technology is used by all fifty
states, the district of Columbia, and the federal government of the
United States to track (and at times constrict) the movements of
pretrial convicts. The same applies to those on probation. If the more
abstract characteristics of control involved a shift towards states of
limbo (never being finished with something; perpetually soft rebooting,
rather than fully completing a sequence of institutions and starting
over from scratch with each), then the fact that this new punishment is
reserved for ambiguous convictsâthose awaiting their trial or on
probationâspeaks volumes to the nature of new control mechanisms within
the criminal justice system. Electronic monitoring has also been used in
many other countries, for things such as house arrest (once again, the
line between closed disciplinary environments, the house and the prison,
fades from view): ironically enough, one of the biggest companies to
provide electronic monitoring, GEO group, also happens to operate the
largest network of private prisons in the world, including many
detention centers operated by ICE, who have themselves deployed GPS
tracking in seven workplace raids against âillegalâ immigrants. Some
anticipate the technology to be able to analyse patterns of the offender
deemed âsuspiciousâ, and predict criminal behaviour; a terrifyingly
evident instance of panopticism, and yet the one surveilling is no
longer a signed human subject. Things have shifted, and are already
emerging on the other side of the Atlantic: after years of trial in
South Wales, Londonâs Metropolitan Police has deployed AI-based facial
recognition technology, targeted towards âspecific locations⊠where
intelligence suggests [...] most likely to locate serious offendersâ.
The potential biases in both selected locations to survey and datasets
used to train the neural networks are painstakingly obvious, yet once
again we are presented with a solution to traditional discipline. Why
use individual officers to survey a mass, when an artificial neural code
has rendered them obsolete? With humans, you had the inherent tension
between cognitive evolution and hard biological limits. But with neural
networks, virtually any cognitive structure is within reach.
The use of electronic tagging does not stop at carceral institutions, of
course. What of the other temples of discipline, the school, the
hospital? Those with dementia, once confined to the asylum, share the
fate of the pretrial convict, and are now being equipped with
GPS-tracking ankle devices, something which has garnered backlash, as
the practice has horrific consequences on both the victimâs health and
privacy. In Japan, some school-children wear uniforms and backpacks
equipped with a special âpanicâ button, which, once pressed, transmits
their geographical location to a security agent. A technique which, to
the surprise of none, resorts to electronic monitoring. And of course
one does not have to be a convict, a patient, or a student to be
geographically tagged; one only needs a smartphone with GPS-enabled
technology. Nor does one need to be diagnosed with dementia to
experience control within the realms of healthcareââOur current capital
intensive, hospital-centric model is unsustainable and ineffectiveâ, as
the World Economic Forum proclaims in their platform for the future of
health and healthcare: very well, what then shall replace it? Here our
triumphant avant-garde of the âFourth Industrial Revolutionâ prescribes
nothing short of dystopia: using an uncanny âdata-enabled delivery
systemâ to provide precision prevention and personalized care delivery,
two methods dependent on biological, behavioral, epidemiological and
socioeconomic data extracted straight from the individuals and groups
receiving care. The apparently laughable pipe dream of well-funded
public healthcare, a concession yet to be fully granted even amongst
developed countries, is conspicuously absent from the platform; instead
one hears of âpublic-private coalitionsâ, ânew models of
collaboration/partnershipâ. But let us return to the school: there are
other ways in which new paradigms affect educational institutions. In
the second part of the essay, Logic, Deleuze states that â...perpetual
training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace
the examination.â Here the English translation fails us rather
miserably: âcontinuous controlâ actually refers to âcontrĂŽle continuâ, a
practice in Education Nationale where the student is evaluated
continuously on his grades and averages, rather than on his performance
in a set final exam. As it would happen, the French government decided
in 2018 to undertake a massive (and controversial) overhaul of the
Baccalaureate, the national secondary-school diploma, one which
drastically increased the weight of continuous evaluationânow
representing a full 40% of the final grade; this in a supposed effort to
âmoderniseâ French education. No longer are there set academic
examinations, which function as neat borders between the subdivisions of
oneâs educational course. Other elements of the reform, such as the
suppression of prepackaged faculties in favor of a âfreerâ open system
where one chooses three specialised subjects, are evocative of control
as well; you no longer adhere to a carefully administered timetable
shared with a mass (your school class). The case of France is in part
mirrored by global reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of
distance learning, which has âfreedâ many students from the rigid
confines of a school buildingâand drastically increased learning
inequality. Before, your time at home was yours (setting homework
aside), and your time at school belonged to the state or private company
in charge of administration. At home, there seems to be no boundary
between the two; instead of committing to one and starting anew in the
other, one is never finished with either. VoIP services like Discord,
formerly providing âChat and text for gamersâ, have changed their motto
to âYour place to talkâ, and present an example chat on their login page
that shows students sharing history notes with each other. Everything is
entangled; nothing is separate, and this of course is quite conducive to
a system which fluctuates from energy to information: the first roots
itself in thermodynamics, whilst the second relates to signs, objects
long argued by post-structuralist semioticians to be circular,
self-referential, impossible to separate from each other, nor every
other. Whether it is the domain of the hospital, the school, carceral
punishment: connections multiply, and control dismantles the walls once
erected by the disciplinaries, brick by brick.
