Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from September, 2018

Towards a Vitalist conception of Place in the era of the Control Society

In ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’, Deleuze marks the passing of the “Disciplinary Society”. These societies operated on localisable, hierarchical topologies idealised in the model of the factory: ‘bringing everything together, giving each thing its place, organizing time, setting up in this space-time a force of production greater than the sum of component forces’ (Deleuze, 1995: 177). Their passing signifies not just the “breaking down” (Deleuze, 1995: 182) of old institutions, but the introduction of the “Control Society”, characterised by ‘ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control that are taking over from the old disciplines at work within the time scales of closed systems’ (Deleuze, 1995: 178). The topology of these new mechanisms of power, unlike the centralized uniformity of the factory, are diffuse, molecular, and networked. Galloway and Thacker identify one of the characteristics of this society as the, ‘increasing everydayness of surveillance’ (Gallowa