Examining Deleuze, Communication, and Power in the Twenty-First Century

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2017 Anti-Hermes: Examining Deleuze, Communication, and Power in the Twenty-First Century

Pattinson, Telford-Anthony

Pattinson, T. (2017). Anti-Hermes: Examining Deleuze, Communication, and Power in the Twenty-First Century (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/24935 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/4099 doctoral thesis

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Anti-Hermes:

Examining Deleuze, Communication, and Power in the Twenty-First Century

Telford-Anthony William Pattinson

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATIONS, MEDIA, AND FILM STUDIES

CALGARY, ALBERTA

SEPTEMBER, 2017

Abstract

This dissertation conceives of a post-structuralist philosophy of communication as informed by Gilles Deleuze (1925-1990). This philosophy of communication is based upon two things. First, within the primary literature, the problem of power is a consistent thread around which Deleuze organizes his concepts. Two, concurrent with his analysis of power, Deleuze produces a disparate critique of communication itself that develops and matures across the decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in which he moves from ideas of transmission, information, and opinion, respectively, to focus his analysis of the relationship between power and communication.

However, while the history of Communication Studies has also evinced an interest in this relationship between power and communication, the field has not taken up Deleuzian philosophy as a viable mode of theoretical inquiry to further address this association. This dissertation seeks to address this gap.

To make the Deleuzian perspectives about power and communication translatable in terms that are relevant to Communication Studies, this dissertation engages in a close reading of

Deleuze’s “Postscript of the Societies of Control” essay (1992), in which control is described as several things—the opening of confined spaces, the breakdown of social institutions, and the materialization of communication in practices of technology, labour, and economics. However, this dissertation explains, expands upon, and critiques these perspectives on control that Deleuze only sketches in this essay. Additionally, to make the link between Deleuzian post-structuralism and Communication Studies more cogent, the Deleuzian descriptions of control are thematized on the level of movement, which are treated as both concrete and analogical, which situates one’s freedom by modulating the capacity to move altogether. On one hand, control-as-movement is concrete, since messages, smartphones, capital, information, and people are all things in the world

that move from one point to another. On the other hand, control-as-movement is analogical, as much as power and communication have been modelled by Communication Studies as being unilinear and unidirectional, from a sender to a receiver. And yet, today, control is multilinear and multidirectional, within which power and communication are omnipresent.

Preface

Portions of this dissertation were presented at the annual conference of the Canadian

Communication Association in 2015 (University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario) and 2016

(University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta). The author of this dissertation, T.A. Pattinson, is responsible for the production of the written materials contained herein, which are original and unpublished pieces of work.

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Acknowledgements

First, thank you to Dr. David Mitchell and Dr. Ryan Pierson, who have shepherded this dissertation, in its various stages and transformations, during the past six years of my PhD education. Your feedback, encouragement, time, energy, and patience when working with me have been greatly appreciated, both in terms of professional development, when it came to things like asking better questions, developing more persuasive answers, and articulating a stronger, clearer line of inquiry to my theoretical arguments, and personal support, when the realities of the world outside of the university were skulking at the margins of this document. This dissertation would not have taken shape without the myriad conversations that we have shared in person, on the telephone, and via e-mail.

Secondly, thank you to the members of my PhD committee—Dr. Barbara Schneider, Dr.

Maria Bakardjieva, Dr. Anthony Camara, and Dr. Jinying Li—for taking the time to read this document, for providing me with suggestions to improve my writing and research foci, and for formulating questions to probe the limits of this work and my thought process. I would also like to thank the members of my candidacy committee—Dr. Jason Wallin, Dr. Lee Carruthers, and Dr.

Graham Livesey—whose input was beneficial in reshaping and bolstering my project’s connection to the field of Communication Studies.

Third, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my friends and colleagues at the

University of Calgary and other institutions, who have provided words of encouragement and wisdom when I was first articulating and later refining the ideas presented in this dissertation. In no particular order, thank you to Anders, Terrance, Aiden, Andrea W., Kobra, Jeremy, AnneMarie,

Mylynn, Justin, Lisa, Ofer, Susan, Jessica, Ray, Angie, Andrea J., Kirsten, Trang, Mohammad,

Rebecca, Heba, and Christine.

A major shout-out of praise to Megan Freeman, who has fielded an endless array of administrative questions from me during the peak periods of the school year, and any and every time in between, since 2011. Thank you for your knowledge in navigating all the ins and outs of the details of the PhD degree.

I am grateful for the continued sponsorship I have received from the Stó:lō Nation of

British Columbia, without which my education since 2003 would not have been possible. A special note of thanks to Jewel Francis-Leon, who has been a huge help in facilitating my graduate student journey. Additionally, the research and writing of this dissertation have been funded by the

Department of Communication, Media, and Film at the University of Calgary, the Province of

Alberta Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship, and the University of Calgary Indigenous Graduate Award program.

Of course, thank you to my parents, to whom I owe a huge debt for making my graduate student experience in Calgary over the past few years that much easier.

And last, although certainly not least, thank you to N., the person with whom I have communicated the most—there for a word or a laugh, always.

Thank you to anyone else I have missed.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i Preface...... iii Acknowledgements ...... iv Table of Contents ...... vi Epigraph ...... ix Introduction: ...... 1 Stuck in the Middle of the Movements of Control? ...... 1 Or, Conceiving Power-Communication In Media Res ...... 1 1. Sketching the Goals & Scoping the Focus of the Dissertation ...... 1 2. Identifying & Explaining Relevant Terms of the Dissertation ...... 6 a. Communication ...... 6 b. Control ...... 8 c. Power ...... 11 d. Movement...... 14 e. Post-Structuralism ...... 18 3. Chapter Outline ...... 20 Chapter I: ...... 28 Communication vis-à-vis Power—Beyond History, Conception, & Field: ...... 28 A Summary ...... 28 1. Orienting the Dissertation ...... 28 2. Transmission as Communication? Articulating a Concept ...... 29 3. Communication Theory After Transmission: The ‘Ferment in the Field’ ...... 36 4. Communication Theory After Transmission: Meta-Model & Meta-Discourse ...... 42 5. Excursus: The Effects of ICTs, or, Setting Up the Control Society ...... 47 6. Conclusion: Power-Communication & the Deleuzian Turn? ...... 51 Chapter II: ...... 56 What Comes Before the Societies of Control? ...... 56 Identifying ‘Communication’ in Deleuzian Post-Structuralist Philosophy: ...... 56 A Summary ...... 56 1. Why Deleuzian Philosophy? Alternative Perspectives on Power & Communication ...... 56

2. To Surf or Not to Surf: Framing the Problem of Control in Deleuzian Philosophy ...... 58 3. Deleuze on Communication: The 1970s—Transmission ...... 64 4. Deleuze on Communication: The 1980s—Information ...... 72 5. Deleuze on Communication: The 1990s—Opinion ...... 83 6. Conclusion: Moving into the ‘Societies of Control’ ...... 93 Chapter III: ...... 97 Quo Vadis? ...... 97 Control, Discipline, & the Spaces Between the Seen & the Said ...... 97 1. Summarizing Previous Discussions of Power & Communication ...... 97 2. Focusing Deleuzian Commentary: On the “Postscript on the Societies of Control” ...... 99 3. A Brief History of Power-Communication: Discipline Before Control ...... 102 5. Before Visuality & Discourse? The Dislocation of Spaces Qua the Spatial ...... 115 6. Updating the Disciplinary Rationale of Spatial Power: Where Is Control Going? ...... 126 7. Conclusion: Control—From History to Logics, or, From Rationale to Expressions ...... 130 Chapter IV:...... 134 Tempus Fugit? ...... 134 Some Remarks About Instances of Material Practices of Control Logics...... 134 1. Re-Articulating Control: From a History of Power to a Logic of Communication ...... 134 2. The Bleeding Edge of Control, or, Time as the Pedagogy of Power ...... 136 3. The Time of Control After Deleuzian Post-Structuralism: Other Examples? ...... 140 4. Back to Foucauldian Post-Structuralism? Logics of Control Contra Discipline ...... 147 5. Material Practices of Control Logics ...... 156 a. Technology as a Material Practice ...... 158 b. Labour as a Material Practice ...... 162 c. Economics as a Material Practice...... 167 6. Conclusion: ‘What Counts Is That We Are at the Beginning of Something’ ...... 170 Chapter V: ...... 173 Sine Qua Non: ...... 173 Post-Structuralism, Non-Philosophy, & the Limits of Communication ...... 173 1. Summarizing the Trajectory of Dissertation (So Far) ...... 173 2. Control-as-Program, or, the Political Limitations of Deleuzian Post-Structuralism ...... 177

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3. From Control to Non-Communication: Stipulating the Laruellean Intervention ...... 181 4. Refining the Laruellean Intervention of Non-Philosophy ...... 186 5. Communication & Non-Communication: On Hermes & the Idea of the Secret ...... 191 6. Conclusion: Excursus—On Non-Communication & Depression...... 198 Chapter VI:...... 208 Conclusion: ...... 208 What Comes After the Societies of Control? ...... 208 1. Positioning the Dissertation Towards the Future ...... 208 2. Contradiction? Communications, Communities, & Campuses in Control Societies ...... 211 Works Cited ...... 218

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Epigraph

Modern communications don’t shrink the world, they make it bigger. Faster planes make it bigger. They give us more, they connect more things. The world isn’t shrinking at all. People who say it’s shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm. No wonder people go to school to learn stretching and bending. The world is so big and complicated we don’t trust ourselves to figure out anything on our own. No wonder people read books that tell them how to run, walk and sit.

We’re trying to keep up with the world, the size of it, the complications.

—Don DeLillo, The Names (1982/1989, p. 323)

Introduction:

Stuck in the Middle of the Movements of Control?

Or, Conceiving Power-Communication In Media Res

1. Sketching the Goals & Scoping the Focus of the Dissertation

In this dissertation, I am interested in creating a conceptual bridge between the field of

Communication Studies and the literature of post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-

1995). Specifically, I want to make the concepts one finds in Deleuzian post-structuralist philosophy ‘translatable’ for anyone who works within Communication Studies. This effort to make Deleuzian concepts legible to Communication Studies scholars will, in turn, necessitate the construction of a ‘philosophy of communication’ (Mangion, 2011; Chang & Butchart, 2012) of sorts that is explicitly post-structuralist in character. This is important for two reasons. The first of which is because Deleuzian post-structuralist thought has not enjoyed a bounty of use within

Communication Studies as have other intellectual approaches from the French, continental philosophy tradition of the twentieth century. I suggest that Deleuzian post-structuralism can make its own contributions to the problematics of the field in such a way where it does not simply re- state concepts like discourse (Foucault, 2002), deconstruction (Derrida, 1997), meta-narratives

(Lyotard, 1984), simulation (Baudrillard, 1994), and social capital (Bourdieu, 1984), for example, that have been extrapolated from the works of Deleuze’s peers. I want to address a theoretical gap when it comes to how those in Communication Studies can further philosophize about communication, by teasing out some terms, examples, questions, dilemmas, and implications that are littered throughout the primarily Deleuzian literature.

Secondly, like philosophers Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004),

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), and Pierre Bourdieu (1930-

2002), whose various concepts were mentioned above, respectively, in this dissertation I want to make explicit the fact that, like communication, there is a parallel interest in the conception of power in Deleuzian philosophy, from which scholars in Communication Studies can draw upon to understand, define, and explain the contemporary relationship that power has with the phenomenon of communication. What is different in the Deleuzian version of this rendering of power qua communication, however, is the suggestion that we should not just be critical of what power is and how it is expressed, namely, by whom, for what end, and how it is applied to and exercised within society. Instead, what is novel in the Deleuzian interpretation of communication is that the concept of ‘communication’ itself is treated as power’s complementary component; if one only critiques power, one remains silent about communication.

Furthermore, power functions, in the Deleuzian estimation, precisely because one might remain silent about communication, yet cannot remain silent within it. As it were, the Deleuzian interpretation of communication does not idealize communication as a process of interaction

(Habermas 1984, 1987), nor as a means to engage with public life and political existence

(Habermas, 1991). It is this very compulsion towards communication, rather, that effects a permanent, putative ‘matter of fact, matter of concern’ (Latour, 2004) condition of power, about which Deleuze finds an uneasy relationship with philosophy, along the lines of questions like ‘are we thinking?’, ‘how do we think?’, and ‘to what purpose is thinking oriented?’ (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1994). Should we say, then, that today to communicate is to think, and vice versa (Hayles,

2012)? It might be tempting to read Deleuzian critical commentaries on the relationship between communication and thinking as more rote complaints about contemporary culture, such that we are either ‘amusing ourselves to death’ (Postman, 1986) or engaging in ‘information overload’

(Toffler, 1970), which are possibilities that are amplified today because information-

communication technologies (ICTs) squander our capacity for critical thinking such that philosophical inquiry can only be shallow or superficial (Carr, 2010). Instead, I want to articulate in this dissertation, following the Deleuzian line of inquiry, the idea that since we cannot resist the need to communicate, we cannot resist the impacts of power in the same measure. Rather than ask the Leninist question, ‘what, then, is to be done?’ (Žižek, 2004b), after Deleuze, we might ask ourselves, when thinking about the relationship between power and communication, ‘what can we even do about this?’

To answer such a question, I turn to Deleuze’s concept of ‘the control society’ (1992) to stage the encounter between power and communication in the twenty-first century. Control is a concept that encapsulates the methods in which both power is exercised and communication takes place today, even though it is only briefly elaborated in the primary literature since it was a late invention in Deleuze’s philosophical career. Effectively, control ‘modulates’, or regulates, physical, material, mental, emotional, and economic reality. In the essay “Postscript on the

Societies of Control,” Deleuze lays out three avenues in which we can think about control precisely as a concept that is invisible and omnipresent in our thoughts and deeds—that it has a history, a logic, and a program. In the chapters that follow, I treat each section of Deleuze’s essay as a conceptual map to think about the relationship between power and communication—the history of control depends upon its differentiation from the Foucauldian ‘disciplinary society’ that conceptually precedes it; the logic of control is expressed in terms of the evolution of technology, labour, and economics that together determine how one thinks, acts, and lives in the twenty-first century; and the program of control posits a lack of imagination as to how one cannot conceive of a future in which power and communication are not co-constitutive.

However, to best represent this idea of control-as-modulation as sketched in the

“Postscript” essay, I draw upon Deleuze’s example of movement in late capitalist society (1995), in which sports like surfing and hang-gliding are analogies for the experience of power and communication. With these sporting activities, one is thrust into and rides a movement, be it a wave or a wind, but remains subject to it, since one cannot determine the movement as such (its speed, direction, momentum, orientation, etc.), but only one’s place within it. Unlike other sports, surfing and hang-gliding have no rules to which one adheres and no conditions in which one wins or loses as if one were playing a game. Taking these examples seriously, I argue that movement, in the Deleuzian formulation, can thus be understood in two ways. The first way is that movement is concrete and literal, in which people and things move from points A to B to C and so on.

Similarly, power and communication extend themselves according to concrete, literal movements, in which messages, information, technologies, capital, and bodies are caught within continuous circuits of transit. The second way is that movement is an abstract, analogical process on the level of thinking, which maps onto how we can explain both how power works and communication happens. The consent towards the compulsion of communication, which underscores one’s acquiescence to power, belies this movement-in-thought, when people are made to be productive members of the control society because of how much communication they undertake and with whom they engage.

Finally, this dissertation, when drawing together these concurrent threads about theories of communication, power, control, and movement, limits its focus to a few examples from the

Deleuzian oeuvre. Instead of dealing with the major philosophical texts of Deleuzian post- structuralism holistically—that include monographs on the major thinkers from the history of

Western philosophy (1984, 1988a, 1988b, 1990a, 1991, 2006a, 2006b), elaborations of an ontology

(1990b, 1994), treatises on cinema, painting, and literature (1986, 1989; 2003; 1997, 2000c;

Deleuze & Guattari, 1986), and writing collaborations that are explicitly Marxist in form and content (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 1991, 2009)—I take up the examples of power, communication, and control that appear most often in Deleuze’s short essays, interviews, and segments of larger works (1992, 1995, 1998, 2000a; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 1994). In effect, in my reading of Deleuzian post-structuralism I will construct an unconventional, if not ‘minor’, version of the figure of ‘Deleuze’, in which I treat him as a valuable theorist of communication, despite his hostility towards the idea of communication otherwise.1

As such, my dissertation has at two audiences in mind who might be interested in this minor

‘Deleuze’ who reads as another theorist for Communication Studies. The first of which is anyone in Communication Studies, especially those who are interested in the contemporary arrangements between power and communication. In this sense, Deleuzian post-structuralism, and specifically ideas about the control society, would be of interest to anyone who does work, for example, in mediated social communities (Hardt & Negri, 2000; Terranova, 2004); new media (Manovich,

2001; Hansen, 2004), actor-network theory (Latour, 1996, 2005), political economy (Dean, 2005;

Fisher, 2009), speculative realism/object-oriented ontology (Bennett, 2010; Bogost, 2012), and media ecology (Parikka, 2015; Peters, 2015). In this vein, control, as the nexus between power and communication, is the conceptual foothold for one who wants to utilize other ideas from Deleuzian

1 To suggest that Deleuze can be read as a theorist of communication is already to take flight from ‘Deleuze’, namely, the man and the philosopher himself, in order to critically evaluate the fecundity and validity of his remarks about communication. Perhaps there is no more appropriate use of Deleuzian post-structuralism other than reading it ‘against the grain’, as this is exactly the kind of meta-textual practice with which Deleuze engages the history of Western philosophy. The most famous, and perhaps inappropriately rendered, maximization of the Deleuzian practice of philosophical reading is that of the practice of ‘bastardization’. Deleuze refers to this as the ‘taking from behind’ of a philosopher to give him a ‘monstrous child’, so to speak, that is, an interpretation and practice of one’s work that is both critical but also still consonant with the philosophical position under interrogation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. ix-x). 5

thinking, especially one that is not predicated upon a reading of post-structuralism that is primarily semiotic or linguistic (Giddens, 1987; Deetz, 2003).

