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The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control1 Chapter 9 The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control1 Maurizio Lazzarato We have left behind the epoch of discipline to enter that of control. Gilles Deleuze described in a concise but effective way this passage from disci- plinary societies to the societies of control (Deleuze 1990). He provided us with this historical reconstruction by setting out from the dynamics of difference and repetition, thereby generating new interpretations of the birth and development of capitalism. One of his most important theo- retical innovations concerns the question of multiplicity: individuals and classes are nothing but the capture, integration and differentiation of multiplicity. It is not only the phenomenological description of this evolution which interests me here, but the method employed. For Deleuze, the constitutive process of both capitalist institutions and multiplicity can be understood only by calling upon the concept of the virtual and its modalities of actu- alisation and effectuation. The passage from disciplinary societies to the societies of control cannot be understood by starting out from the trans- formations of capitalism. We must begin instead from the power of the multiplicity. Marxists generally accept Foucault’s description of disciplinary soci- eties, provided that it is regarded merely as a complement to the Marxian analysis of the capitalist mode of production. But though Foucault acknowledged his debt to Marx (his theory of discipline was doubtless inspired by the Marxian description of the organisation of space and time in the factory), he understood the confinement of workers accord- ing to a very different logic. For Foucault the factory is but one of the forms taken by the actuali- sation of the paradigm of confinement. The capital – labour relation is not the fundamental social relation on to which the ensemble of other social relations is aligned. The school, the prison and the hospital, along with law, science and knowledge – in short, everything that Foucault 172 Maurizio Lazzarato defines as what can be stated [l’énonçable] must be understood without entertaining a structure – superstructure relation to production. Marxist theory concentrates exclusively on exploitation. Other power relations (men/women, doctors/patients, teachers/pupils and so on) and other modalities of the exercise of power (domination, subordination, enslavement) are neglected for reasons that pertain to the very ontology of the category of work. This category is endowed with a power of dialec- tical totalisation, both theoretical and political, which may be criticised precisely along the same lines that Tarde criticised Hegel: it is necessary to ‘depolarise’ dialectics with the help of the notion of multiplicity. In capitalism, it is not a single drama – that of Spirit (Hegel) or Capital (Marx) – but a ‘multiplicity of social dramas’ which must be taken into account. To seize the dynamics of capitalism, we should not refer to the ‘immense, external and superior’ forces of the dialectic (capital/labour), but to the ‘infinitely multiplied, infinitesimal and inter- nal’ forces (Tarde 1999: 112). The logic of contradiction, the motor of the ‘single drama’, is far too poor and reductive. This assertion, which Foucault will take up again after Tarde, is aimed directly at the Marxist conception of power, in which power is always dependent on a deeper economic structure. The microphysics of power replaces the pyramidal aspect of the Marxist conceptualisation with an immanence wherein the various ‘enclosures’ (factory, school, hospital, etc.) and disciplinary techniques are articulated with one another. In relation to this, Deleuze points out that it is the economic structure and the factory which presuppose disci- plinary mechanisms already acting on souls and bodies, not the other way round. Other forces and other dynamics may then be invoked to explain the expansion of capitalism. These forces and these dynamics obviously imply a relationship between capital and labour, but they cannot be reduced to it. This is not to deny the relevance of the Marxian analysis of the capital–labour relation, but rather its claim to reduce society and the multiplicity of power relations that constitute it to the single relation of command and obedience exercised in the factory or in the economic relation. On the contrary, it is the latter which must be integrated within a broader framework, that of the disciplinary societies and their twofold techniques of power: discipline and biopower. Likewise, the imposition of conducts and the subjection of bodies are not explicable by monetary constraints and economic imperatives alone. Regimes of signs, machines of expression and collective assemblages of enunciation (law, knowledges, languages, public opinion, etc.) act like Life and the Living in the Societies of Control 173 the cogs of the assemblages, in the same way as machinic assemblages (factories, prisons, schools). By concentrating on one dimension of the power relation alone (exploitation), Marxism is inevitably led to reduce the machine of expres- sion to ideology. One of the objectives of Foucault’s writings on discipli- nary societies is to take leave from economism and the dialectical culture of dualisms, to expose the poverty of explaining dominations in terms of ideology. The multiplicity of singularities, their power of creation and copro- duction, and the modalities of their coming together were not born with post-Fordism, but instead traverse the entire history of modernity. The power of the disciplinary societies (whether we are dealing with tech- niques of confinement or so-called biopolitical techniques) acts, primar- ily and always, on a multiplicity. Accordingly, dialectical dualisms must be thought of as captures of multiplicity. For Foucault, disciplines trans- form the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered classes. The techniques of confinement (disciplines) impose a nondescript [quelconque] task or conduct for the sake of producing useful effects, provided that the multiplicity is not great in number and the space well defined and limited (school, factory, hospital etc.). They consist in dis- tributing the multiplicity across space (by gridding, confining, serialis- ing), ordering it in time (by breaking up gestures, subdividing time, programming actions), and composing it in space-time so as to extract from it useful effects by augmenting the forces which constitute it. The biopolitical techniques (public health, politics of the family and so on) are exercised as the management of the life of any multiplicity, no matter its provenance. Here, unlike in disciplinary institutions, the multi- plicity is numerous (the population as a whole) and the space is open (the limits of the population are defined by the nation). The Deleuzian interpretation of Foucault (independently of the issue of its faithfulness to Foucault’s work) will be very useful for us in analysing the dynamics of difference and repetition (Deleuze 1984). Deleuze distin- guishes between power relations and institutions. Power is a relation between forces, while institutions are agents of the integration and strati- fication of forces. Institutions fix forces and their relations into precise forms by according them a reproductive function. The state, capital and the various institutions are not the source of power relations, they derive from them. Thus Foucault, as interpreted by Deleuze, analyses dispositifs of power which deploy themselves according to the modalities of integra- tion and differentiation, and not according to modalities that could be traced to the subject/work paradigm. 174 Maurizio Lazzarato Power relations are virtual, unstable, non-localisable, non-stratified potentialities. They only define possibilities or probabilities of inter- action; they are differential relations that determine singularities. The actualisation of these differential relations and singularities by institu- tions (state, capital, etc.) that stabilise them, stratify them, and make them non-reversible, is simultaneously an integration (capture) and a dif- ferentiation. To integrate means to connect singularities, to homogenise them and make them converge qua singularities towards a common goal. Integration is an operation that consists in tracing a general line of force which passes through forces and fixes them into forms. The integration does not function by abstraction, generalisation, fusional unification, or subsumption (to speak the Hegelian–Marxist language). The actualisation of power relations takes place gradually, ‘stone by stone’, as Gabriel Tarde thought. It is an ensemble of integrations, first local, then global. Deleuze describes integration as a procedure aimed at making the ensemble of net- works and patchworks, flows and aggregates, hold together. Tarde too uses the term ‘integration’ to avoid understanding the consti- tution of social quantities and values (whether economic or otherwise) either as a totalisation or as a simple generalisation or abstraction. Social type or social quantity are understood as integrations of small differences, small variations, in accordance with the model of integral calculus. But the actualisation of power relations is not only integration, it is also differentiation [différenciation]:2 power relations are exercised to the extent that there is a difference between forces. In capitalism, this dif- ferentiation, instead of being a differentiation of difference, the unfold- ing of multiplicity, is a creation
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