We have examined the fates of several disciplinary institutions as
control progressively takes over. Yet what exactly is driving this
process? What material conditions made it so that control would emerge
in the late 20^(th) century? Sovereignty had very simple machines;
Deleuze cites â...levers, pulleys, clocksâ, the first two being objects
that humans act upon mechanically, whilst the last one allows a human
(the clergy) to exercise sovereignty on others (calling the Third Estate
to prayer). Disciplineâs scientific advancements, which it traced back
to the Renaissance in retrospect, allowed it to produce machines capable
of distributing and administering analogical energy, and as the
remaining artefacts of sovereignty implied a âmachinicâ treatment of the
working class, the proletarian wage-labourer was transformed into a
discontinuous producer of energy. Here Silvia Federiciâs insights into
the turbulent and multi-faceted developments that birthed an industrial
capitalism out of tattered feudal ruins, rigorously developed in her
text Caliban and the Witch, are of paramount importance. The thousands
of disobedient wage-labourers and rebellious women brutally executed by
an emerging set of absolutists were, in their death, the first
anatomical samples; the body was mechanised, and many diagrams depict
various parts as machines (the arms as those aforementioned pulleys and
levers, for example). The burgeoning anatomists who ripped these bodies
apart form the arborescent roots of vicious feedback loops: the common
body functions as Machine, therefore its given image is Machine, and
because the anatomy of the common bodyâs image is machinic, it must
ânaturallyâ operate as Machine; so on and so for. With the zenith of
capitalist relations came commodified wage-labour, decoupled from any
potential relation to ecosystems: the clock became the supreme indicator
of time in lieu of the natural sky, as there was a newfound compulsion
to ârationaliseâ, equalize the schedule in opposition to natureânight
shifts, clock in. No more âunlucky daysâ; any superstition obstructing
the path towards productivity shall be purged by all and any means,
because productivity is no longer a means. It is the end-game. This
body-thought of the time was exemplified by two philosophers on each
side of the Channel, Descartes and Hobbes; the first drafts an ontology
where mind, a uniquely human function, must subjugate at all cost the
savage primitive body (an ontology not without its bells and whistles,
of course; all human minds are not created equal), whilst the second
develops an absolutist political framework to do so, one well adapted to
the early modern context. The polities of modernity all operate on the
same Cartesian plane, one concerned with two axes: geographical and
historical. The first draws a line in the sand; between a civilized (and
soon civilizing) Europe and the primitive outsides-spaces of barbary,
savagery, the Oriental despot. The second draws a line in cultural time,
and it does so in an undeniably contradictory manner: an opposition
between the enlightened secular humanism of âmodernityâ and an
obscurantist medieval âDark Ageâ. Year 1000. The Occident is plunged
into an overwhelming torpor. The eyes are too weary to throw curious
glances at their surroundings, the senses too exhausted to be awake. The
human spirit is annihilated as after a lethal illness, humanity wants no
longer to know of the world which belongs to It. Even more astonishing:
even what It knew, It has inexplicably forgotten. These words are taken
from Stefan Zweigâs Amerigo: Story of a historical error. But the
historical error in question is not the misattribution of the New World
to an eponymous explorer who never truly âdiscoveredâ the Americas: it
is an error of separation, when does what begin, when does what end? Do
the Dark Ages begin with the Roman collapse? There was no âRomanâ
collapse: Byzantium lived to see the Renaissance, and 153 years of it.