The second potential audience for this dissertation is anyone in ‘Deleuze Studies’ who does work with media and technology, precisely because ‘communication’ is a term that often does not appear in such literature, despite the attention paid to issues of power and the concept of the control society more specifically. As it were, the journal that bears the philosopher’s name, Deleuze

Studies (2007-current) has addressed topics that are adjacent to communication, especially in terms of the Deleuzian uptake of specific media, by publishing a series of special thematic issues, which include literature (Buchanan & Marks, 2000), music (Buchanan & Swiboda, 2004), new technology (Poster & Savat, 2009), contemporary art (Zepke & Sullivan, 2010), film (Martin-

Jones & Brown, 2012), and architecture (Frichot & Loo, 2013). More generally, the term ‘media’ in the secondary literature is perhaps the closest to the idea of ‘communication’ that I want to draw out in this dissertation (Pisters, 2001; Rodowick, 2001; Bryant, 2014; Harper & Savat 2016), yet is not precise given my purposes in speaking to communication ‘as communication’ (and not ‘as media’). Yet, I believe that there is enough viable material within the primary literature itself, despite the tensions, contradictions, obfuscations, and disconnections that one sometimes finds there, such that investigations that proceed along the lines of ‘Deleuze and Communication’ are possible, towards which this dissertation endeavours.

2. Identifying & Explaining Relevant Terms of the Dissertation

a. Communication

The most general understanding of communication in this dissertation can be thought of as a relation of two (or more) differences. In The Logic of Sense (1969/1990b), Deleuze examines communication, not specifically as ‘communication’ unto itself, but as a relation between disparate

elements that would otherwise not meet, but meet nevertheless in such a way where one does not become reducible to the other. ‘Sense’ is the condition by which Deleuze (1990b) understands that differences and their relations do not collapse into one another. He writes, “given a proposition which denotes a state of affairs, one may always take its sense as that which another proposition denotes” (p. 29). The differential relation of these disparate elements we might think of as a kind of diffusion or asymmetrical relationship, wherein one difference exists in more disequilibrium than another (for example, the difference between a warm room and the cool outdoors).

‘Communication’ is the relation wherein the difference between the two sets of disparate elements can be intuited, which itself cannot be accounted for within the differences themselves. Thus, we have no idea what a warm room is without knowing what the cool outdoors are; the sense of communication of this relationship exceeds the two differences that are related (p. 40). As it were, communication has no cause; it simply is, because without it, there would be no way to make sense of the world, in which everything would be rendered identical (as only one kind of difference) or non-sensical (when there would be too many differences that would have no relation or bearing upon one another).2

It is this very relationality that gives communication its essence, which we can think about given types of communications that exist within the field of Communication Studies. For example, senders and receivers, broadcasters and audiences, speech and writing, and even media and messages are all understood as being different from one another insofar that there is a sense in which these things can be related ‘as being different’. The problem, paradoxically, is that since

2 “We speak, on the contrary, of an operation according to which two things or two determinations are affirmed through their difference, that is to say, that they are the objects of simultaneous affirmation insofar as their difference is itself affirmed and is itself affirmative. We are no longer faces with an identity of contraries, which would still be inseparable as such from a movement of the negative and of exclusion [as dialectics]. We are rather face with a positive distance of different elements: no longer to identify two contraries with the same, but to affirm their distance as that which relates to one another insofar as they are “different”” (Deleuze, 1990b, pp. 172-173; original emphasis). 7

communication itself has no cause (as a relationality of differences), then how can Communication

Studies account for its existence, specifically when it comes to defining and delimiting what the concept of ‘communication’ is? It is with this tension that we will see Deleuze identify the relationship between power and communication, because each represents a shift from one difference to the next (from senders to receivers or from media to messages, etc.) that happen concretely in the physical-material world, but also as figures of thinking itself. What Deleuze describes as ‘control’ is thus the very relationality of relations, in which ‘communication communicates’ itself as a kind of movement from point A to point B, but in its very enunciation cannot ‘get outside’ of itself, which Deleuze treats as a problem of power.

b. Control

In this dissertation, I begin my explanation of control by way of the ‘dictionaries’ that describe the panoply of concepts within Deleuzian post-structuralist philosophy. In this case, control can be defined as the “regulating, modulating and channeling [of] flows, frequently regulating people’s access and movement via passwords/codes (especially as concerns access to information) (Shields & Vallee, 2012, pp. 41-42; added emphases). Even though it will be articulated by Deleuze as a new form of domination, control is not immediately felt upon the body as discipline was before it, in which the body was confined to a given space (like a cell within a prison architecture). Indeed, control functions because it deploys a light touch, figuratively speaking—it monitors, adapts, and directs how, where, when, and why the movements of society

‘flow’ (or transition from point to point). Basically, control intensifies the disciplinary condition of confinement in spaces, but only because it captures people within their own individual experience (despite not being physically confined altogether), which is essentially dynamic in

character. The very liberation of movement, as it were, becomes the new site of (figurative) confinement out of which one cannot escape.

Yet, control is not invoked by Deleuze to secure the classical liberal rights of the individual of the modern era (Rousseau, 1968; Locke, 1980; Hobbes, 1994). Rather, Deleuze takes aim at the ways in which “control societies dismantle the individual,” such that one cannot engage in real, meaningful social interactions with other people (who are also isolated in their ‘individuation’)

(Parr, 2005, p. 55). Essentially, within the control society one is imprisoned within one’s own freedom. And one’s own freedom today is best expressed along the lines of communication— when one can write, say, and share whatever one thinks about anything whatsoever, although such freedom of communication also bumps against other people, institutions, and nation-states who scrutinize what, how, and why one would communicate in such an open fashion. In this scenario, control exerts dominion over everyday existence because the actual movements of individual experience join with the personal enunciations of communication, when messages (as the content of communication) are shared within informational networks (as the means of communication) when one uses electronic-digital technologies (as the materials of communication). The Deleuzian response to this staging of control in practice is to ask, ‘why is communication the filter through which the social, political, and economic realms are encountered?’

This version of control, I suggest, is different than those which one encounters in

Communication Studies. For example, while information, computerization, and digital technologies are a part of the control society, it would be unfair to read Deleuze’s complaints as a philosophical rendering of the cybernetics of society (Wiener, 1948). The Deleuzian version of control is not simply a one-to-one application of cybernetics upon the human world, in which regulating, modulating, and channeling processes are understood solely as informational-technical

effects. Similarly, despite how he renders control as the next step in the evolution of power, the

Deleuzian history of control is only superficially tied to the socio-technological history of developments in communication since modernity, especially since the Industrial Revolution

(Beniger, 1986). As it were, the Deleuzian interrogative is more a matter of asking ‘what is the state or condition of power right now, within which we might be controlled?’ As much as control is posited within an open environment in which people are free to choose how to move and how to communicate, so long as they do both, then the Deleuzian interpretation of control cannot neatly be prescribed within a strict historicization of the changes that take place in society vis-à-vis technology and mass media, in which the printing press and the smartphone are the relative endpoints of a communicative continuum that contain telegraphy, cinema, phonography, radio, television, computers, and the Internet.

More broadly, I do not want to read Deleuze’s concept of control as another iteration of hegemony (Hall, 2006; Laclau & Mouffe, 2014) or ideology (Althusser, 2008; Žižek, 1989).

Certainly, we can recognize that control can, in fact, fit within the hegemonic and ideological parameters of how people consent to specific instances of power and generally agree with certain kinds of worldviews. Yet, hegemony and ideology are too rigid of concepts precisely because they remain prescriptive on both levels of form and content, as to what one should think and how one should believe, whereas control only requires movement and communication to occur, without sanctioning how, where, when, why, and for what purpose. To this point, I also do not think that control can be entirely explained according to how capitalism coordinates ‘cultural industries’

(Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002; Hesmondhalgh, 2007), since such an interpretation would skew towards larger media, corporate institutions as the guarantors of political power (Herman &

Chomsky, 2002; McQuail, 2010), in which democratic communication is limited. Whereas from

the Deleuzian perspective, we should be skeptical even towards social, emancipatory, and democratic versions of communication, since the compulsion to communicate itself remains unquestioned and unchallenged.

And finally, control is not reducible to the scope of biopolitical determination. Indeed, the birth, death, and health of bodies and populations (Foucault, 2008; Haraway, 1994; Esposito, 2008;

Cheney-Lippold, 2011) are all concerns of the control society, but only as the pre-condition upon which movement and communication rely. In the history section of his “Postscript” essay, for instance, we can read an implicit understanding on Deleuze’s part that the biopolitical framework of disciplinary society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries serves as the framework to be re- organized and abstracted in the twentieth century, which we can extend into the twenty-first century. Instead of associating power with biopolitical management, I see in the later Deleuzian post-structuralist philosophy a political interpretation of power that is existential in nature, in which movement and communication are ordinary, everyday, quotidian, and normative experiences of domination (that might not even be thought of as such). From there, this existentialist interrogation of power requires us to take into consideration the very questioning of questioning itself, as a kind of axiom of philosophy (Camus, 1955), which begins with asking ‘why should we communicate?’

c. Power

Unlike control, however, my understanding of power is closer to the primary Deleuzian literature, which is stated most explicitly in the monograph Foucault (1986/2006a), when Deleuze examines the philosophy of his contemporary. “Power,” Deleuze writes, “is a relation between forces, or rather every relation between forces is a ‘power relation’” (p. 59). Deleuze admits, however, that he is less interested in what power is, and instead wants to know how exactly it is

practiced. He locates the practice of power in the ways that it affects someone to do something, which can be active or reactive in nature (Deleuze, 2006b, pp. 39-72).3 This is to say, active power is when one affects someone to do something, whereas reactive power is when one is affected by someone to do something (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 60).4

Contrary to Foucault, though, Deleuze’s explication of power does not delimit it to any one strata—the family, the school, factory, the hospital, the prison, and so on—nor universalize it to the scale of the macro-institutional (Foucault, 1988, 1995, 2003). Deleuze (2006a) makes this caution explicit, claiming that power “has no essence; it is simply operational” (p. 24). As described by Deleuze, power operates primarily between forces as a relation or valence (pp. 25,

59-60). By ‘force’ Deleuze means that power is a relation of ‘an action upon an action’, which in disciplinary societies means that these actions include the allocation of resources, the classification of people as specific subjects, the composition of spaces in which subjects can be produced, and the normalization of procedures of management beyond the confines of the prison (when the technique of confinement is generalized to other spaces). In other words, power-as-force is when one incites, provokes, and produces something, as a question of matter, but is also when one is incited, provoked, or produced to do something, as a question of function. Yet, there does not have to be an actual ‘doer behind the deed’ (Butler, 2006, 34) of incitement, provocation, and

3 “In a body the superior or dominant forces are known as active and the inferior or dominated forces are known as reactive. Active and reactive are precisely the original qualities with express the relation of force with force. […] It is therefore essential to insist on the terms used by Nietzsche; active and reactive designate the original qualities of force but affirmative and negative designate the qualities to the will to power. Affirming and denying, appreciating and depreciating, express the will to power just as acting and reacting express force. […] What Nietzsche calls noble, high and master is sometimes active force, sometimes affirmative will. What he calls base, vile and slave is sometimes reactive force and sometimes negative will” (Deleuze, 2006b, pp. 40, 53-54, 55; original emphases). 4 “The latter are not simply the ‘repercussion’ or ‘passive side’ of the former but are rather the ‘irreducible encounter’ between the two, especially if we believe that the force affected has a certain capacity for resistance. At the same time, each force as the power to affect (others) and to be affected (by others again), such that each force implies power relations: and every field of forces distributes forces according to these relations and their new variation. Spontaneity and receptivity now take on a new meaning: to affect or to be affected” (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 60; added emphasis). 12

production, or any living person who commands one to move and communicate in the same breath; thus, control abstracts power insofar that it is incredibly difficult to point to someone or something and posit it as the causal factor for power as an action, like communicating, that causes reactions

(like the creation of functions that act upon other functions).

In this sense, I posit that the Deleuzian representation of power as a relation of a force acting upon another force suggests that control, unlike discipline, does not require subjects as such; the subject in the control society is not determined according to whether he or she ‘subjects’ himself or herself to authority and government, nor whether he or she differentiates himself from the very existence of an external authority or government altogether, especially when he or she struggles against domination, exploitation, and submission (Foucault 1982, p. 781). Rather, power is put upon subjects by enveloping them completely, surrounding them within the forward momentum of motion. What is persuasive about Deleuze’s understanding of power vis-à-vis communication and control is precisely that it cannot be fixed or pinpointed; its very elusive, ephemeral quality is precisely why it takes hold not just in the physical stuff like the body, but also in the hearts and minds of people (Stiegler, 2014).

As such, power, especially when given shape within the control society, should not be conflated immediately with concepts like ‘domination’, ‘oppression’, or ‘repression’. Indeed, power can be thought of as being productive instead of being restrictive. The tendency towards any kind of movement, the opening of confined spaces, and the permission of any and every kind of communication within the model of the Deleuzian control society are all examples of how the active and reactive aspects of power become one in the same. For those of us today who are interested in the relationship between power and communication, we should ask ourselves if,

the issue finally is whether there is a real difference between puissance and pouvoir,

between good power (potency, capability, empowerment) and bad power (power

over others, domination, violence), or whether the ontological model of power,

forces, dynamism—in short, physics—necessarily brings with it violence and

removes any distinction between puissance and pouvoir. (Bogue, 2007, p. 163)

While there is a difference in the Deleuzian rendering of good power from bad power, which he extrapolates from the work of philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) (Deleuze, 1988b, 1990a), what we want to draw out in this dissertation is how good power can be transformed into bad power, and vice versa, especially when Deleuze conceives of power in relation to force, but also force in relation to movement. It is this sequence of thinking in the primary literature that will allow us to sketch out how the control society functions as a communicative concept.

d. Movement

The fourth major term of this dissertation is the concept of movement. Movement is invoked throughout this dissertation in two complementary senses. The first of which involves actual, concrete movements across and within spaces. For example, bodies can run, walk, stagger, flail, jump, and crawl, among many other things. People, but also goods, commodities, vehicles, materials, resources, and even information and data, traverse the entirety of the globe, crossing the borders of the physical and electronic worlds in a zig-zag formation. As well, many technologies today are miniature, mobile, and are used when transit occurs. Smartphones, laptops, MP3 players, cameras, headphones, watches, and health monitor devices are all affixed to our persons as we carry them around to place to place (especially when they converge into one apparatus).

In this sense, the literal movements of bodies and things are akin to the concept of mobility, which itself has constituted a kind of ‘turn’ within social sciences research in recent years (Faist,

2013), be it on the level of socio-aesthetic experience in the twenty-first century (Urry, 2000, 2007) or as a metaphor of conceptualization in which specialized terms travel between disciplines and fields (Bal, 2002). Mobility as a discursive concept can be articulated in several ways (Sheller &

Urry, 2006): as a philosophy of human interaction; as a materiality of human and non-human relationships; as an orientation vis-à-vis the construction of spaces; as a form of vehicularity of or around the body that travels; as a simultaneous networking of homogeneous and heterogeneous elements; and as a heuristic to think about complex living and non-living systems.

‘Communication’ is but one material instance of mobility in action that cuts across these articulations, in which words, messages, and media, for example, need not have any physical enunciation for them to nevertheless have an immediate impact (Packer & Wiley, 2012).

Consequently, this impact of communication-as-mobility, be it material or immaterial, is important to consider when the historical coordinates of home, community, location, territory, and belonging have rapidly been transformed and dispersed in the informational-communicational, post-modern era of late twentieth and early twenty-first century life (Morley, 2000). Altogether, in this sense, the version of a Deleuzian philosophy of communication that is tied to the concept of the control society and enacted on the level of movement seems entirely appropriate given the ways in which movement-as-mobility can be conceived.

