technical images and linear text

Deleuze’s ‘postscript’ raises some interesting questions about the contemporary validity of the kind of disciplinary, panoptic model of social control outlined in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Deleuze posits that these kinds of disciplinary societies, having succeeded the ‘societies of sovereignty’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are now undergoing a transformation into what he calls ‘societies of control’ (3). The substance of this claim is not immediately obvious. If anything, contemporary society in the West seems less overtly ‘controlled’ than in previous centuries. Sovereignty and discipline are quite clearly different, to be sure; their respective ends, to “tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life” (3) are quite clearly distinguishable. Deleuze’s ‘society of control,’ however, seems less distinct from its predecessor. Both theoretical forms of society involve the interaction of a series of disciplinary institutions, both state and non-state, observing and cataloguing individual behaviour for the purposes of social administration.

And yet, in examining Deleuze’s argument and Haggerty & Ericson’s piece, the salient points of this distinction become more clear. In a disciplinary society, the institutions of discipline operate along a distinct linear timeline, in a concrete and sequential fashion, and according to their own unique — but generally consistent — logics. In the factory, for example, “individuals are constituted 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” (Deleuze 5). Discipline, in the form of managerial supervision, is in this case explicitly deployed to construct a population of useful bodies for the purposes of material production.

With rapid cultural and technological change following the Second World War, however, the institutions of social control have become more decentred and heterogeneous, even as the processes of control have become more tightly integrated. As Haggerty and Ericson note, some theorists have tried to extend Foucault’s concepts of panopticism and disciplinary society, perhaps ‘beyond recognition,’ to account for these changes (607). Deleuze, however, draws from a completely different set of concepts to account for the different objectives for (and practices of) contemporary social control. Social control in modern societies, on his interpretation, is accomplished by a ‘surveillant assemblage,’ consisting of a multiplicity of loosely affiliated observers.

By virtue of electronic communication, however, these ‘loosely affiliated’ observers are in fact more closely tied to each other than the institutions of disciplinary society. Where once institutions were insulated from each other to some extent by physical barriers, now the knowledge contained within formerly discrete institutions is digitized and interoperable. Even the term ‘institution’ itself becomes questionable, as surveillance increasingly becomes the province of small businesses and individuals.

The shift from state-run to corporate-run surveillance is also indicative of a shift in the emphasis of surveillance itself. The Panopticon was designed to ensure compliance with certain specific disciplinary norms. Its intent was to ensure that the prisoner caused no disturbances to safety or to public morality; as long as these conditions were satisfied, the observer had no real cause to enquire as to how each prisoner’s time was occupied. The surveillant assemblage’s purpose is more or less the opposite. Being businesses, the vast majority of observers within the assemblage care little about one’s compliance with societal norms, except insofar as such compliance may affect profitability. The Nielsen rating system doesn’t prevent the viewer from watching shows it deems inappropriate, nor do the cameras in a shopping centre try to direct shoppers to specific stores. Indeed, except in cases of shoplifting and/or other egregious lawbreaking, the surveillant assemblage very rarely intervenes explicitly in the lives of those it surveills. Instead, surveillance data is compiled into an archive of one’s transactions for use in directed marketing and enhancements in productivity and profitability.

Thus, it seems perhaps that Deleuze was mistaken to call the society of the surveillant assemblage a ‘society of control’ in his ‘postscript.’ Yet, when we consider further the object of the surveillant assemblage, the nature of the ‘control’ inherent to such a society becomes more evident. Under such a society, as Deleuze states, “the operation of markets is now the instrument of social control … control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (6). Control in such a society is not accomplished by controlling the desire of the subject. Instead, it is effected by ensuring that a product is available to satisfy any desire the subject may have, and that desires which cannot be satisfied through consumption are commensurately devalorized. This form of control may lack the ‘long duration’ of disciplinary forms of control, but it is ‘without limit’ in the sense that it does not grant the observed any real sphere of self-determination. While the prisoner of the Panopticon was free to act however they chose in a disciplined manner, the observed subjects in contemporary society are administered and guided in every aspect of their conduct.

The weaknesses in Deleuze’s ‘postscript’ are those found in the majority of his work: he frequently puts more emphasis on rhetorical effect than basic logic, and in the process is often too ready to make sweeping generalizations based on limited evidence. His claim that, today, “the corporation has replaced the factory” (4), is one particularly notable instance. Corporations can in no sense ‘replace’ factories; in the history of institutions, corporations developed right alongside factories, and indeed, factories are an essential part of corporations and their activities. In a broader sense, as well, one might dispute the idea that ‘societies of control’ have wholly supplanted the disciplinary societies. Though society has indeed greatly changed since the development of the disciplinary society, the sheer prominence of the basic disciplinary institutions (the school, the church, the armed forces) in contemporary society should constitute evidence enough that Foucault’s model is not completely outdated.

Nevertheless, Deleuze’s analysis of the inherent differences between contemporary societies of control and the disciplinary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a particularly useful one. Foucault’s insights in Discipline and Punish remain profound, but Haggerty and Ericson rightly note that he “fails to directly engage contemporary developments in surveillance technology” (607). Electronic communications and the characteristics of modern capitalism have greatly changed the mechanisms of social control and the ends to which they are applied. Though the institutions of disciplinary society still play a prominent role in social structures, Deleuze’s concepts of the surveillant assemblage and the society of control provide us with a useful model for social administration in the postmodern era.

Works Cited

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”

Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The surveillant assemblage”