Did this latter period mark the beginnings of modernity? If so, one must
then ask âWhich renaissance?â: there were three in the span of the
Middle Ages alone, the Carolingian, Ottonian, and 12^(th) century
renaissances. Were these Middle Ages a manifestation of stale religious
dogma or divine theological harmony? Well, starting from Luther, it
depends which Church you ask. And crucially, what is it that
fundamentally differentiates Renaissance and Enlightenment in terms of
their actual function as the arborescent roots of modernity?
The question is one of intensities. Year 1007; the Latin word
âburgensisâ is first etched into a charter. Our seeds of modernity were
sowed by free serfs who had successfully escaped enclosures of the
feudal manor: those that live in the âboroughâ, legally known under the
Ancien RĂ©gime as the bourgeoisie. Each century, long or short, is a
increment in intensities: the humanist groundwork laid by the
Renaissance in the late 13^(th) and 14^(th) centuries (an ironically
regressive set of cartographies on Greco-Roman antiquity) is coupled to
an Age of Discovery, or the long 16^(th) century; the bourgeois latch
onto the Western Hemisphere and begin to erect world markets, they are
now an integral part of monarchical administration. The next pair of
intensifiers constitutes itself with both a theoretical draft and a
tangible mise en oeuvre: first Enlightenment (the 17^(th) and 18^(th)
centuries), then High Modernity (the long 19^(th) century, 1789â1914).
Coupled to the Reformation, our earlier motions had deterritorialized
religionâbut not politics: no Priest stood in between you and the Holy
Spirit, yet a reified King still stood between you and the political
state, and here lies that crucial difference: the merchants slip right
through the grip of sovereign forces, the absolutist state is no longer
sovereign enough to mediate the bourgeoisieâs interest, and, paired to
earlier scientific progress, the means of production are developed into
a veritable productive machine, a particularly social one. Itâs no
longer a question of operating a handful of serfs by the crass threat of
corporal punishment: the ones carrying the industrial complexâs weight
are now mechanical aggregates, and they arenât easy to administer. Kill
one to set a precedent, and you risk being outnumbered a thousand to
one; manage a thousand, and you steer an unfathomable amount of
alienated labour. But of course, you can only âmanageâ so much. And when
none of the bourgeois could manage anymore, when all possible means of
sublimating alienation had been exhausted from nationalistic jingoism to
colonial expansion, modernity slithered into its climax; a depravedly
âvalidâ logical conclusion. The ensuing century of hell that follows the
assasination of Franz Ferdinand is often mistakenly quantified by its
corpses, far in millions; a vain attempt, no amount of bodies could do
so satisfyingly. Thereâs no break between utilitarianism and the Shoah,
energetic and frenetic production reaches its execrable zenith in total
drab, paper is fashioned out of human skin, ripped from
Auschwitz-Birkenau, yet not for long; âthe costly chemicals required
render the whole endeavour unprofitable, and one mustnât tolerate what
is unprofitableâ. True, the Allies âwonâ, and our post-war geopolitical
blocs kept the game up for decades. But as the détente of the Cold War
turns into a burst of inevitable collapse for the East, the technology,
the changing mindsets: everything is already in place for something new.