The second sense in which movement is discussed in this dissertation is analogical. For example, the kinds of movements that Deleuze describes in his later years of philosophizing almost seem ‘extra-terrestrial’, quite literally, as they take flight from and happen above any conception of ‘the earth’ altogether. When we examine Deleuze’s examples of surfing or hang-gliding as instances in which one is captured by a structure of power, what we find is a figurative thinking of power that takes shape either as a wave (up, down, ebb, flow, etc.) or as a gas (draft, current,

pressure, etc.). When one inhabits the movements of a wave or a gas, one is not just partaking in the representations of moving through space and enduring the passage of time, i.e. surfing is not just a representation of a wave nor hang-gliding a representation of a gas. On this point, Deleuze is clear. For instance, in his book on cinema, Deleuze demarcates the differences between space and movement in the terms of philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Deleuze (1986) writes,

“movement is distinct from the space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering. The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible, whilst movement is indivisible, or cannot be divided without changing qualitatively each time it is divided” (p. 1). In other words, space is homogeneous and movement is heterogeneous, in which the former is identical to itself, whereas the latter is always differentiating itself. Cinema is not a representation of space and movement, then, but an actual instance of the production of identity and difference according to how we understand space cinematically and move in the world.

Within the Deleuzian formulation, perhaps we can say that today’s physical spaces

(Foucault, 1995) and digital spaces (Andrejevic, 2007) are effectively ‘static’ in their constitution and composition, wherein bodies, people and things, technologies, and ideas, that live in and occupy these spaces, negotiate how to comport themselves and are contoured by movements as such. Indeed, as Deleuze (1986) himself puts it, to think about the differences produced in real movement is to think about how space-in-time is transformed, which necessitates a philosophy of

‘the new’ (p. 7), since it materializes that which has not yet happened (like the immediate future).

This is not unlike how a dancer ‘improvises’ the space within which movement occurs, for instance, such that the space of the dancer becomes part and parcel of the movements expressed.

Movement thus is intensive insofar that it effects change of the whole (of space and the body) over time. This is precisely what control does, too, on the level of thinking, when it modulates the very

creation of difference itself—nothing too different, too heterogeneous, or too cutting-edge is permitted, otherwise it would constitute a political challenge to the control society regime.

Movement, in these cases, is a transit in thinking, which is not necessarily tied to a geographical expression of space per se. As McKenzie Wark (1994) puts it, “We no longer have roots, we have aerials” (p. x). Thus, we need to think of Deleuze’s examples of surfing and hang- gliding as ‘aerials’ of power whose primary characteristic is movement. Whereas before in his philosophy Deleuze, with frequently collaborator and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, argues that movement is tied to neither speed nor momentum (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 381), but to the capacity to make connections and effect the production of difference within a given setting, at the end of his philosophy Deleuze no longer holds this position since there is no more setting that is stable and static. As a result, the control society puts people into concrete movement in their actions and analogical movement in their thoughts, precisely because communication is the relation through which movement comes into being—between bodies, spaces, technologies, media, or industries, albeit in service to power, and not in resistance against it.

The payoff of conceiving of the Deleuzian interpretation of movement on both the level of the actual and the concrete (vis-à-vis mobility) and the analogical (vis-à-vis thinking and power) is that it underscores a necessary relationship between the epistemologies and ontologies of communication. Specifically, one cannot be discussed or considered without the other, wherein there is no practice without theory, and vice versa. While Deleuze himself does not conduct empirical studies to see how people move, how people communicate, with what technologies people communicate, and so on, he still points to actual, possible instances of communication that are not synonymous with control. We will see, however, that Deleuze conceives of these communications insofar that they do not support the trajectory of movement, especially in terms

of unilateral, unidirectional models and explanations. Yet, at the end of his philosophy, he also does not champion a liberation of movement, since that, too, also encapsulates how power works in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If we do in fact live in a control society, then what will entail, after Deleuzian post-structuralism, is a drastic revision of what communication is

(or could be) when power is reflected in both our actual-analogical movements and mirrored in the form of our words, statements, e-mails, texts, and other uses of electronic-digital, informational- communicative technologies.

e. Post-Structuralism

The final term that is relevant to this dissertation is post-structuralism. The version of

Deleuzian post-structuralism that is presented in this dissertation is somewhat unconventional, insofar that it does not rely on issues of representation (Hall, 1985), language (Rose, 1984), and subjectivity (Howarth, 2013) that one finds in similar post-structuralist works that are Derridean and Foucauldian in character. For example, Derrida (1988) questions whether the term

‘communication’ itself is sensible when one delimits oral practices from written ones when conceiving of human interactions that are primarily representational in nature. Furthermore, structures in thinking no longer have any sort of thinkable centre or origin, but are appropriately

‘decentred’ because of the acute mutability of language qua the communicative field of human existence; similarly, signs are subject to a series of play (or slippages) that are infinitely undermining the prevalence towards presence in thinking and communication (Derrida, 1978).

Similarly, after post-structuralism, it is untenable to hold onto a concept of a universalist subject when the pressures of modern philosophy, namely, since the eighteenth century to the present day, have led us to “wager that [the concept of] man [sic] would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault, 1994, p. 387), in which there are multiple subjects, various

perspectives on truth, and a plethora of representations of both subjects and truths that allow us to make sense of ourselves in the world.

In Deleuzian philosophy, we can find the refrain of the repudiation of representation, language, and subjectivity that is associated with Derridean and Foucauldian thought. For example,

Deleuze, either by himself (1990b, 1994) or in conjunction with Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari,

1987, 2009), often engages in philosophical labour insofar that he either departs from or revises

French structuralisms that are ideological-Marxist (Althusser, 2008), libidinal-psychoanalytic

(Lacan, 2006), and semiotic (Barthes, 1972) in nature. Yet, the version of ‘Deleuze’ to be articulated throughout this dissertation vis-à-vis problems of power and communication does not owe its primary conceptualization to such departures and revisions. Rather, as it will be articulated throughout this dissertation, post-structuralism provides new points of entry when analyzing things like information, spaces, technologies, economics, and materiality, in which power and communication do not have to be reduced to and conflated with representation, language, and subjectivity per se. However, in saying this, we do not simply abandon these ideas, since they are relevant to Deleuze’s descriptions of the control society; in his pivot from the historical and geographical context of French philosophy during the 1960s and 1970s, Deleuze does not simply retreat to a mode of theorization that proceeds by way of positing that ‘anything goes’ (Feyerabend,

1978). Instead, we simply do not want to inflate topics like representation, language, and subjectivity beyond their capacity, especially when we are trying to draw out the finer associations that Deleuze makes between power and communication or movement and thinking.5

5 Michael Hardt (1993) simplifies the allure of French post-structuralism, Deleuze included, for Anglo-American audiences, in which there is an emphasis placed upon difference, multiplicity, becoming, and immanence over identity, dialectics, being, and transcendence. He writes, “Poststructuralism, we find, is not simply oriented simply toward the negation of theoretical foundations, but rather toward the exploration of new grounds for philosophical and political inquiry; it is involved not simply in the rejection of the tradition of political and philosophical discourse, but more importantly in the articulation and affirmation of alternative lineages that arise from within the tradition itself” (pp. ix-x). Hardt adds, “We do not look to Deleuze here, however, simply to find the solutions to contemporary theoretical 19

3. Chapter Outline

In Chapter I of the dissertation, “Communication vis-à-vis Power—Beyond History,

Conception, & Field: A Summary,” I trace the history of the relationship between power and communication as it has been identified and understood by Communication Studies. Specifically,

I am interested in how definitions of what communication effectively ‘is’ are conflated with either models of communicative processes or the very discourses about these models and processes. At the heart of this conflation is an essentialization of communication that carries within it assumptions and understatements about communication’s relationship with power. There are three examples that I treat as significant to illustrate this conflation: the now-discredited ‘transmission model’ of communication (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) of the late 1940s; the special issue of

Journal of Communication (1951-current) entitled “The Ferment in the Field” (Gerbner & Siefert,

1983), in which scholars in Communication Studies came together to discuss what the field has been, was at that given moment, and where it could head in the future; and the ‘meta-modelling and meta-discourse’ of communication theory (Craig, 1999), in which the forms and contents of communication research were codified to suggest that the lack of a common ground or language of conceptualization within Communication Studies needs to be produced.

These junctures are important to my elaboration of a Deleuzian philosophy of communication because they stipulate a history and context in which communication was first thought of as being a simple, unilinear, and unidirectional phenomenon, but was then made complex, dynamic, multilinear, and populous. Furthermore, the field of Communication Studies

problems. More important, we inquire into his thought in order to investigate the proposals of a new problematic for research after the poststructuralist rupture, to test our footing on a terrain where new grounds of philosophical and political thought are possible. What we ask of Deleuze, above all, is to teach us the contemporary possibilities of philosophy” (p. xv; added emphasis). As it is posited in this dissertation, control vis-à-vis power and communication, is but one such problematic. 20

has conceived of ‘communication’ particularly as a problem about how the field itself constructs its operational object, which has produced a variety of competing opinions, perspectives, traditions, and subfields. Moreover, the problem of power becomes more and more pronounced as being tied to the very conception of ‘communication’ and the field of ‘Communication Studies’ as we move closer to the present day. At work in this history is a figurative movement of thinking that speaks to how Deleuzian post-structuralism will also grapple with the relationship between communication, as a process and concept, and power, as a concrete and abstract force, in which

‘power-communication’ traverses the variety of social, political, economic, technological, historical, and geographical relations that have enmeshed the world when named as ‘control’.

Indeed, today, the very capacity of movement itself signifies the effects of power-communication, in which communicative acts map all sorts of power relations—social, political, economic, informational, energetic, erotic, material, etc. In these relations, communication is always on the move, ‘eppur si muove’, which is effectively what original models of the field, like transmission, tried to represent, and what later moments of disruption and revision, like the Ferment in the Field and the meta-model/discourse of communication theory, sought to reject—the process that takes place between points A and B.

In Chapter II, “What Comes Before the Societies of Control? Identifying ‘Communication’ in Deleuzian Post-Structuralist Philosophy: A Summary,” I begin to unpack power- communication in Deleuzian terms, despite that he was not a supporter of communication ‘as communication’, a fact about which a keen reader should be conscientious. Throughout the 1970s,

1980s, and early 1990s, in several short essays and interviews, and infrequently in major works,

Deleuze, be it alone or in conjunction with Guattari, deals with what communication is, how it works, and what it does. I draw upon these writings to situate a basis from which the convergences

between power, communication, and movement can be understood. In these writings, Deleuze proposes several alternatives to communication, insofar that transmission, information, and opinion, as instances of movement on the level of exchange, are not to be lauded. Each type of communication is roughly approximate to the period in which he was writing—transmission in the

1970s, information in the 1980s, and opinion in the 1990s. In Chapter II, I lay out the arguments of these texts, explain how power and communication are conceived by Deleuze, and draw conclusions about the trajectory towards which he heads as a theorist of meta-communication.

Indeed, as we will see in Chapter II, during this period between the 1970s and early 1990s,

Deleuze repeatedly grasps at forms of communication that are politically fertile, but that also cannot be folded into apparatuses of power. And while he proposes avenues of resistance to communication, which include stammering, crying, silence, artistic expression, and friendly engagement in conversation, he fails to conceive of a version communication that remains heterogeneous to power. Why does Deleuze fail? Because he does not fully exhaust the connections that communication has with power, especially when counter-communicative acts themselves normalize communication as a positive entity. Deleuze has yet to think of a mode of communication that is altogether radical. In many respects, this failure in Deleuzian thinking is not unlike how transmission requires noise to be the ‘exception’ to the model that legitimates the model’s explanatory thrust as such. It is only at the end of his philosophical career that Deleuze develops a concept that synthesizes the social, historical, political, technological, economic, and material histories of power as they have evolved vis-à-vis communicative practices, for which movement can be thought as a relation between the two. He names this synthesis ‘the control society’, which serves as the culmination of his decades of philosophizing, but also as the main theoretical concept that grounds the remainder of this dissertation.

In Chapter III, “Quo Vadis? Control, Discipline, & the Spaces Between the Seen & the

Said,” I focus my analysis on statements that Deleuze makes in his “Postscript” essay, which he starts by explicitly connecting his version of the control society to the disciplinary society that one sees elaborated in the works of Foucault. Here Deleuze proposes that Foucault was already pointing to a new configuration of power at the end of his career, although Deleuze must first belabour the ‘history’ of power’s transformation. In the disciplinary era, spaces like the school, the hospital, the clinic, and the asylum were where power was practiced. Although no space best represented the practice of power than the prison, within which one was confined, wherein ideas about spatiality in general meant that one was physically and mentally bound to a given site.

Effectively, Deleuze treats Foucault as a theorist of space, in which power is exercised by comporting bodies to specific, predictable behaviours and modes of conduct in localizable settings.

The body performed in certain ways only because it was shuttled through specific spaces that confined undesired affects or movements. These spaces themselves were only realized because of problems in the social field that necessitated their construction—be they criminality, pedagogy, disease, hygiene, mental illness, and so on.

We will see in Chapter III how Deleuzian statements about this well-trodden history of

Foucauldian thought situate how control can be thought of as a contemporary rationale of power, for which communication is necessary because movements occur everywhere and all the time. As such, my explication of Foucauldian discipline relies on the unfamiliar ways in which Deleuze conceives of power, precisely, as a force that acts upon another force, in which we can conceive of the liberation and hindrance of movement qua space as its fullest representation. This relationality of liberation/hindrance of movement qua space is read throughout Foucauldian philosophy by Deleuze as a sort of tension within which people, bodies, and movements are

captured. Deleuze’s interpretation of Foucault as a thinker of power-qua-spatiality furthermore relies on how actual spaces rely on practices of visuality and discourse to fix bodies and movements in a prescribed milieu. When one cannot be seen, one is instead represented in writing or speech; when one cannot be spoken of, one is instead made visible. This construction of a figurative space between visuality and discourse is important to my elaboration of the history of control insofar that power-communication can be thought of today as being both visual and discursive in nature simultaneously. The brief explanation of electronic cards (debit cards, credit cards, licenses, etc.), upon which I draw from elsewhere in Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay, concretizes how the separate visual and discursive technologies of the disciplinary era become joined in the society of control. Without these materially discursive and intensely surveillant objects, one is not permitted, or is at least severely hindered, to move about society.

In Chapter IV, “Tempus Fugit? Some Remarks About Instances of Material Practices of

Control Logics,” I look at the claims that Deleuze makes about the contemporary ‘logics’ of control, which he sets about in two ways. First, Deleuze makes plain how control societies, as the form of social organization in the present, are different from the historical instances of disciplinary societies. These differences can be understood as the opening of confined spaces that prisons, schools, hospitals, clinics, and asylums represent. Effectively, movement has become liberated today, so Deleuze says. Yet while people can move anywhere and everywhere they so choose, what follows from the opening of spaces and the liberation of movements is an abstraction of power. In Chapter IV, I schematize the several distinctions between disciplinary and control societies that Deleuze makes, and show how shifts in power, in terms of confinement/openness and coercion/liberation, suggest that power materializes in the minds of people, in addition to the management of their bodies.

After this articulation of the tenets of the control society contra the disciplinary society, I focus on the Deleuzian construction of a few scenarios in which control is realized in material practices, which include how people use technology, how people participate in labour, and how people engage in economic situations. However, Deleuze identifies historical shifts in each type of practice, which signal shifts in dynamics of power from sovereignty to disciple, then discipline to control. The contemporary logic of control effectively combines the material practices of technology, labour, and economics, such that movement and communication are the necessary actions one takes to survive in society. However, in Chapter IV, I also want to emphasize the contextual dimension of control for which discussions of spatial configurations of power alone cannot account and about which Deleuze is relatively silent. It is the combination of material practices—technology, labour, and economics—in the here and now that give control logics their thrust, because power cannot be immediately apprehended in ways that are felt, seen, or experienced in the disciplinary configuration. What Deleuze tries to ask at this point in his essay is ‘how have we arrived at the circumstance of power in which we live at this very moment?’ I argue that Deleuze arrives at this question because he keeps trying to conceive of the relationship that communication has upon action, thought, and life, for which his philosophy has never fully been able to comprehend. Subsequently, it is at the end of the ‘logic’ section of his “Postscript” essay that Deleuzian post-structuralism begins to run out of conceptual steam.

To solve this problem, in Chapter V, “Sine Qua Non: Post-Structuralism, Non-Philosophy,

& the Limits of Communication,” I conclude my analysis of Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay by briefly summarizing its ‘program’ section. What is demonstrated here in this final section of his

“Postscript” essay is Deleuze’s inability and incapacity to conceive outside of the structures of power-communication that support the control society. Elsewhere in his writings at the time,

Deleuze entertains the idea that maybe one cannot resist the control society as such, but can only merely ‘escape’ it by producing and inhabiting ‘vacuoles of non-communication’. And while he does not entertain the possibility of what non-communication is and how it could work, this loosely sketched concept is key to my interpretation of the overall fecundity of Deleuzian post- structuralism to Communication Studies.

