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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 preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the
prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, 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, neighborhood 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.
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 center 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.
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. Félix Guattari has
imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's
neighborhood, 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.