Our technological axioms are the products of the Second Industrial
Revolution: widespread electrical power, synthetic chemicals,
semiconductor alloys jointly create a three-terminal device which
amplifies or cuts off a certain amount of electrical current: the
transistor. This first technological shift away from discipline, a
system which concerned itself only with aggregates of non-discrete
dynamic energy, relies on cutting off a flow, rather than administering
its properties or directions; youâre no longer on or in the continuous
domain of real numbers. Youâre either on or off: a two-element Galois
field, or modulo 2 arithmetic. Addition is a XOR gate (the sum of two
ones warps back to zero), multiplication is an AND gate (any null
operand leads to zero): you combine transistor-based versions of them to
form half-adders, and in turn combine those to form full-adders. Enough
circuits piled up and the result is a binary-based machine capable of
executing generalised sequences of arithmetic operations independently:
the rudimentary computer. With a bit of fine-tuning, and some already
well-established tech to complement, it becomes the ultimate
distribution mechanism for semiotic data: speakers, pixel screens,
keyboards, ect. And with the advent of the Internet, computers across
continents are now entangled in a dizzying array of networks. Before
this, the name of the game was administering flows of energy through
rigid schedules, standardisation, and panopticism: this shifts to a
process of controlling information flows, granting or denying access to
them, whenever necessary. Panopticism doesnât tell you whether youâre
under surveillance or not; technopticism never has to tell you that
youâre always under surveillance. And this reality is reflected in our
emerging societies, through many forms. Prior to decolonisation, the
world-system in place generally centered around a supply flow of
minerals and agricultural resources from export-oriented colonies to
their industrialised Euro-American metropoles, running on wage-labour.
Such a context encouraged individual metropoles to maintain their
colonial grip on significant swathes of the Third World, and it would
take the inevitable sparks of an anti-colonial malaise to make the
economic losses of imperial administration outweigh its once-lucrative
gains. Once the hassle reached that threshold, Western states faced the
challenge of maintaining our aforementioned global supply chain in
territories that belonged no longer to them, but rather to independent
(albeit fragile) nation-statesâand they did so through a variety of
means. One of the most flagrant instances of what theorist Mark Fisher
later termed âcapitalist realismâ was the U.S backed coup on September
11^(th) 1973 in Chile, where Augusto Pinochet violently seized power
from the democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende, ushering in
an authoritarian regime now infamous for its abominable methods of
repression, and malignantly declaring to all the futility of imagining a
different world. Other instances might come about less brashly: using
debt, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to perpetrate
the process of privatization, primitive accumulation and disintegration
of traditional communal lives ongoing since the Late Middle Ages, in the
English enclosures and pyres of the witch-huntâor perhaps, far more
insidiously, reaffirming these collective livelihoods as a generous
concession, one made via the mechanisms of an liberal jurisprudence. But
no oneâs guarding their ruler-drawn colonial borders anymore; at least
not for long. On the contrary, international financial institutions
shred any attempt to remove oneself from their newly-entangled global
market: protectionist policies are struck down, throughout Africa and
Asia, to make space for Western multinationals. This slots into the
twilight of the Second World, a new set of nominally liberal-democratic
states in Central Asia and other post-Soviet areas leads to new
peripheries for global markets; whilst the remains of socialist
countries either fade into isolated obscurities of famine (North Korea)
or reluctantly integrate into the international economy at the cost of
their principled utopianism (China; Vietnam). With new semi-peripheries,
where the manufacturing of goods can now be outsourced, multinationals
zone in on a Global South devoid of post-war social democracy. New
infrastructure and entanglement makes capital mobile, but labour remains
static: syndicalist union opposition to multinationals and subsidiaries
no longer poses a real threat, as the corporation either stomps it out
(via third parties/state apparatuses) or displaces capital to another
peripheral state. Back in the First World, these developments are paired
to a post-Fordist shift into consumerism and tertiary labour, the
service sector, adding an even further enhanced layer of commodity
fetichism; whereas industrialised High Modernity successfully
constructed social relationships between commodities, the emerging
control society takes this a step further by displacing the very
manufacturing of the commodity into invisible zones, and reorienting
âproductive labourâ to the simple administration of prepackaged goods.