My rendering of ‘non-communication’ thus follows from the turn that Deleuze and Guattari make to the ‘non-philosophy’ of thinker François Laruelle (1937-current). In their book, What Is

Philosophy? (1991/1994), Deleuze and Guattari mention Laruelle as someone who is doing unconventional things in the realms of thinking. Specifically, Laruelle tries to think without reproducing philosophical concepts and discourses that he feels are unable to grasp what is unthinkable and unknowable. Laruelle’s non-philosophy essentially describes philosophy without engaging with it on the level of conversation or debate, which would repeat the reproduction of concepts and discourses that try to represent the cusp of that which is new and different in thinking and knowledge altogether. However, like Deleuze, Laruelle also has a bit of an interest in communication. I examine some remarks that Laruelle (2010c) makes in the essay “The Truth

According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication,” in which he tries to conceive of a form of communication that refuses exchange, interaction, and dialogue. Basically, Laruelle’s version of communication is mute, inert, and hermetically sealed off from the world. It is this version of communication that refuses or withdraws from the world that I treat as the mode of non- communication to which Deleuze alludes. Ideally, perhaps non-communication is the limit of communication itself, specifically that which communication ‘cannot be’. Consequently, I position non-communication as working alongside communication, as a possible destination of thought and

action at which we can never arrive, but at that to which we should aspire nonetheless, especially if we take Deleuze’s suggestion to escape the control society seriously.

Chapter I:

Communication vis-à-vis Power—Beyond History, Conception, & Field:

A Summary

1. Orienting the Dissertation

In this chapter, we will begin to explore the historical relationship between power and communication within the field of Communication Studies. Specifically, we will see that the earliest models of communication, which were linear and unilateral in their representation of the communicative process, suggest a complementary explanation of how power was thought to operate. However, over time, Communication Studies abandons these models of communication, instead treating communication as a variable, fertile concept that underscores several areas of interest within the field. By the end of the twentieth century, it is taken as a given that communication cannot be limited to one definition nor exists within one research tradition within the field. Yet, does such a rendering of communication also suggest a change in how power can be conceived—is power, too, not as variable and fertile of a concept at the end of the twentieth century? Such a question will lead us to Deleuzian post-structuralism, insofar that within that intellectual history we find a repudiation of power itself that rests upon a prior rejection of the idea of ‘communication’ that is otherwise commensurate with or normative within the field. It is this

‘standing outside’ of the field of Communication Studies that Deleuzian post-structuralism performs that will allow us to recast the problem of the relationship between power and communication as one of ‘control’, which, in the Deleuzian interpretation, can be located within the historical, temporal, and material levels of the societal.

2. Transmission as Communication? Articulating a Concept

What is the overall purpose of Communication Studies? One scholar, George Gerbner

(1983), answers, “The significant dialogue of perspectives [that constitute Communication

Studies] is, as it should be, about how to make research most productive in illuminating the dynamics of power in communications and of communications in society. In other words, it is about the ways to pursue the critical mission of the discipline” (p. 356). But how do we understand this purpose today? It is tempting to think of ‘power’ as a tool of oppression, as an operation of force abused by people and institutions to suit their own ends. Certainly politicians, corporations, and privileged social classes engage in communicative practices to legitimate their monopoly over power, but perhaps there is a much more nuanced way to think about the relationship between power and communication today. For example, power can be located at both the macro-structural and micro-agential levels of human existence, which work together dialectically such that people are not as beholden to the omnipotence of abstract systems (society, economy, etc.) as we might think they are (Giddens, 1982). Furthermore, we might associate power with the qualities of a medium, through which people identify with and organize themselves into certain group classifications according to how communicative acts orient people vis-à-vis the social whole

(Mumby, 1991). We may also locate the tendrils of power in the various media institutions that produce and reinforce the parameters of the discourses that are deemed to be acceptable within the public sphere where one engages with the thoughts and opinions of others (McQuail, 2010).

In these instances, then, we can say that power qua communication is repressive or restrictive, undoubtedly, but how can Communication Studies speak to the ways in which it is productive as well—providing new ways of acting, thinking, and being in the world? Those who control communication also control the ways in which power can be effected in the world, upon

the ways in which we act, think, and live. Yet individuals can also act, think, and live as they so choose, which is to say, they also wield control over themselves as they will it, and certainly they control the kinds of communication with which they engage. But how do people come to have such control? How is control understood as an expression and effect of communication? To answer these questions, it is necessary to trace the history of Communication Studies to see how we arrive at the concept of control today.

In many respects, the very functionality of power vis-à-vis communication that Gerbner describes is derived from the ways in which ‘communication’ itself has been conceived and defined. The difficulty of delimiting what communication ‘is’ and how it exists within society is exactly what prompted Gerbner and others, in the early 1980s, to explicate the critical mission of the field altogether. At the time, he and other scholars in Communication Studies came together to survey the field, to map the various ways in which ‘communication’ had been operationalized since the field’s institutionalization. However, these attempts to concretize the meaning of

‘communication’ did not locate a singular conception or definition. Instead, Gerbner and others pointed to a ‘ferment’ within the ‘field’ of Communication Studies that multiplied the term itself.

This diversification of communication also demarcated the ways in which ‘communication’ had been articulated by the field’s practitioners since the inception of Communication Studies, be it as an pedagogical object of inquiry, an interpersonal process of human action, a historico-material practice, a techno-mediated phenomenon, an engine of economic production, and so on. The lack of consensus about what communication ‘is’ that the ‘ferment in the field’ demonstrates effectively gives the field its rationale, precisely because ‘communication’ remains impossible to pin down, and consequently scholars in the field work to explain and discuss this very impossibility. The goal of the field, then, is to figure out what it is we mean when we say that we ‘communicate’.

In this chapter, we will link the inability of Communication Studies to define a singular version of its overall operational concept to the fact that the earliest models of the field tried too hard to limit what communication was (or should be) according to how its processes were modelled. By contextualizing the early history of the field that began by designing linear models, we will be working within the tradition of the same critical mission of Communication Studies that Gerbner lays out. Specifically, we will think about how the relationship between power and communication has been recast by Communication Studies scholars since in the 1980s, in which the relationship will be though of as being has much more microscopic, granular, and subtle, since communication defies linear explanation and modelling. As such, when thinking about this relationship, we should not say that power is synonymous with communication or vice versa.

Power is not a model of communication, nor is communication a representation of power relations.

If society can be said to be complex, heterogeneous, and variable, so too is the relationship between power and communication. And while the imbrication of how power and communication in recent memory is certainly topical, it is not entirely new. Indeed, one of the earliest models of communication of the field provides a conceptual ‘road-map’ as to how power-communication can be thought today. In order to exhaust the questions of how, why, and in what concentration power operates vis-à-vis communication today, we must first construct our own linear understanding of the field, by taking into account from whence communication was thought of as only one kind of phenomenon.

Therefore, we turn to the ‘transmission’ model of communication, one of the earliest attempts by Communication Studies as developed by mathematicians Claude Shannon (1916-

2001) and Warren Weaver (1894-1978) to articulate communication in action, so that we can underscore some assumptions about what communication ‘was’, especially for purposes of

thinking about how transmission (and other similar linear models) effected understandings of power. First, transmission presupposes that power-communication is rational. Secondly, transmission analogizes technical and social forms of power-communication. Third, transmission explicates how communication does not pre-exist its modelling, but must be produced, often across distances and over time. Finally, transmission exemplifies the fact that power-communication is always a relation between at least two actors, because if one actor does not agree to be a part of the transmission process, then communication cannot exist because it does not exist in common.

This is not to say that the above example is reducible to transmission as the expression of power- communication. Rather, as a historical model of communication, transmission offers a perspective to recast the problem of power today.

While it is no longer in vogue as a sufficient explanation, we return to the transmission model of communication to re-consider how power and communication are co-constituted.

Specifically, how exactly does transmission model communicative processes? As Shannon and

Weaver (1949, p. 5, 98) explain, communication takes place between two actors—a transmitter

(or sender) and a receiver. An information source is transformed into a message by the sender.

This message is sent by the sender as a signal via a communication channel to the receiver, who then receives the signal and unpacks the message once it reaches its destination. While transmission assumes completion, meaning that the message-signal received is the same as it was sent, sometimes disruptions and failures of communication, called noise, happen during the process. Noise occurs when message-signals that are being transmitted via a communication channel are subject to distortions, errors, and surpluses in information. These aberrations within communication-as-transmission are not intended by the sender and are not beneficial for the receiver when the message-signal changes within the communication channel. As such, noise

impinges on the efficacy of communication and must be accounted for in the transmission model, although noise is not proper to the success of communication-as-transmission. When the entirety of the communicative process is modelled with noise in mind, the transmission model thus assumes that the sender instantiates the communicative process to minimize and avoid noise altogether. In turn, the receiver’s response is determined by the creation of the communicative act altogether, in which it is confirmed whether noise was properly accounted for in the initial transmission.

Communication thus is represented in sum as a linear process—as the sending and receiving exchanges of messages in which information is relayed between two actors, be they people (a person qua person) or machines (a machine qua machine).6

However, the transmission model results in several problems when one tries to identify the relationship between communication and power. The first problem is that transmission is explained as a mathematico-technological occurrence (by Shannon), and only afterwards is it analogized and

6 Other models of communication that were assumed and/or conceived in the early years of Communication Studies repeat the same linearity of communication in action. For example, the behaviourist ‘hypodermic needle’ version of communication assumed a direct, immediate, and uniform effect of mass media message reception, metaphorically deposited into the heads and brains of audiences, as if it were ‘injected’ by a ‘hypodermic needle’ (Bineham, 1988). However, this model was soon abandoned when a ‘two step flow’ of communication was developed in which ‘opinion leaders’, those in positions of authority and/or expertise, received, interpreted, and disseminated mass media messages within smaller spheres of social influence (Katz, 1957). As such, the two-step flow of communication is still overall a linear model of the communicative process, albeit with an intermediary position in which messages are not immediately received. Another example is the model of verbal communication that was developed by Harold Lasswell (1948/2012), in which he asked “Who/Says What/In Which Channel/To Whom/With What Effect?” This model of communication placed emphasis on the contexts in which speaking can be analyzed, when speaking occurs on several levels—control (‘who’), content (‘says what’), media (‘in which channel’), audience (‘to whom’), and effect (‘with what effect?’). While these examples are significant as historical touchstones of explaining how communication was thought to occur, Shannon and Weaver’s transmission model stands apart because it does not need human involvement to take place, although it potentially explains human communication nonetheless. Finally, Roman Jakobson’s ‘forms’ and ‘functions’ of language’ (1960, p. 353, 357) add a ‘y-axis’ (of sorts) to the overall sender-message-receiver chain (or what he marks out as an addresser-message-addressee relationship), in which he focuses on all the variables of human communication that Shannon and Weaver miss. Specifically, Jakobson pays attention to the referent of a message (the context), the physical means of message delivery (the contact), a common basis of linguistic communication that is primary to meaning-making and understanding (the code) that all operate in conjunction with a verbal enunciation (i.e. along the y-axis with the ‘message’ serving as the centre). Jakobson then maps onto this model of verbal communication ‘functions’ of language: emotive (per the addresser); poetic (per the message); conative (per the addressee); referential (per the context); phatic (per the contact); and metalingual (per the code). 33

applied more broadly to human phenomena like speaking (by Weaver). Weaver’s social version of transmission is predicated upon Shannon’s mathematical rendering of transmission as a first principle. As such, the social dimension of communication that Weaver utilizes as an example is determined by the technological conditions elaborated by Shannon in which transmission is thinkable. The problem with this technological determination is whether it is appropriate to explain human phenomena like two people speaking, be it as face-to-face conversation or through instant messaging via texting. What remains consistent, however, between Shannon’s mathematico- technological transmission and Weaver’s social transmission is the explanation of communication as a linear process of information/message-signal exchange.

Yet this creates another problem for anyone interested in thinking about the relationship between power and communication today, since transmission is too linear, reductive, and simplistic as a model of communication as it happens. Indeed, Shannon and Weaver did not intend transmission to be a model of power, but it nevertheless expresses several conditions in which power is practiced. First, transmission assumes that communication is unidirectional, taking place from the sender to the receiver, without placing emphasis on the receiver’s response to the message-signal. For instance, can the receiver not become a sender in kind by replying in agreement, disagreement, or clarification as to what was transmitted? Additionally, transmission also places too much emphasis on the message-signal as the unit of information to be sent, whereas all the information that was not or could not be coded into a message-signal is left out of the process. Information here includes the social, historical, and political contexts in which one generates a message-signal. Finally, transmission also simplifies communication by observing its occurrence between like actors. While Shannon and Weaver examine transmission between two machines or between two people, they run the risk of dehumanizing human interaction and reifying

non-human interaction by treating communication-as-transmission as a flat phenomenon, without the possibilities of dynamism, randomness, chance, delay, disruption, and failure that one finds in human existence. This problem is acutely felt today given that transmission also occurs on the level between a person and a machine and vice versa. Transmission fails as an adequate and contemporary model of understanding the relationship between power and communication because of the amount of people sending message-signals and the variety of technologies that exist to facilitate such message-signal transmission.

Despite these failures of the transmission model to adequately account for how power and communication relate to one another, it nevertheless persists as a teaching heuristic of communication in many introductory level Communication Studies classes. The persistence of the transmission model is because it ultimately expresses several fantasies about communication, with which the application of power is consonant. The first fantasy is that transmission, not unlike

Communication Studies, assumes that ‘communication’ exists, or must be made to exist, despite any noise in the message/signal-communication channel exchange process that makes message- signals faulty or break down. As a positive concept, communication seeks to reduce miscommunication and eliminate outright failures. As such, transmission proceeds via the idea that communication is, or should always be, successful. Noise, miscommunication, and failure are not constitutive of success within transmission, although they nonetheless orient what it means for communication to succeed; success occurs when communication exists, whereas failure is only possible when communication is piecemeal or absent altogether. The existence and success of communication-as-transmission then lead to the transparency of message-signal exchange.

Transmission presupposes that any message-signals received will be and should be received exactly as they were sent, otherwise the purpose of transmission is defeated. Transparency here

also forecloses the possibility of interpretation, that there can be several ways to implement a message, by assuming a uniformity of the message-signal as a known quantity (that it could only ever be ‘one thing’). And if the existence, success, and transparency of transmission holds true, then the receiver should understand the message-signal transmitted by the sender, respond to the information of the message-signal (its meaning), and act upon the sender’s transmission accordingly. Within the confines of the model, the receiver depends upon the sender and the transmission of a message-signal. The receiver thus legitimates the overall communication process, consecrating the fact that communication can be predicted and governed as a process that always moves from point A to point B.

We will see below that, because of the limitations of transmission, Communication Studies has moved away from such notions of communication. In many respects, these shifts in the field away from fantasies of transmission (as the supposed best version of communication modelling) were the result of trying to reconceive these fantasies about communication as forms of power themselves. Indeed, the major moments of the field in the decades after the development of the transmission model demonstrate that communication is often in flux, variable, unclear, uncertain, and polyvalent in its application and effect. Yet these moments in Communication Studies history treat the conception of ‘communication’ more exhaustively than they do the phenomenon of power. What we can take away from these moments in the field is that the very multiplications of

‘communication’—be it as a concept, practice, process, and model of social interaction—entail how power can be thought of as a dispersive phenomenon.

3. Communication Theory After Transmission: The ‘Ferment in the Field’

Recognizing the limitations of the transmission model, scholars in Communication Studies have repeatedly tried to conceive what communication ‘is’ other than ‘transmission’. In this

respect, they have been fulfilling the mission of the field that Gerbner identifies, namely that power, as it exists within communication but also as an expression of it, is to be illuminated given its effects upon society. However, what is unspoken in Gerbner is this: the moment that communication is concretized as only ever being one thing, i.e. ‘communication is X’, is when the illumination of the dynamics of power, in and of communications in society, becomes yet another operation of power altogether for those who wield and control it. To name communication as one kind of thing is to silence other possibilities of what communication could be, which calls into question who makes the decision to name communication ‘as X’ and why one has chosen this emphasis. As such, the dilemma of naming communication as one thing has been and continues to be avoided by the field, but the mere illumination of power is not enough. At this point in this chapter, we turn to a couple of junctures in Communication Studies history to see how critiques of transmission, specifically about its linearity and reduction of communication, were applied and explicated. From these encounters with resistances to transmission, we can tease out some implications about how power thrives when communication itself multiplies. But what exactly are these snapshots in time of the field that are important to think about the relationship between power and communication today?