The other side of this phenomenon is one of rustbelts: Detroit,
Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Lorraine, Northern England, and in turn this shifts
the electoral makeup of the Global North. In the Keynesian-disciplinary
paradigm, liberal democracies show relatively straightforward
socioeconomic traits: economic elites vote for a pro-capital right wing,
workers vote for a pro-labour left wing, and the state mediates class
tension between industrialists and unions. This last aspect, variously
termed by some as âsocial corporatismâ and âtripartismâ, still partly
exists today in Scandinaviaâthrough the âNordic modelâ so often admired
by some liberalsâas well as in the Low Countries, and in the programs of
some christian-democratic parties; nevertheless in virtually every other
First World country it is in the process of being decimated. With the
onset of control and deindustrialisation, the whole paradigm begins to
shatter; an information-oriented culture war begins between economic
elites, who favour centre-right candidates, and âculturalâ elites, born
out of the blending of high and low culture so characteristic of
post-modernity, who instead favour the newly soulless husks of formerly
centre-left parties. Exit Thatcher and Reagan, enter Blair and Clinton:
the âThird Wayâ bows down in a spasm of irony to the Iron Lady (once
quoted sayingâof the market economyââThere is no alternativeâ) and any
material progress for lower classes is denounced as pure impossibility,
from all sides: it has now been made easier to imagine the end of the
world than the end of capitalism. In continental Europe, the story is
similar. Gerhard Schröder, of the German SPD, garnered much backlash
from his partyâs left wing after publishing a small manifesto with Tony
Blair calling for centre-left parties in Europe to embrace a supply-side
agenda; meanwhile, on the other side of the Rhine, France (while not
embracing this âThird Wayâ just yet) sees the left electorate abandon
the rotting carcass of the Parti Communiste Français in favour of a more
moderate Socialist Party. Around thirty years later, the emergence of
âEn Marche!â; a political movement describing itself as neither left nor
right, advocating social liberalism all whilst defending tax cuts on a
supply-side basis, brings the âThird Wayâ to its logical conclusion. No
one knows what the future holds; yet certainly it will be more of the
present.
The End of Historyâwhich Fukuyama had excitedly proclaimedâdid not last
long. And if the Gulf War was a horrifying parody of war, it was only a
matter of time before the world would witness a horrifying parody of the
Gulf War. The first symbolic-weapon turned the flows of globalization
against themselves on September 11^(th) 2001: four commercial airliners
hijacked by Al-Qaeda are sent straight into the holy economic, political
and military monuments to U.S hegemony (the Twin Towers, the Pentagon,
the White House or perhaps the Capitol, though the last two were
untouched). This attack and its consequences would plunge the
international scene into a semiotic fever dream, far more intensified
than the Gulf War: more flagrant violations of international law, more
melodramatic theatreâColin Powellâs UN speech comes to mindâin short,
more brashness. Rather than not happening or being simulated, the
lingering and communicative â9/11â becomes the absolute event. And, to
Baudrillard, it all culminates in the released photographic symbolisms
of now infamous horrors in the Abu Ghraib prison. A âhumiliation,
symbolic and completely fatal, which the world power inflicts on
itselfâ; aesthetic parallels in all realms, produced and consumed, were
traced back to industrial pornography in his 2004 essay, aptly titled
War Porn. For as he remarks the striking synergy between that emblematic
Iraqi prisonerâscarecrow, electrical wires dripping down his arms, and
the hooded members of the Klu Klux Klan, his quite ironic conclusion:
âIt is really America that has electrocuted itselfâ. And, moreover, that
very semiotic image virally circulating within the accelerating
techniques of a control society is taken not by international observers
craving to denounce; it is photographed by the perpetrators in
themselves, deriving pure enjoyment from the act, praying to the
construction of a heightened reality. One where humiliation of the
victim, shock of the viewer, and symbolic bludgeoning of all are holy
ontological agents. Hence the difference between Abu Ghraib and the
non-events of 1991 could not be greater. The next stringent blows to
presentism, we are still in the midst of: first the neo-krach of 2008,
the gradual impotence of âThird Wayâ social liberalism, the
intensification of cultural strife in the leadup to Brexit and Donald
Trumpâs ascent to the presidency in 2016. Four years later, temporary
gains made by Biden in the United States and Macron in France have
failed to make the future look any less bleakâas control societies shed
their liberal presentism, the only appropriate reaction must be one of
speculative horror.
The logic and realities of a control society are fundamental to
contemporary polities. They are progressively establishing themselves as
the de facto civil texts of all sorts of world cores: Wall Street, La
DĂ©fense, the IMF, the City of London, lâElysĂ©e, the World Economic
Forum, to name only a few. But they have their limits. The mistake of
superimposing Occidental contexts onto a wildly diverse collection of
human worlds is one intellectuals have been guilty of for centuries, and
as we have seen the part played by the material conditions of the
post-war West in forming control mechanisms, it is clear that an
analysis relying on the presence of these same mechanisms in peripheral
states is far from self-evident. Through many perspectives it remains
undeniable that modernity has ended on a world-wide basis: entanglement
and globalization have made it so. Yet it is still worth remembering
that the rare minerals which power modern computing are dug up in
disciplinary mines, in pools of sweat, blood and sobs. That the service
sectorânow dominant in our flexible First Worldâruns on products fresh
from the emerging disciplinary zones of Southern semi-peripheries. Just
as one mustnât ignore the growing swathes of human spaces entirely
beyond state control. Some may retort, and with admirable foresight,
that expecting these stateless margins of humanity to successfully
escape all-encompassing control is a stark underestimation of capitalâs
prowess in recuperating anything that lives. That sort of dynamic
pessimism, I find quite respectable; yet even capital cannot help but
hurtle towards the hard structural limits of the biosphere. And
arguably, it will be our present ecological realities which will mold
the chessboard of future politics, one where nothing remains to be
redistributed, democratised. Here Malcoeurâs Neoleviathan is of use, a
striking monograph where Medean polemical narration naturally deselects
all losing moral pleasantries, where the technological cutting-edge of a
control society outlives its generative surface, and enters with naked
trepidation into the state of nature. A bouncing, vibrant pessimism
tackles liberal presentism and its embeds in socialist and
orthodox-fascist paradigms: the old walls separating disciplinary
worlds, which had finally been torn down by accelerating digital flux,
did indeed lose their despotic function as the scaffolds of bourgeois
morality, statist administration, declaring the subject free from
ideological squabbling. And yet it was a comically naive error to
believe, in control or beyond it, that the horizons of liberation were
to be grasped. The Neoleviathan is medieval or post-classical, which is
quite different from the fully-centralized totalitarian apparatus of a
contemporary reactionary state: as sprawling large-scale jurisdictions
collapse from the contradictions or intensifications of their ârationalâ
sovereignty, external chaos rapidly assembles cultural in-groups, and
aggregated Uniques are completely hijacked by any myriad of phantasms
with just the right amount of differentiation needed to override their
obsolescing catch-all predecessor, be it âRomanâ, âHumanâ, âCivilizedâ.
Which phantasm wins out by attrition? Whichever one manages not to be
deselected; itâs that simple. And once none of them can keep up, life
ends captured by itself. Does the Stirnerite child conclude the
dialectic, finish the work of Enlightenment philosophy in one master
stroke, and abolish the God-Man? Amorality certainly emergesâequipped
with 3D-printed semi-automatic rifles, and a crude hatchet ready to cut
into your genome, but with no hard feelings: vice does not triumph,
virtue is simply deselected. Therein lies the mortifying wit of a
control societyâs fate, a reality transparent to the public eye no
matter how many bubbly growth statistics David Cameron gleefully
bludgeons us with. Piling up sacred âprogressâ religiously, beckoning
all flows of desire to aimlessly race around in its anarchic digital
spaces, it ends up cannibalising itself: ecological parameters go
haywire, ensuing socioeconomic shock waves burn through our
civilizational tapestry, and the forlorn technological vestiges of what
once was are seized by leviathanised states, striving in desperation for
survival, to escape deselection. A broad pictureâone should be weary of
speculating on the details with too much certainty. But we do have
various scenarios at our disposal to ponder, five in particular: the
shared socioeconomic pathways of the IPCC. Each gives differing
predictions on greenhouse emissions and political trajectories based on
two parameters, the extent of socioeconomic challenges to climate
mitigation (the prevention of anthropogenic emissions) and to climate
adaptation (the management of regional climate-related catastrophe).