In this chapter, we will focus on two notable attempts on the part of Communication Studies scholars to resolve the problems of linearity and reduction that one finds with the transmission model. The first of which is ‘the Ferment in the Field’ of 1983, when in a special issue of the

Journal of Communication scholars came together to identify the myriad forms of how communication was conceived at that time (Gerbner & Siefert, 1983). Many of these

‘communications’ were the result of how Communication Studies had evolved since the field’s institutionalization. The second moment of escaping the transmission model is the mapping of the

‘meta-modelling’ and the ‘meta-discourse’ of communication theory as concentrated around the field’s conceptual problematics (Craig, 1999). Meta-modelling and meta-discourse were meant to unify the diverse strands of theoretical inquiry within a schema that compares historical research traditions, especially about the problems of what ‘communication’ and ‘communication theory’ are (or could be in future). Together these two critical junctures of Communication Studies signify multiple tries to solve the problems that communication ‘as transmission’ inevitably created.

The first significant moment to define (and redefine) communication as something other than transmission is the 1983 ‘Ferment in the Field’, which was a compilation of 35 essays that were published as a special issue in the International Communication Association-affiliated

Journal of Communication (1951-current). The ‘Ferment in the Field’ itself emerged because of the major differences in theoretical and methodological research paradigms that existed within the field at that time (Nordenstreng, 2004, p. 7).7 The intervention that the Ferment in the Field made is twofold. The first of which is that it was a moment of ‘consolidation’ and ‘cataloguing’ of what had taken place in the field, although the effects of such an effort have been circumspect (Sjøvaag

& Moe, 2008).8 The second intervention is that the Ferment in the Field brought to fruition multiple answers to questions about whether Communication Studies itself had a future and, if so, what kind of future would it look like (Berelson, 1959). Indeed, the Ferment in the Field repudiates such questions altogether, by highlighting that Communication Studies has not one, but several futures, each as appropriate as the field’s contemporaneous problematics. And furthermore, unlike the

7 Kaarle Nordenstreng (2004), looking back at both the ‘Ferment in the Field’ as well as the missed opportunity to be involved with the initial special issue, inverts Gerbner’s identification of the field’s critical mission. He writes that what the field gains in breadth and diversity it potentially lacks in depth and specificity, stating that, “our task is to deconstruct the naïve view that communication is the core of society and that we [in Communication Studies] specialize in undoing media hubris” (p. 13) 8 This claim is made by Todd Gitlin (Sjøvaag & Moe 2008, p. 131), although Michael Schudson reiterates Gitlin’s point, stating, “All of the papers in it [the Ferment in the Field] are brief. It became a kind of a milestone, a marking point, a point of reference of some kind, but I do not think there is a single piece in here that has gotten much mileage itself, as something to look back to or to cite” (Sjøvaag & Moe, 2008, p. 132). 38

relatively ahistorical abstraction of communication that transmission demonstrates, the takes on what communication ‘is’ that one finds in the Ferment in the Field explicitly connect to the historical, political circumstances in which the field existed. This is to say, if Communication

Studies has multiple futures, it also had and has multiple pasts and presents (Park & Pooley, 2008), and numerous perspectives (Shepherd, St. John, & Striphas, 2006) about the never-ending conversation about what communication ‘is’ (Gehrke & Keith, 2015), in which the problem of power has been, is, and will continue to be, central to the field’s rationale.9

The essays of the Ferment in the Field special issue are loosely organized around several thematics. These thematics include the history of the field (Schramm, 1983; Rogers & Chaffee

1983; Miller, 1983; Comstock, 1983), institutional, disciplinary, and national differences between communication research approaches (Katz, 1983; Grandi, 1983; Mattelart, 1983; Hamelink, 1983;

Thayer, 1983), the ways in which Communication Studies has been organized into administrative and critical research paradigms (Tunstall, 1983; Szecskö, 1983; Melody & Mansell, 1983; Smythe

& Dinh, 1983), the relationships Communication Studies has with Media Studies and media institutions (Lang & Lang, 1983; Stappers, 1983; Balle & Cappe de Baillon, 1983; Noelle-

Neumann, 1983), communication’s relationship with democracy (Blumler, 1983; Gans, 1983;

Stevenson, 1983), the methods of communication research (Rosengren, 1983; Slack & Allor, 1983;

Ewen, 1983; Haight, 1983; Pool, 1983; Halloran, 1983), the political economy of communication

(Mosco, 1983; Schiller, 1983), and the convergences between Communication Studies and

9 Contemporary calls for a new ‘ferment in the field’ moment repeat many of the same kinds of questions that one finds in the original: ‘what does the field of communication research look like?’; ‘what have been the key tendencies and developments in communication(s) research and its subfields?’; and ‘what is the status of theory, methods, critique, ethics, and interdisciplinarity in our field?’ (Fuchs, 2016). What is implicit in such a call for a new ferment within Communication Studies is the fact that previous questions, about what communication is and how it is done, remain open, and are persistent enough that to invoke them today means that one casts into doubt Gitlin and Schudson’s remarks that the original ‘Ferment in the Field’ moment did not have much impact. 39

Cultural Studies along the lines of critique (White, 1983; Edelstein, 1983; Carey, 1983; Garnham,

1983; Tuchman, 1983; Jansen, 1983).

Despite these different interpretations of Communication Studies in practice, if one turns to the Ferment in the Field looking for a conclusive definition of what communication ‘is’, one will be disappointed. The scholars of the Ferment in the Field developed their thematics to survey the meshworks of research practices and perspectives that all try to capture the idea of

‘communication’, even though they consequently ran into the impossibility of absolutely defining or categorizing the concept that gives the field its name. Yet these scholars intuited that the field’s very lack of concreteness about its operative term is what gives Communication Studies its strength as an academic endeavour. For example, one scholar, Wilbur Schramm (1983), asks whether the field has “produced a central, interrelated body of theory on which the practitioners of a discipline can build and unify their thinking,” and answers that it has not (p. 14). Schramm extrapolates from his answer that “Communication is always a part of something. It represents a relationship not only between individuals, but also between relationships” (p. 16; original emphasis).

We can further crystallize the difference between the earliest transmission models of communication and the later ferment of Communication Studies by way of updating the contexts in which these conceptions of communication can be though via example. In the case of the former, transmission as a ‘one size fits all’ definition of communication would be as stifling of a situation as if there were only one physical store from which one buys food or clothes (Wal-Mart), one website to purchase technologies (Amazon), one company that produces said technologies

(Apple), one social networking service to keep in contact with friends and family (Facebook), one search engine to find information (Google), one entertainment hub to enjoy visual or sonic media

(Netflix, Spotify), and one service provide that supports all of the above (Comcast in the United

States, Rogers in Canada). There is little choice in a monopoly situation that is either horizontally or vertically integrated. In the case of the latter, however, perhaps there are too many choices

(Schwartz, 2004) of communication, which, if the example holds, means that there are too many physical stores, websites to purchase technologies, companies that produce technologies, and so on. In which case, the understanding of what communication ‘is’ becomes a question of emphasis.

The problem in conceiving of power, then, becomes inverted, since being too specific about how power works loses the overall survey of where it is exercised, whereas speaking too broadly about where power works reduces it to a general phenomenon with indistinct characteristics.

Consequently, while consensus about a concept is laudable, it should not be fetishized nor absolutized, which is how the early historical models of communication, like transmission, proceeded. However, dissensus about a concept is likewise desirable, but only such that conversation about communication vis-à-vis power does not degrade into the staking of territories and research traditions, whereby scholars associate because of the ‘family resemblances’ between communication types, but are not conversant with one another in terms of the similarities and differences in one’s mode of theorization or methodology.

Beyond what happens between people, like Communication Studies scholars, it is this understanding of communication, i.e. the relationship between relationships, which Schramm describes that best describes how power can be thought after the Ferment in the Field. While power is explicitly dealt with in terms of political economy or Cultural Studies critique, for instance, what the Ferment in the Field captures is a conceptual picture of how power criss-crosses the various types of ‘communication’ that exist within the field and the world. This is to say the Ferment in the Field is the very practice of power itself, when the field is mapped out and drawn along the

lines of historical boundaries, disciplinary distinctions, differences in approach, justifications of foci, and how communication both supports and subverts democratic, public action. The issues of who gets to make these decisions, moreover why these decisions had to be made, were the very matters of contestation that gave rise to the Ferment in the Field altogether. In this sense, the diffusion of ‘communication’ within the Ferment in the Field, which was already fraught with ideological, theoretical, and methodological clashes, analogizes the disruption of the transmission model, in which the linearity, reduction, and simplicity of the transmission model could no longer be viable for those doing academic work in the 1980s. By dint of its fragmentation, the concept of communication connects and includes all facets of society, and Communication Studies scholars came together, and continue to do so today, precisely because ‘communication’ itself cannot be drawn together under one definition or categorization.10

4. Communication Theory After Transmission: Meta-Model & Meta-Discourse

The second attempt to conceive of what communication ‘is’ other than transmission is

Robert T. Craig’s 1999 essay “Communication Theory as a Field,” published in Communication

Theory (1991-current). Craig takes the lack of coherence of the field as a given, and proceeds to treat theoretical work done in Communication Studies as a “set of assumptions” that suggest common themes or problems (p. 121). Indeed, Craig seeks to put different theoretical approaches

10 Ten years after the Ferment in the Field, scholars in Journal of Communication looked back to see what (if anything) had changed. They wondered whether the Ferment in the Field was still fertile to again wonder what communication ‘is’ and how Communication Studies responds, or cannot respond, to questions about the (non-) existence of the field’s necessary concept. Indeed, the title of the follow-up, ‘The Future of the Field—Between Fragmentation and Cohesion’, dramatizes the tension within which ‘communication’ exists and scholars do their research. This is to say, the future of 1983 that was 1993 did not offer a clearer picture about what should be done than what the scholars of the Ferment in the Field had attempted. As the editors of the ten-year anniversary of the Ferment in the Field write, Communication Studies is constituted by “both centripetal and centrifugal tendencies: paradigms at war with each other; paradigms whose epistemologies intersect; and the occasional search for an overarching, comprehensive conceptual framework for communication research” (Levy & Gurevitch, 1993, p. 5). And even some of the essays of ‘The Future of the Field’ that speak most directly to the Ferment in the Field (Beniger, 1993; Craig, 1993; Grossberg, 1993; Krippendorff, 1993; Lang & Lang, 1993; Shepherd, 1993; Swanson, 1993) repeat this diversification of perspectives that borders on opacity about what it is Communication Studies scholars (are supposed to) do. 42

‘into dialogue’ with one another in such a way that treats communication as an effect, or, rather, a construction that constitutes the thinkability of reality itself (p. 124). As Craig writes, “The constitutive model offers the discipline of communication a focus, a central intellectual role, and a cultural mission (i.e., to critique cultural manifestations of the transmission model)” (p. 125). On one hand, Craig here politicizes the diffusion of approaches to communication, wherein phenomena can be understood ‘as communication’ without being defined by or compared to the transmission model. Communication, then, is more than the transmission of message-signals between senders and receivers. On the other hand, Communication Studies also cannot be extricated from the historical, political conditions about which one cannot help but communicate, especially to communicate ‘about communication’, including communication about why communication is more than just ‘transmission’.11

However, any and every move away from transmission on the part of Communication

Studies scholars, Craig notes, is another facet of the ‘meta-model’ of communication, insofar that multiple ‘communications’, or theoretical approaches to the problem of what communication ‘is’, emerge in contradistinction to transmission. Yet, Craig cautions that meta-modelling is not an either-or proposition, i.e. either we are left with transmission or something else entirely, but also that explanations about what communication is, despite the lack of concreteness of the field’s operational term, cannot be substituted for the term itself (p. 127-128; 2015). To side-step these research complications, Craig articulates a supplement to the meta-modeling of communication— the necessary ‘meta-discourse’ component to ground communication theory.

11 “The constitutive model is presented as a practical response to contemporary social problems, such as those arising from the erosion of the cultural foundations of traditional ideas and institutions, increasing cultural diversity and interdependence, and widespread demands for democratic participation in the construction of social reality. Just as the transmission model can be used to bolster the authority of technical experts, a constitutive model can hopefully serve the causes of freedom, toleration, and democracy” (Craig, 1999, p. 126). 43

The meta-discourse of communication is the fact that “communication is not only something we do, but also something we refer to reflexively in ways that are practically entwined with our doing of it” (Craig 1999, p. 129). Meta-discourse takes place on the level of the ordinary, everyday, and concrete occurrences of communicative utterances about communication. Craig uses the concept of meta-discourse to reconstruct communication theory along the lines of what theoretical approaches do with communication and what Communication Studies scholars have done with these theories. Indeed, meta-discourse returns to the problem of legitimating the existence of Communication Studies by articulating the field’s relevance and practicality since everyone communicates (and can communicate about communication). Craig is less interested in theoretical perspectives like rhetoric, semiotics, phenomenology, cybernetics, sociopsychology, sociocultural studies, and critical (Marxist) theory, those strands that he identifies as the major theoretical perspectives within Communication Studies history, and more interested in constructing a common ground or space “in which all communication theories can interact productively with each other and, through the medium of practical metadiscourse, with communication practice” (p. 131).12

To achieve this common ground upon which all communication theories can potentially interact, Craig creates two tables to show how different theoretical perspectives can be compared.

The first table lays out the major tenets of these theoretical perspectives—how they theorize communication, how they theorize problems of communication, their meta-discursive vocabulary, how their meta-discursive vocabularies appeal to commonality, and what challenges result from

12 Sixteen years after Craig created a common space to think about communication theory, Barbie Zelizer (2015) asks, “What is singular about communication that might have bearing on its theorizing?” (p. 412). Zelizer continues, stating, “Given that both the journals and handbooks in our field regularly stretch across ontologies, methodologies, and epistemologies in the scholarship they disseminate, we may be overdue for theory that elucidates the value of that so- called “intellectual smorgasbord,” particularly because an array of evidentiary links may not occur as regularly in other disciplines” (p. 413). In this respect, transmission is one such singular thing, at least according to Craig, albeit as a point of orientation from which the field must escape. 44

the use of meta-discursive vocabularies (p. 133). The second table maps the differences between perspectives so that one can note, for example, the differences between rhetoric and cybernetics or phenomenology and critical theory (p. 134). The ramifications of constructing a commonality within meta-models and meta-discourse of communication are clear: communication is in fact

‘something’, although it need not be only one thing, unlike what transmission proposes, which is what Craig’s tables illustrate.

The problem, however, with Craig’s meta-modelling/meta-discourse arrangement is that

Communication Studies scholars do not occupy the same place within this common ground or space (or even at the same time), so one cannot assume that one is or can be conversant with the entirety of the field, let alone to non-practitioners of Communication Studies. Thus, Craig’s attempts to avoid conflating communication with meta-modelling/discourse create a problem in which those who speak the ‘lingo’ of the ‘game’ of communication are the only ones who are privy to the subtle differences of the research field that practice the lingo and play the game altogether.

We can then say that Craig’s survey of Communication Studies is both not inter-disciplinary and intra-disciplinary enough, by which the phenomenon of communication itself is infra- disciplinary. In short, in the attempt to include everything ‘about’ communication, Craig ends up potentially shutting people out of the conversation about what communication ‘is’ or how it can be studied. And while the historical scope of Craig’s meta-modelling/discourse is limited to roughly sixty years, one encounters that the same conundrum, of who is included in or excluded from the conversation about communication, when one takes seriously the history of ideas of/about communication all at once.

Together, meta-modelling and meta-discourse provide ways to talk about the diffusions of power in the twenty-first century, especially when tied to communication. If, after Schramm,

power can be thought of as the relationship of relationships, like how communication as been conceived, this means that the thinking of power cannot be separated from the talking about power.

It is possible to compare meta-modelling and meta-discourse to how we think of and talk about power. Meta-modelling is a macro-operation, by which we can think of power as a conception tied to a specific need (why must power be produced?) at a given time and place (how is power today different from previous forms of power?). Meta-discourse is a micro-operation, by which power is realized (we can do X with power), concretized (we can do X with power to people Y), and implemented (we can do X with power to people Y to effect Z). However, what we need is a

‘meso-operation’, something that connects the macro- and micro-scales of power. In this respect, this is exactly what communication is, since it relates one scale of power to the other. However, it also gives form to the macro-scale of power (what we say) and content to the micro-scale of power

(what we say about the fact that we can say anything). Precisely, the common ground of communication cannot be filled because communication itself is constantly in movement, relating the different levels of power. Instead, the common ground of communication theory ‘about communication’ can only be produced as an empty, floating space, figuratively speaking.

The Ferment in the Field and the meta-modelling/discourse of communication theory are significant as examples because they show just how far Communication Studies has moved away from the linearity, simplicity, and reduction of the transmission model. These examples illustrate the loci from which power has been thought within the field, but also expressed within it—mostly for better, sometimes for worse. This is to say, the questions about what communication ‘is’ (or can be) are ultimately tied to power. The conditions of power that determine how and why communication exists at a specific time and place are expressible insofar that there is need to

discuss ‘communication’ altogether.13 How, then, might we think of communication? First, it is a social, political, and historical phenomenon, and is necessary for human existence to continue.

Secondly, communication exists as the unspoken, or forgotten, problem of the field is ‘what is communication?’ itself. Thus, Communication Studies is a research paradigm that repeatedly, and perhaps fetishistically, discusses how one is to talk ‘about’ communication, which gives rise to various theoretical perspectives that have overlapping and often contradictory interests in solving communication problems. Finally, communication is ever-changing, and has had different emphases and fashions at given times, which at the advent of the field included emphases on language, meaning, interpretation, clarity, transparency, and the impacts of technology.

5. Excursus: The Effects of ICTs, or, Setting Up the Control Society

Today, however, communication can be also thought of vis-à-vis capitalism, globalization, commodification, digitization, and the limits of community. Consistent across these bookends of

Communication Studies is the role that technology plays in the communicative act—at the advent of the field, transmission as but one example, but today, as the limits of ‘the technological’ itself.

13 In his book Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Peters (1999) demonstrates this fact when he synthesizes the major thematics of communication since Greek antiquity up until the end of the twentieth century. The overall thrust of Peters’ book is that there is no one communication, an ur-communication, but instead multiple reinventions of communicative problems. Each chapter isolates a problem of communication at a specific point in time and moves forward in history as communication problems themselves change and evolve because of circumstance. In this respect, Peters’ genealogy of material practices of communication follows the same intellectual trajectory that one finds in the Ferment in the Field and Craig’s meta-model/discourse essay. Peters’ snapshots of moments in the history of communication also demonstrate another conceptual movement away from the conflation of communication with transmission. Specifically, Peters’ historicization of communication disrupts the perception of communication as a linear phenomenon. While Peters’ book overall proceeds in a chronological fashion, his historicization of communication is not entirely or neatly teleological. There are gaps and overlaps in his treatment of historical record. The major takeaway from his book is that Peters ultimately suspends the expectations of communication history by abandoning linearity as a model of communication, not just as form and content, but also as a method of analysis. However, Peters’ treatment of the historicization of communication has a major problem. His narrative about changes in communication is highly selective in nature, as it focuses primarily on communication as it has been practiced in Western society. As such, Peters’ historicization is a political matter since it marginalizes how communication has been thought of and practiced throughout history by people in Eastern societies and the Global South. Peters’ historicization ultimately silences parts of the plurality of those who communicate and have also contributed to continuation of ideas about communication. 47

The effects of technology are also what the Ferment in the Field and the meta-modelling/discourse of communication theory either ignored, failed to anticipate, or did not emphasize enough. Such consideration is necessary to understand the distribution of power in the twenty-first century. This dissertation functions as a sustained study about how far the idea of communication has come since transmission, but by way of how ICTs have transformed the communicative act. However, ICTs have not solely transformed communication. It is necessary to designate how power has impacted how and why we communicate today. Power cannot be located on the macro- or micro-level of social interaction, but is fulfilled at the meso-level, as a relation of relations, that ICTs themselves

‘mediate’ (in the etymological sense of the term).

The attempts to move away from the transmission model of communication failed to predict, ignored, or did not emphasize the social, historical, political, and economic conditions in which transmission was situated and from which it diffused, which is to say, transmission as a technological process. Transmission is still thinkable today as a model of technical communication because of the role ICTs have had in shaping and transforming social, political, and economic life.

The ubiquity with which one encounters and uses ICTs today is the result of several moments in which the technologization of communication became more and more inevitable. For instance, the transmission model cannot be removed from the immediate post-World War II context of cybernetics and computational communication that occurred at the same time Shannon and

Weaver elaborated sender-receiver relationships (Wiener, 1948, 1954). In many respects, cybernetics provides a complementary model of communication. Transmission in Shannon and

Weaver is linear, demonstrating the exchange of information. Conversely, cybernetics

‘boomerangs’ the linearity of transmission by making it into a loop. Communication ‘feeds back’ into itself to correct, if not prevent, noise, miscommunication, and failure. Norbert Wiener (1954)

summarizes the aim of communication, when he says that “In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful” (p. 17).

Both transmission and cybernetics try to control the success of communication, which is to say, control is also the capacity to predict success and to anticipate problems in the exchange of information to eliminate them. Even cyberneticists at the time recognized that technologies themselves have the potential to ‘steer’ reality to ends that are not beneficial to human ends.

Later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ICTs ultimately ended up ‘steering’ their way into the social sphere, when they were widely introduced into work spaces and incorporated into labour practices. The connection of ICTs to labour effected a social structural shift when the production of immaterial goods, like information and knowledge, subsumed the production of material goods, like commodities. In this respect, any society that shifts from the production of material to immaterial goods is designated as ‘post-industrial’ (Bell, 1974, 1980). Post-industrial society thrives because information, like data processing, and knowledge, like new statements about previous facts or ideas, extend the spaces in which labour ‘works’ (Bell, 1980, pp. 505-506), from the physical-material sphere to the mental-immaterial sphere. However, this extension of labour into the mental sphere of social existence is impossible without computerization, since “the computer is a tool for managing the mass society, since it is the mechanism that orders and processes the transactions whose huge number has been mounting almost exponentially because of the increase in social interactions” (Bell, 1980, p. 509). The slogans of today’s corporations that have made their profits because of computerization and computer commodities, like Apple, exemplify how physical-material life can be controlled through the management of mental- immaterial life, when informational and knowledge labours are expected to ‘think different’. Yet when one ‘thinks different’, does he or she ‘think different’ on the level of what is thought or the

level of how one thinks? Or both? Regardless, such corporate slogans obfuscate how naturalized

ICTs have become in social, political, and economic life. It is difficult to identify and talk about the effects of ICTs, specifically without using them altogether, when they have become extensions of biological processes and social interactions.14 Either which way, in post-industrial society, thinking is inextricable from the ICTs with which one exists otherwise, when one works and lives in the same measure.

This trajectory of the technologization of communication culminates at the end of the Cold

War, when ICTs were so ubiquitous that life without them could not happen. After the Cold War, it was said that the world had reached ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1995), in which no alternative to America neoliberal democracy was conceivable. It was at this point when ICTs became symbols of an ideology that relies on bureaucratization (Beniger, 1986) and corporatization (Deetz, 1992) of life itself. The same computers that one uses at work became desirable as commodities to engage in society during leisure time. As a computer network of electronic-digital technologies, the Internet, which was already used in a nascent form by the military and universities since the 1960s, became massively popular, and was hailed as a new version of ‘the public sphere’ (Habermas, 1991) in which people could communicate with others across the globe in the realization of the idea of ‘the global village’ (McLuhan, 1962). These changes in society demonstrate the rate at which action, thought, and life become incorporated into the use of ICTs (Poster, 2001; Papacharissi, 2002). As James Beniger (1986) writes,

14 The difference between this perspective and the technological determinism of Marshall McLuhan is that we can treat the inability to see and discuss the effects of ICTs here as a political problem, whereas McLuhan identifies it as a technological problem (only in contradistinction to the treatment of the effects of ICTs as a social problem). McLuhan (1994) writes, “There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement [that people are to blame for bad uses of technologies and not the technologies themselves] that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his [sic] own being in a new technical form” (p. 11). 50

[A] society’s ability to maintain control—at all levels from interpersonal to

international relations—will be directly proportional to the development of its

information technologies. Here the term technology is intended not in the narrow

sense of practical or applied science but in the more general sense of any intentional

extension of a natural process, that is, of the processing of matter, energy, and

information that characterizes all living systems. (pp. 8-9; original emphasis)

What Beniger describes recalls the idea of how technology turns the natural world into ‘standing reserve’, or raw materials to be transformed into practices and objects of culture (Heidegger, 1977).

In the twenty-first century, power and communication as practiced via ICTs have ultimately shaped and transformed what it means to act, think, and live: actions are monitored and regulated; thinking is prescribed and delimited; and life is managed and administered. Nothing today, be it a person, place, thing, event, action, or statement, escapes from being captured by practices that

ICTs support; it is too easy to photograph, tweet, hashtag, share, meme, commodify, and buy portions of the lifeworld. Yet, should people still assume that they wield the freedom to act, think, and live as one so chooses, precisely because of the quantity and quality of communications in which they engage?

6. Conclusion: Power-Communication & the Deleuzian Turn?

To answer such a question, we must first understand the impacts of ICTs have had on the social sphere, specifically how communication as a concept has transformed since the transmission model, moreover how it has become much more diffused since the Ferment in the Field and meta- structural since Craig’s meta-model/discourse formulation. Relatedly, we must think of power as a recursive, self-reflexive, or cybernetic, phenomenon. The technological here analogizes the social and the political, but at the heart of this triangulation is a communicative logic that

exemplifies existence in the twenty-first century. Communication exists, must exist, will continue to exist, and every attempt to resist this inevitability will give this communicative logic its positive, or productive, charge. Whereas before one could say, ‘I communicate’, now one says, ‘I must communicate (about communication)’. In many respects, Communication Studies itself, as an academic practice housed within the university system, can be thought of as pedagogical space in which control is fulfilled. To stay true to the mission of the field that Gerbner underlined, anyone who teaches and/or researches within the field should be reminded that such a mission requires self-reflexivity about what it is we do, especially if we aid and abet forces of power, even when we explicitly try to abandon and abolish them. This is especially important when it comes to conceiving of the confluences of power and technology vis-à-vis communication that together have generated a new orientation of reality.

But what, exactly, is this new orientation of reality? Post-structuralist philosopher Gilles

Deleuze has one possible answer. The name that Deleuze gives to this new orientation of reality, in which the co-constitution of power and communication shape action, thought, and life at the end of the twentieth century, is ‘the control society’ (1992). The Deleuzian control society can be an important concept for Communication Studies because it re-articulates the conversation about questions about what communication and power ‘are’, ontologically speaking, considering the operation of power-communication on difference levels of existence. The control society also condenses several critiques that Deleuze himself has levied against transmission models of communication since the 1970s. Previously, Deleuze examines how power-communication (as transmission) is thought of as being reducible to information exchange, the dissemination of opinion, and the circulation of money. However, the control society, as developed by Deleuze in the early 1990s, points a new formulation of power-communication. Whereas transmission is

unilateral in its linearity, occurring between senders and receivers, control is multilateral, functioning as a relation between people, places, and things that all encounter one another. This dispersal of power-communication into various arenas of collective existence (nation-states, cultures, economies, institutions, etc.) is facilitated by the reliance that people place upon ICTs, even though the control society cannot be reduced to ICTs themselves. People must believe of their own accord that they use and require ICTs, to the point that they think that they are free from the effects of power and engage in communication of their own volition.

Despite the brevity with which Deleuze elucidates it, the concept of the control society can be beneficial to Communication Studies because it also categorizes several disparate realities— material, immaterial, physical, mental, psychological, political, technological, economic, social, sexual, etc.—under one heading to diagnosis a specific moment in human history: the world at the end of the twentieth century and even the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this sense, the

Deleuzian control society is both a descriptive and prescriptive model of communication because what it provides are snapshots of thinking about control as an expression of power, but also how people think alongside and live with control. The matter that is most relevant to Communication

Studies, however, is whether communication speaks of the realities of control (as a legitimation of power) or speaks to the realities of control (as a protest of power). The control society also emphasizes the same questions of what communication ‘is’ that have plagued the field—is communication information, transmission, technology (or media more broadly), or even power itself? If not these, then what is communication for us today?

Furthermore, the critical intervention of Deleuzian post-structuralism into Communication

Studies is that it is skeptical towards the central concept of the field itself—‘communication’. As it were, it is not enough to be critical of how communication is taken up in exercises and

applications of power, as if it exists naïvely or innocently otherwise, but one must also be critical about how and why one must communicate in the twenty-first century, as if it were a reflex or a compulsion. Perhaps this is the reason why that Deleuzian post-structuralism has not gained much conceptual traction within the field as have Foucauldian and Derridean post-structuralisms, which take communication for granted, precisely because of the emphasis placed upon language qua subjectivity that one finds in these intellectual traditions. For Deleuzian post-structuralism, while one also finds an interest in questions of language and subjectivity, Deleuze does not limit his critique of power-communication to these topics. It is in this vein that this dissertation argues that

Deleuzian philosophy best contributes to the problematics of the field of Communication Studies.

In Chapter II, we will begin to unpack an altogether different lexicon of concepts that are deployed to challenge and subvert the linear explanation of communication and, relatedly, the effectiveness of power. Put simply, we will see in Deleuzian post-structuralist philosophy a resistance to the very idea that communication is both a necessity and a public good. These concepts within the Deleuzian oeuvre work immediately at the nexus of power and communication, in a manner of speaking, ‘out of the middle’. In the various essays, interviews, public talks, and excurses about communication throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, we will see how Deleuzian thought will grasp the relationship between power and communication as a phenomenon of movement, which fixes communication into a normative purview of social existence and obscures the polyvalence of power in all spheres of biological life. Today we can understand this movement literally and metaphorically—we communicate while we move (from home to work, from private to public spaces, across geographies as small as a neighbourhood and as large as the globe, etc.), we use technologies that themselves are mobile such that we can

communicate altogether, and we communicate about things that are themselves captured within the plenitude of momenta (news, information, capital, commodities, services, and so on).

Chapter II:

What Comes Before the Societies of Control?

Identifying ‘Communication’ in Deleuzian Post-Structuralist Philosophy:

A Summary

1. Why Deleuzian Philosophy? Alternative Perspectives on Power & Communication

In Chapter I, we argued that the key relationship of the field of Communication Studies was between power and communication. We traced a history of Communication Studies that struggled to properly delimit what, in fact, communication is. Specifically, we focused on the

Shannon and Weaver transmission model of communication as one of the earliest representations of communication. In the transmission model, we found an analogical framework for how we can think about the directions that Communication Studies has undertaken, but also the concepts of power and communication themselves. Furthermore, we analogized transmission to suggest that power and communication can no longer be thought of as unilinear and unilateral phenomena, which is what transmission had previously ‘modelled’. Rather, power and communication have become multilinear and multilateral in their forms and contents. We compared this conception of multilinear, multilateral power-communication to two junctures within the history of

Communication Studies that demonstrate this fact: the 1983 ‘Ferment in the Field’ and the 1999 construction of a meta-model and meta-discourse for communication theory. We concluded that both these historical examples do not consider a specific interrogation of the very operative term of ‘communication’ that grounds the field itself. We surmised that to do so would mean that we would have to turn to an intellectual project that is less deferential to the idea of communication, but that is still conversant with the kinds of critiques of power that one finds in Communication

Studies. We posited that Deleuzian post-structuralism is one such theoretical avenue, since it proceeds, especially in the later period of Deleuzian philosophy, from this very point-of-view, while also not being an exhausted domain of theoretical inquiry within Communication Studies.

In this chapter, however, we will begin our examination of the problematic of ‘power- communication’ within the primary literature of Deleuzian post-structuralism, wherein we locate the treatment of communication ‘as communication’, or, as a locatable concept that bears resemblance to how Communication Studies has applied the term. We will then retrace the history of ‘communication’ within Deleuzian post-structuralism to demonstrate how the concept of control ultimately is realized by Deleuze as a phenomenon of movement, through which power and communication operate to give license to the illusion of freedom-in-movement (as well as freedom-in-thought). Specifically, we will identify moments in the history of Deleuzian philosophy, during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, in which the question of ‘what is communication?’ is constantly reconceived. Deleuze finds answers to this question in notions like transmission, information, and opinion. And yet, each articulation of communication—starting with transmission, moving to information, and concluding with opinion—demonstrates Deleuze’s evolution of conceptualization, where he either adds complexity to the linearity of communicative models or connects communicative acts to the socio-political field in which they are enunciated.

The complexity and connectivity that Deleuze sees in ‘communication’ are important to our purposes to explicate how the control society comes into being—whence a concept, whither a reality—precisely because they show that over the decades he remains unable to resolve the relationship between communication and power. We will treat this aporia as a significant moment in the history of Deleuzian thought since it is precisely out of this disjunction between power and communication that control becomes realizable as a rationale and an expression of contemporary

existence that is subject to the power-communication dyad. While in Chapters III, IV, and V we will discuss how the concept of control has a history, a logic, and a program, in this chapter we must first illustrate how Deleuze notes within the period between the 1970s and early 1990s how power and communication are co-constitutive. Additionally, we will note how Deleuze rejects the linear, simplistic, and reductive models of communication, but also anticipates the very multilinear, mobile, and self-sustaining paradigms of power that prescribe how we are to act, think, and live. This tension will serve as the conceptual pivot around which we will later situate the functionality of ‘the control society’.