With no clear evidence of an imminent global eco-revolution, and far
less evidence of a potential green transition via electoral means, it is
safe to bet against some of the more optimist pathways. Leaving us with
either autarkic-corporatist nationalism, increasingly stratified
neocolonial capitalism, or fossil-driven accelerationism. The first,
antithetical to any sort of rational international cooperation, is
problematic for both mitigation and adaptationâtherefore it is
unsurprisingly the scenario closest to leviathanisation, with a chaotic
scramble for regional food security potentially fracturing current state
formations into scattered political vacuums. In contrast, the second
threatens adaptation: the digital-semiotic framework of control allows
âresponsibleâ consumer choices and local token gestures to characterize
mainstream environmental activism in high to middle-income areas,
allowing the maintenance of a knowledge-oriented managerial class in the
First World. Regardless of how emissions evolve, unfamothable amounts of
stratification, coupled to the disastrous consequences of climate
change, turns developing countries into vast pools of abundant labour,
and no help is conceded to a highly vulnerable Global South in adapting
to new geographical conditions; it is highly unlikely that these
wastelands will look anything remotely similar to a control society. Our
final scenario is taken straight out of a sci-fi movie, or perhaps Nick
Landâs philosophy: mitigation and low emissions are not given a second
thought, the global market hurtles into fossil-fuelled control
mechanisms, cybernetics, geoengineeringâin awe, the myth of progress
overrides the clamor of de-growth, and scientific humanism salvages the
God-Man against all odds. Within an atmosphere where increasingly
colossal amounts of carbon dioxide have locked in large-scale feedback
loops, society erects self-regulating glass walls barring it from
apocalypse, and valiantly tries to get a grip: here the degree of
potential leviathanisation is therefore contingent on the tech cutting
us off from the desert. Control mechanisms remain in place right up
until progress succumbs to critical failure, international order
shatters, and we are sucked right back into the original position to
face the consequences. It is worth remarking, and the pessimist does so
with relish, that while the preservation of âbusiness-as-usualâ under
SSP5 and the emerging Neoleviathans both make plentiful use of
technology, one can withstand a far greater margin of error than the
other. It takes one crack in the glass to plunge that particular
socioeconomic narrative into genuine crisis, but precision is the last
thing on a Neoleviathanâs mind. The former scenario demands perfection,
from technology yet to be inventedâthe latter involves an entity so
dedicated to escaping deselection that, for all they care, the
technology might as well detonate in the loserâs face.
All this leaves one with various paths, as to how the mechanisms and
participants of control societies might react to widespread ecological
calamity. But speculation, while undoubtedly valuable, is only part of
the full picture. In the final instance, to analyse control is to
analyse how contemporary stratification materialises, in times of
collapse and in times of anti-collapse, anywhere from the Euro-American
cores of finance capital, to the sweatshops of Haiti, to the stateless
highlands of Zomia. It is a process where one must confront the sobering
possibility that our war of attrition against institutions may well be a
reproduction of power rather than its abolition, far from the creation
of new horizontal lives or worlds. Where the line between relative
deterritorialization, characteristic of capital-induced cultural
annihilation, and the construction of an absolute field of immanence
shrouds itself in vast, recuperating motions. To avoid capture by
controlâs snake-coil modulations, one must ruthlessly critique all that
exists: the medium, formats, abstract logic, assumptions, historical
narratives, counter-historical narratives, genealogies, ect. It is not a
matter of fearfully staying in place, paralyzed and resentful: it is a
matter of constructing with great care, dissolving the optimistic grip
of carceral progress, in both political theory and in our heads.
Utopianism must abandon those architectural blueprints so embedded with
civilizational logic, and might instead embrace a truly vibrant, dynamic
process of reversalâreversal of values and emotions, conscious states or
phenomena. It would be hypocritical to prescribe the ârequiredâ actions
or lines of thought here: this is not an instruction manual, only an
attempt to fashion beauty out of deeply horrific realities. When push
comes to shove, this may well be our lone cold comfort, the only
conceptual toy separating us from a bottomless ravine of trauma. And
therefore the will to carve that dot of euphoria into animation owned
entirely by us, for us, can only emerge from us.