2. To Surf or Not to Surf: Framing the Problem of Control in Deleuzian Philosophy

In order to better contextualize how and why Deleuze inevitably arrives as the concept of control, which happens after he fails to conceive of alternatives to linear processes of communication, we first turn to comments that he makes about surfing. Peculiarly, the act of surfing highlights both the insights and the frustrations when specifying how control works in the primary Deleuzian literature. Real surfing activity does not interest Deleuze. Instead, he draws attention to surfing as an analogy to think about existence at the end of the twentieth century. In a short essay entitled “Mediators” (1985/1995), Deleuze discusses conceptions of sport-as- movement, including surfing, which anticipate his later comments about how control operates. In this essay, Deleuze constructs a narrative history of sport-as-movement, suggesting that something today has changed. He writes, “We got by for a long time with an energetic conception of motion, where there’s a point of contact, or we are the source of movement. Running, putting the shot, and so on: effort, resistance, with a starting point, a lever. But nowadays we see movement defined less and less in a relation to a point of leverage” (p. 121). In this instance, movement is a form of power because force is exerted by someone or something upon something else (the space of the

race track/putting circle, the body of the runner/shot-putter, the shot-as-object, etc.). Power is machinic because it makes things happen. Things happen because efforts of power, i.e. applications of force, transition from an origin-point A to a destination-point B. Such applications of force are facilitated because a fulcrum, which is related to the lever as a simple machine, eases the amount of force that is needed to make movement happen. The elbows, knees, and hips of an athlete are all fulcrum-points that make movements easier. These fulcrum-points also reduce the amount of resistance that hinder movement. The fluidity of the body, for example, gives rise to better, faster, stronger, and more movements than does its rigidity. But in the Deleuzian estimation, movement-as-leverage is an antiquated form of sport. As such, it is not yet possible to derive some conclusions about control, especially as a phenomenon of movement.

The contemporary form of sport-as-movement, however, provides a new model of being- in-the-world. Deleuze states, “All the new sports—surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding—take the form of entering into an existing wave” (p. 121). Movement is no longer fixed between two points, between an origin and a destination, but occurs as a continuous transit, located in a constant middle-space. Movement mediates notions of origin and destination altogether. In some respects, this formulation recalls the transmission model of communication. Transmission, here specified as the relationship between the message-signal and the communication channel, mediates senders and receivers. Without transmission, no relationship between the two is possible. But does the logic of transmission (as a model of communication) thrive today (as a fantasy about communication) because it is no longer intended by the sender and directed towards the receiver?

By way of analogy, from the comments Deleuze makes about sport we can suggest as much. He continues, stating that “There’s no longer an origin as a starting point, but a sort of putting-into-

orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to

“get into something” instead of being the origin of an effort” (p. 121).

But what Deleuze describes here is not control over movement. One cannot control waves of water or gusts of wind; one must surrender to them to be able to surf or hang-glide altogether.

In other words, control is movement, because once one is put into orbit, or has ‘gotten into something’, one cannot stop. Control captures movement insofar as it enables it to happen anywhere and at any time. The idea of control here exemplifies Newtonian force—an object at rest remains at rest; an object in motion remains in motion until force is applied to change its speed and/or direction. What is significant in the Deleuzian example is the way one moves, by way of thinking that he or she controls the waves or the wind, even though they do not. This is precisely how power produces and reproduces itself, in the illusion that we are, in the terms of poet William

Ernest Henley, truly ‘the masters of our fates, the captains of our souls’. In “Mediators,” the idea of control-as-force-of-movement Deleuze extends to communication itself, saying that

“Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves” (p. 129). Power makes communication happen, communication gives rise to new forms of power, and control will be the name Deleuze gives to this co-constitution.15

“Mediators” is typical of the comments that Deleuze makes about control, power, and communication throughout his career. The only consistent trait among the several essays, interviews, and book chapters in which he discusses these concepts is the idea that the linear

15 To resist the forces of power that make communication happen, moreover the types of communication that give rise to new forms of power altogether, one must avoid moving and being made to move—in both thought and action. Deleuze (1995) writes, “What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then there is the chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements” (pp. 129-130). Of note is the fact that pointless statements do not block communication; they occur because communication flourishes. In this chapter, we are interested in the possibility of whether Deleuze’s own comments about various types of communication rise above the level of pointlessness. 60

process of transmission is to be resisted. But when Deleuze tries to articulate concepts or problems that resist it, he repeatedly runs into problems that he cannot solve. The first of which is that

Deleuze does not schematize his ideas in ways that speak to the concerns of Communication

Studies. Instead, Deleuze tends to reduce communication to dialectical relationships, even though he does not really refine or reinterpret them over time as he moves closer to the idea of control.

One cannot help but notice that Deleuze privileges one position or concept of the dialectical relationship over the other. This trend is repeated across the three decades—the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s—when Deleuze begins to take communication ‘as communication’ seriously.

For instance, in the 1970s, Deleuze treats communication as the difference between linearity as such, which transmission models as a relationship between senders and receivers, and non-linearity, as non-intentional enunciations exist unto themselves, and do not convey messages to be exchanged. In the 1980s, he understands communication as the difference between information and art. Information is disseminated in the form of orders that are to be obeyed, whereas art gives rise to human expressions that resist oppression, violence, and death. And in the

1990s, Deleuze conceives of communication as the difference between opinion and philosophy.

Opinion only claims to create concepts, Deleuze opines, whereas philosophy sets about to really create them. Which is to say, people have opinions about problems, but opinions cannot and do not solve problems. Concepts, meanwhile, are produced out of the need to solve problems, themselves only realizable because of the kinds of questions that we ask about the world and our place within it.

Consistent across these dialectical relationships is how Deleuze privileges non-linearity, art, and philosophy over linearity, information, and opinion. To think about power and communication within these binary relationships means one must submit to the Deleuzian

privileging. But if one does submit, then the effects of power and communication remain under- examined, and, ironically enough, one ends up repeating the very same problems, of trying to resist both power and communication, that Deleuze himself tries to circumvent. To avoid this dilemma altogether, in this chapter we will contextualize Deleuzian ideas about power-communication to critique them, suggesting what about them works and what requires further explication.

The second problem that emerges because of Deleuze’s attempts to resist the idea of communication-as-transmission is that the panoply of concepts he sketches are not defined and explained in ways that suggest how they can be applied. Concepts like stammering, conjunctives, counter-information, and so on, are produced as alternatives to communication-as-transmission, precisely because they are conceived as tools to be used to escape power. Yet Deleuze does not really define what any of these concepts really are, and instead illustrates them through example.

As such, these concepts are opaque. For instance, how exactly does stammering both relate to and avoid power? How does it express and transform ideas about communication? Deleuze does not provide clear, obvious answers (and, sometimes, any answers at all). As such, one must make

Deleuzian concepts ‘sensible’ and ‘translatable’ within the Communication Studies idiom so that they ‘work’. In this chapter, then, we will also extrapolate from Deleuze’s obfuscations some concrete conclusions about how power and communication relate to one another. This includes consideration about how Deleuzian concepts, proposed as alternatives to communication-as- transmission, could be co-opted by forces of power altogether.

Ultimately, this chapter works to validate the basis upon which Deleuze conceives of control, which will be fully fleshed out in Chapters III, IV, and V, by identifying the preconditions in which control becomes thinkable for post-structuralism. We argue that the specific type of

Deleuzian post-structuralism can make valuable contributions to Communication Studies because

it gives the field another frame of reference for how power and communication mutually reinforce each other. Certainly, power and communication are not synonymous, but in Deleuzian post- structuralism it follows that the edges between the two have become blurred. And while Deleuze recognizes this when he designates the effects of control upon society, he only reaches this conclusion after repeatedly working through the problem of conflating communication with linearity that the transmission model exemplifies. However, the difficulty that results from turning to Deleuzian post-structuralism to think through the myriad relationships between power and communication is that it is tempting to say, ‘power equals control equals communication’. This temptation is all-the-more tantalizing because Deleuze does not otherwise give clear, concise definitions of what power and communication substantially are vis-à-vis the concept of ‘the control society’ itself. In this sense, perhaps Deleuzian post-structuralism can be dismissed altogether, especially considering how the debates about what communication is and what power does are already well-trodden topics within Communication Studies?

However, we argue that the Deleuzian concept of control allows us to shift our perspective about how we think about power-communication today. This shift in perspective is concretized by the emphasis Deleuze will place on the materiality of the modulation of social life, through which power-communication operates. Power-communication, control, and technology—at the end of the Deleuzian post-structuralist literature these topics together form a tapestry within which action, thought, and life are situated, made predictable, and managed to legitimate the status quo. But these concerns that Deleuze addresses most explicitly in the early 1990s with the control society have precedent in his philosophy. And in this chapter, we will identify these precedents of

Deleuze’s fascination with communication modelling, found in short essays, interviews, and book chapters, that work through the effects of power and communication upon action, thought, and

life. These historical touchstones demonstrate a continual re-evaluation of the relationship between power-communication on Deleuze’s part, albeit through the lens of transmission. However, it is not until he abandons logics of transmission-as-communication altogether that he concludes that control is the new orientation of reality.

3. Deleuze on Communication: The 1970s—Transmission

Communication, especially when tied to the concept of control, occupies a significant, albeit elliptical portion of later Deleuzian post-structuralism. However, it is surprising that communication has scant attention in Deleuze’s earliest works, be it as a concept or the development of a framework to later conceive of it altogether, especially in relation to power. For example, many of Deleuze’s writings in the 1960s are monographs on thinkers who together form a counter-narrative, or ‘minor history’, of the Western canon of philosophy. This counter-narrative of the history of philosophy is constructed by Deleuze at a time when contemporaneous French thought was concerned with the ‘three Hs’—G.W.F. Hegel (dialectics), Edmund Husserl

(phenomenology), and Martin Heidegger (existentialism) (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 12).

Contrariwise, the philosophers who make up Deleuze’s ‘minor history’ include David Hume

(1953/1991), Friedrich Nietzsche (1962/2006), Immanuel Kant (1963/1984), Henri Bergson

(1966/1988a), and Baruch Spinoza (1968/1990a, 1970/1988b).16

16 The idea of ‘minoritarianism’ in Deleuzian philosophy can be thought of in another way. When defining the concept of the minoritarian, we find in Deleuze’s writings the idea that “language, because it deals with the art of the possible, is fundamentally political” (Parr, 2005, p. 164), in which “we need to distinguish between a major and minor language, that is, between a power (pouvoir) of constants and, a power (puissance) of variables. In the political sphere where a ‘major’ language is seen and heard, there also inheres in its form a ‘minor’ element that does not exist independently or outside of its expression and statements” (Parr, 2005, p. 164). Loosely speaking, Deleuze’s major history of philosophy exists on the level of a power of constants, whereas his minor history of philosophy exists operates on the level of a power of variables. In short, the latter reacts to the former. Deleuze is biased typically towards the latter over the former because he is interested in conceiving of the power of variables on their own, without being necessitated by anything else. This pattern of bias or privileging is what Deleuze repeats when he organizes differences of communication along the lines of dialectical relationships. Relatedly, the Deleuzian pouvoir/puissance distinction seems to map onto the distinction made between the specific disciplinarity of a body of knowledge, or connaissance, and the general will to know of a given historical period, or savoir. Cf. Foucault, 2002, pp. 16n-17n. 64

However, in these monographs Deleuze does not dedicate any time or effort to thinking about communication vis-à-vis control since they are concepts that are not yet relevant to his purposes. It is only after the construction of his minoritarian history of philosophy that Deleuze begins to develop his own philosophical program, in which communication begins to reveal itself.

In these singular works, written at the end of the 1960s, Deleuze encounters difference (1968/1994) and sense (1969/1990b) as major philosophical questions, in which communication appears only as a relation, either between moments in time or aspects of reality, from which difference is produced and sense is derived. At this point, communication is not evaluated vis-à-vis themes, topics, and issues that are nominally relevant to the field of Communication Studies. It is not until the 1970s, however, when Deleuze begins to seriously pay attention to communication ‘as communication’, and focuses on it as a problem, specifically because he ties communication to technological and human and phenomena through a consideration of relationality-as-linearity.

One of Deleuze’s earliest pieces of commentary about communication that presages his later remarks about control is the interview with the film journal Cahiers du Cinema entitled “On

Sur et Sous la Communication: Three Questions on Six Fois Deux.” In this interview, Deleuze

(1976/2000b) makes statements about communication in relation to French filmmaker Jean-Luc

Godard’s six-part television series, Six Fois Deux: Sur et Sous la Communication. In Godard’s cinema-making and television-programming Deleuze finds a defamiliarization of the aesthetic form of image production, which he compares to a disruption in talking. Defamiliarization and disruption are invoked by Deleuze because he wants to draw attention to how language, be it verbal or cinematic, can be problematized. Deleuze says, “In a way, it’s always a question of stammering.

Not of stammering in your speech, but of stammering in language itself. You can only be a foreigner, generally speaking, in another language” (2000b, p. 124).

As Deleuze suggests, stammering is less about a defamiliarization of language but within it, which is what it means to be ‘foreign’ within one’s own domain of ‘language’—to use the contents, grammar, and syntax of language in experimental ways to speak to new problems of existence or new ways of thinking. In figurative terms, stammering within language means that one no longer speaks the common vernacular and is no longer situated within pre-given enunciations. Said another way, language is always a matter of parole, the emergence of language in practice, and not a question of langue, the structuring of structure itself for which language is the foundation. The everyday meaning of ‘stammering’ also represents this practice. When one stammers, one pushes the limit of what language can do, since the stammer is not intended per se, but nevertheless is an effect of enunciation when one conjures up the message that is to be communicated. Stammering produces thinking and language at the same time, drawing both together—to speak is to stammer in thinking; to think is to stammer in language. In the moment of the stammer itself, communication can never succeed because it is never a completed process.17

Stammering is only but one possibility that Deleuze identifies to use communication against itself. From stammering as the disruption of language, Deleuze (2000b) transitions to thinking about the disruption of the transmission of information. The transition from language to information is important to Deleuze’s discussion about communication because he isolates in each the process of exchange as a central conceit. For Deleuze, exchange of language or exchange of

17 Later Deleuze (1997b) suggests that stuttering (or stammering) is a kind of performative act in language in which nothing is truly done, if the performative is understood as ‘when saying is doing’. If nothing is done when something is (not) said, which is what happens when one stutters or stammers, the tension in language and the limit of language are revealed in language’s non-doing. Instead, Deleuze finds in stuttering an onomatopoeia, or style, that subverts intention and meaning altogether. He writes, “When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer… then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence. […] Style—the foreign language within language—is made up of those two operations; […] Style is the economy of language. To make one’s language stutter, face to face, or face to back, and at the same time to push language as a whole to its limit, to its outside, to its silence—this would be like the boom and the crash” (p. 113; original emphases). 66

information are isomorphic, and he turns to the Shannon-Weaver transmission model of communication to exemplify this isomorphy. Deleuze stresses this shift in emphasis from language to information when he complains that “language is presented to us as essentially informative, and information as essentially an exchange” (p. 127). Yet Deleuze also suggests an alternative perspective about how transmission-as-communication could be conceived. He says,

Information theory implies a maximum of theoretical information; then at the

opposite pole it puts pure noise, interference; and between the two, redundancy,

which detracts from information but puts it on a higher level than noise. It’s the

other way round: at the top you should put redundancy as the transmission and

repetition of orders and commands; below that information, always a minimum

requirement if commands are to be understood. (p. 127)

This historical version of transmission, according to Deleuze, relies primarily on redundancy (R), which is placed it between maximum information (I) and pure noise (N). Transmission thus

‘models’ communication as I-R-N, albeit as an ideal scenario of communication in action, which is what Shannon and Weaver aimed at when they developed their model.

However, unlike Shannon and Weaver, Deleuze instead sees redundancy as the determining, or causal, factor of transmission, which can be modelled as R-I-N, because it makes certain kinds of expressions utterable by means of shutting down the possibility of disobeying an order or command, let alone to speak of something else instead. In this instance, transmission functions not as an ideal scenario of communication that could happen, but rather as a material reality of communication that does happen. By making redundancy the pinnacle of the transmission process, Deleuze here alludes to the political character of communication: the moment that what can be said is limited, by something or someone, is when what can be thought

becomes limited as well. This allusion recalls another problematization of language, specifically the formulation that “We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either” (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 68; original emphasis). Paradoxically, in his reading of transmission Deleuze gestures towards the possibility of thinking and speaking that is not predicated upon exchange, be it linguistic or informational. This is only realizable by pointing to instances of communication that exceed transmission altogether.

This is to say that these two models of transmission—both the ideal-historical version as

I-R-N and the material-political version as R-I-N—Deleuze finds problematic. To disrupt the linear flow of transmission, Deleuze (2000b) instead identifies communicative potential in that which is the remainder of the transmission model, specifically anything that hinders communicative success (as achieved when orders and commands are assented). What is left over in the Deleuzian version of transmission-as-communication is “something like silence, or stammering, or a cry, something which would flow under redundancy and information, which would make language flow and still make itself understood” (p. 127). Silences, stammering, crying—these human expressions cannot be represented by a transmission model of communication, which is primarily technological and abstract in nature, because they are unintended, impossible to anticipate or control, and constantly connect to other aspects of existence. Effectively, they otherwise ‘scramble’ the coordinates of every effective transmission communication (Genosko, 2012, pp. 118-125; Sampson, 2006). Indeed, silences, stammering, and crying exist as parallel instances of communication, vis-à-vis redundancy and information, but cannot be reduced to them; they are entirely contingent modes of enunciation that ‘speak to’ something wrong and intolerable in the social field. Likewise, these alternatives of communication

still embody the overall thrust that Deleuze finds disagreeable in transmission, when, adjacently, these counter-communications move, like an unending flow of politico-libidinal desire.18

For example, one is rendered silent when thinking about the enormity of genocide in the twentieth century. One stammers when trying to conceive of an alternative to the neoliberalization of the lifeworld that succeeds because people assume that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to this economic governmentality. One cries out in pain or horror when one is exposed to war, violence, murder, and abuse. These examples demonstrate that communicative acts are always connected to political needs, i.e. desires to effect change, that are constitutive of the social field. And while silences, stammering, and crying are no less purposive than transmission, because transmission assumes that message-signals are obeyed, these Deleuzian alternatives to communication are not reducible to transmission because they obligate responsibility and duty of people to one another.

Whereas transmission is linear because it is unidirectional, silences, stammering, and crying ‘strike chords’ because they are multidirectional, furthermore necessitating collective responses to their enunciation.19 It is in this sense that communication-as-transmission can be reconceived, which is what Deleuze himself ultimately intends.

The final point about communication Deleuze (2000b) makes in this interview repeats the need for communication-as-connection when he discusses conjunctives. The use of the

18 “An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source machine: the one that produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine that is coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing-machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen [sic]: each with his [sic] little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2009, pp. 1-2). 19 The phrase ‘strike chords’ is invoked here to reference to the mathematical understanding of a chord-as-line, which is a line with both endpoints connecting within the circumference of a circle (that is not its diameter). This model of communication that takes place within a circle (that is the social field) is not at all specified by Deleuze in this interview, nor proper to his philosophy. However, we can analogize from Deleuze’s comments about silences, stammering, and crying a conceptual figure that points to a way out of the unidirectionality of the linear transmission model—communication is connective as well as collective because it happens within the social sphere of reality. 69

conjunction ‘et’ (‘and’) in Godard’s cinema (‘on’ and ‘under’ as operative terms in the title of

Godard’s television series mediated by ‘and’) is the linguistic opening that allows Deleuze to draw attention to the phonetic similarity in French between ‘et’ and ‘est’ (‘is’). This phonetic similarity is important “because our thought systems tend to be modelled on the verb ‘to be’” (p. 129). For example, something is X precisely because it is not Y.20 However, is it not the case that that which is not, i.e. the inexistent, is also not modelled in thought systems, at least, other than ‘not to be’?

For instance, the ‘not to be’ condition of both the ideal and material expressions of transmission is

‘noise’ because noise is neither intended (e.g. ideal) nor included (e.g. material) into the modelling of transmission success. Nonetheless, noise remains a necessary part of the transmission model because it functions as a point of orientation, or a non-space of coordination, from which the lines of transmission extend, i.e. from the sender to the receiver. This necessary relationship between noise and transmission leads Deleuze to think about relationality in communication as a question of direction.

To this stipulation of thinking about ‘not to be’ conditions, Deleuze adds that the anglicization of the conjunction ‘et’ as ‘and’ allows for the reflection of the relationality of and between things, something that the French language cannot afford. In English, the thinking about

‘ands’ takes the sender-receiver/transmission relationship to its limit. Deleuze says, “ET is no longer even a particular conjunction or relation, it brings in all relations; there are as many relations as ETs and ET doesn’t only put all relations into the balance, but being, language, etc. […] Of course, ET represents diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identity” (p. 130; original

20 This is unlike the homophonic similarity in the Derridean concept of différance (1982), which, in French, sounds the same as ‘difference’, wherein the two terms are only deferred and differentiated according to how they are written. Derrida writes, “Already we have had to delineate that différance is not, does not exist, is not a present-being (on) in any form; and we will be led to delineate also everything that it is not, that is, everything; and consequently that it has neither existence nor essence” (p. 6; original emphases). Unlike Derridean différance, however, the Deleuzian conjunctive of ‘and’ does have an essence, which is existence itself—the conjunctive expresses a positive, not a negative, ontology. 70

emphasis). The introduction of diversity, multiplicity, and non-identity into the transmission model makes communication break down because it no longer is tied to a single trajectory, be it I-R-N or

R-I-N, if any trajectory whatsoever is still conceivable. One supplements transmission with conjunctions as represented by a sender and a receiver, information and noise, redundancy and noise, abstract modelling and concrete practice, and so on. In this sense, conjunctives ‘fill’ the gaps of the transmission model by reintroducing the elements of the real world that were excluded to make communication conceivable in the first place. The problem is that Deleuze does not take up these threads in the work that follows because he is biased against communication itself. He begins to think exhaustively about the potential of communication only when he starts to talk about

‘control societies’.21

In summary, this 1976 interview is the opening salvo of an engagement with communication ‘as communication’ in the primary Deleuzian post-structuralist literature, which is often critical, but also vague and open-ended. Specifically, Deleuze, not unlike Communication

Studies prior, proceeds to think of communication as a problem of transmission, in which exchange, be it of words or information, is paramount to achieving communicative success.

Deleuze here is less interested in the idea of success and more interested in other forms of communication that exceed the linearity of the transmission model and that cannot be translated

21 In many respects, the notion of the conjunctive invoked by Deleuze in this interview restates the concept of the ‘rhizome’ that he and Guattari (1975/1983) introduced one year prior at the Schizo-Culture conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University. In Deleuze and Guattari’s estimation, the rhizome subverts, transforms, opens, and abandons the unilinear communication of transmission altogether. They write, “A rhizome never ceases to connect semiotic chains, organizations of power, and events in the arts, sciences, and social struggles. […] There is no language in itself, no universality of language, but an encounter of dialects, patois, argots and special languages. There is no more any speaker-auditor ideal than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. […] There is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilizes around a parish, a diocese, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by means of stems and underground flows, along fluvial valleys or railway lines; it is displaced by oil spots. Language can always be broken down into its internal structural components, an activity not fundamentally different from a search for roots. There is always something so genealogical about the tree; it doesn’t suggest a popular methodology. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can only analyze language by de-centering it onto other dimensions and into other registers. A language is never closed on itself, except as a function of impotence” (pp. 12-13). 71

within its operations, which would otherwise be represented as ‘noise’. And at this moment in

Deleuzian philosophy, communication is conceived more as a technical problem than a human phenomenon, although we see in this interview how Deleuze sketches some ideas about how the technics of communication impact the social effects of communication. Afterwards, in the 1980s,

Deleuze broadens his analysis of communication-as-transmission, tying it more explicitly to the social sphere, in which it represents the efficacy of power. However, technical communication as such becomes even more pronounced as a problem of human existence when determined by informational logics.

4. Deleuze on Communication: The 1980s—Information

In the 1980s, Deleuzian post-structuralism begins to turn explicitly towards conceiving of communication as a component of control. The first instance of communication-as-control that can be treated as significant is the concept of the ‘order-word’, which Deleuze briefly touches upon in

A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987), written in collaboration with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.

Deleuze and Guattari begin by providing an example of the power in language in action. For instance, a schoolmistress, they posit, who instructs her students about grammar or arithmetic does not teach per se, but rather ‘insigns’, or gives orders and commands—say this letter, write this equation, complete this test, work on this project, and so on. The basic unit of orders and commands that teachers insign is the ‘order-word’, which can be defined as a specific instance of language that “is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” (p. 76).22

22 Deleuze and Guattari basically reinterpret J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, to which they refer when discussing order-words. They write, “We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement” (p. 79; original emphasis). To this point, they dislocate the conflation of language with communication by way of politicizing enunciation. “Language is neither informational nor communicational,” Deleuze and Guattari claim, “It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement” (p. 79). In this sense, terms like 72

However, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that words are not inherently tools of power, but only when they are introduced and circulated within a classroom setting do they signify power nonetheless, when “we give children language, pens, and notebooks [to express and communicate] as we [might] give workers shovels and pickaxes” (p. 76). The example of a schoolmistress

‘insigning’ her students demonstrates two things: one, that power is pedagogy, a form of instructing people about how they are to obey by conditioning the ways in which one communicates (and consents to communication by consequently doing something, be it completing homework with a pen or digging a ditch with a shovel); and two, pedagogy is the paradigm that stipulates how one lives insofar that language is the means through which life is made workable and productive. As Deleuze and Guattari summarize, “Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. Every order-word, even a father’s to his son, carries a little death sentence” (p. 76).

The order-word reappears as a central concept in Deleuze’s configuration of communication-as-control in the essay “Having an Idea in Cinema (On the Cinema of Straub-

Huillet)” (1987/1998). In this essay, the charge Deleuze levies against communication is that it ultimately does not even rise to the level of the idea. To arrive at this conclusion, Deleuze conceives of communication via contradistinction. In the Deleuzian formulation, philosophy creates concepts because there is a need, or problem, to be solved; one does not create concepts to reflect upon something.23 Meanwhile, art creates percepts, or, experiences of sensations that are

‘obey’, ‘talk’, ‘write’, ‘communicate’, and so on, are all order-words because they perform action when they happen, i.e. when they are spoken or done. 23 “It is very simple: philosophy is a discipline that is just as inventive and creative as any other discipline, and it entails creating or even inventing concepts. And concepts do not exist ready-made in the sky waiting for the philosopher to seize them. Concepts must be made. […] A creator [of concepts] is not a being who works for pleasure. A creator does only what he or she absolutely needs to do. The fact remains that this necessity—which, if it exists, is a very complex thing—makes a philosopher (and here, I at least know what the concerns of the philosopher are) propose to invent, to create, concepts and not to concern himself or herself with reflecting, even on cinema” (Deleuze, 1998, p. 15). 73

non-representable, which in cinema includes “blocks of movement/duration” (1998, p. 15).24

Cinema, then, does not represent movement or time; it is both movement and time.

Yet at this moment when Deleuze lionizes philosophy and art, he also does not give any critical space to what communication creates, since he is much more interested by what philosophy and cinema (as a form of art) can do. Presumably, then, communication cannot do anything, since it creates nothing, but Deleuze only comes to this conclusion because he has not yet given communication his full attention. Again, we find the privileging of one position over another in

Deleuzian philosophy when encountering dialectical formations. This becomes apparent when

Deleuze does in fact invoke communication, albeit as a problem for philosophy and art.

Ironically enough, it is in communicative terms that Deleuze conceives of having an idea via philosophy and cinema altogether. “A voice speaks of something,” Deleuze writes, “Something is spoken of. At the same time, we are made to see something else. And finally, what is spoken of is under what we are made to see” (p. 16; original emphasis). But what is this ‘something’ about which a voice speaks? What is it that we are made to see that determines what it is about which we speak? These are the questions to which philosophy and art respond. This ‘something’ for

Deleuze is ‘communication’. At first the definition of communication Deleuze provides recalls the transmission model, when “communication is the transmission and the propagation of a piece of information” (p. 17). As mentioned above, however, Deleuze rarely revisits past conceptualizations, and in this essay, he seeks new avenues of inquiry ‘after transmission’ because his interest in problems has changed.

24 “Everything has a story. Philosophy tells stories as well. Stories with concepts. Cinema tells stories with blocks of movement/duration. Painting invents entirely different types of blocks. These are neither blocks of concepts nor blocks of movement/duration, but blocks of lines/colors. Music invents other types of blocks, equally specific” (Deleuze, 1998, p. 15). Deleuze’s use of ‘story’ does not mean that narrative is a form of representation of these artistic blocks; rather, these artistic blocks are the very form and content of narrative, although he does not entertain this formulation as a question of mediation or medium specificity. 74

From a preliminary definition of communication, Deleuze then shifts his focus, identifying

‘information’ as communication’s constitutive element. Information exists as ‘a piece’, in fragmented form, not unlike a message-signal to be transmitted. More specifically, a piece of information “is a grouping of order-words. When you are informed, you are told what you are supposed to believe. In other words, informing is circulating a keyword” (p. 17). For example, the compulsion to discuss what communication ‘is’, since it still has no easy answer or clear definition, is but one representation of the circulation of a keyword within society, if not its best instantiation.25 The circulation of ‘communication’ as a keyword is important to Deleuze’s pre- figuring of the concept of control because it is not questioned as a means of delivering information.

Indeed, the political issue within the Deleuzian idiom is that questions about how and why one communicates are not interrogated, especially when they need to be critiqued, when the important matter is what one communicates, which is to say, the content of the message-signal.

The circulation of the keyword ‘communication’ is instead defined by its ends—that communication does exist, that it functions, that it is transparent, and that it is successful. Anything that exceeds this schema, like miscommunication (which is to be corrected) and failures of communication (which are to be avoided), is ‘captured’ within communication circulation as a reflexive, self-reinforcing process. While Deleuze does not put his argument in these terms, what he touches upon that is of interest to our later contextualization of ‘the control society’ is the possibility that communication-as-information is ideological, if only because it girds the rationale

25 An echo of Gregory Bateson’s conception of information (2000) can be heard in Deleuze’s definition of information. Bateson describes an example of a man cutting a tree as the process of information circulation that prefigures Deleuze’s order-word of information, in which bits of information are synecdochical vis-à-vis the process of information-production (as redundancy). Bateson writes, “More correctly, we should spell out the matter out as: (differences in tree)-(differences in retina)-(differences in brain)-(differences in muscles)-(differences in movement of axe)-(differences in tree), etc. What is transmitted around the circuit is transforms of differences. And, as noted above, a difference which makes a difference is an idea or unit of information” (pp. 317-318; original emphasis). In Deleuze’s conceptualization, then, the order-word affects a difference when one obeys to do an action, which was not being done before the order-word was enunciated. 75

and expressions of control as an open phenomenon that relies upon multiple, material practices that give it its shape. For instance, communication is constitutive of ideology insofar that it prescribes a worldview, which can be expressed in two ways: one, communication proceeds per the logic that all communicative acts are to be successful; and two, any communicative acts that are not successful are to be reintroduced into the system of circulating order-words and statements to try again to make communication take place. Thus, communication totalizes ideology because there is no remainder outside of its eminent domain that cannot be made communicable. As ideology, communication emerges in the reproduction, exchange, and practice of dominant values and beliefs, like the necessity that one is to communicate altogether. As the central unit of exchange and circulation, information becomes the expression of contemporary ideology par excellence.26

Yet how does communication become ideology? To answer this question, we must return to Deleuze’s rendering of information. Deleuze (1998) elaborates, stating that “Information is communicated to us; we are told what we are supposed to be ready or able to do or what we are supposed to believe. Not even to believe but to act as if we believed. We are not asked to believe but to behave as if we believed” (p. 17; added emphases). We speak and we are compelled to speak, but by what or whom, Deleuze does not say. Yet what is important is that we do not have to agree with what we say so long as we say it regardless. In this instance, communication becomes control because one assumes the compulsion of communication as one’s own choice. There is no information or communication otherwise, other than that which is mobilized and used to control

26 This is also to say that communication-as-ideology is not equivalent to false consciousness. As Slavoj Žižek (1989) writes, “in a universe in which we are all looking for the true face beneath the mask, the best way to lead them astray is to wear the mask of truth itself. But it is impossible to maintain the confidence of mask and truth: far from gaining us a kind of ‘immediate contact with our fellow-men [sic]’, this confidence renders the situation unbearable; all communication is impossible because we are totally isolated through this very disclosure—the sine qua non of successful communication is a minimum of distance between appearance and its hidden rear” (p. 41). Precisely, through communication we choose ideology, we recognize the choice of our choosing, and still choose the ideological condition anyway. 76

the thoughts and actions of people by making them speak, even when they do not have anything to say (p. 17).27 As an expression of power, communication, according to Deleuze, cannot be the basis upon which one explicates subjective experience, mediates intersubjective realities of the world, nor even coordinates pragmatic action towards political ends. Only philosophy and friendship are such bases (in the etymological sense of the word ‘philosophy’ as ‘to be a friend of thinking’) (Marks, 1998, p. 132) of explication, mediation, and coordination. Any form of communication that remains tied power relations and caught within the framework of information- circulation cannot ever be a friend to thinking.

However, as we return to one of the few statements Deleuze and Guattari (1987) make about order-words, we will see that they try to turn informational communication against itself.

They write, “One should bring forth the order-word of the order-word. In the order-word, life must answer the answer of death, not by fleeing, but by making flight act and create” (p. 110). The idea of finding an order-word within the logic of the order-word recalls Deleuze’s earlier idea about stammering within language. And while ‘communication’ is but one order-word that circulates within society in conjunction with power (that is to be obeyed), we can posit that ‘resistance’ is its dialectical opposite, which also circulates throughout society in response. For instance, circulation itself becomes a kind of metaphor of resistance because it emphasizes movement, which is vastly different from the stultifying effects of order-words that only allow for certain kinds of statements to be made and obeyed. However, resistance, at least within the framework of Deleuzian post-

27 Conceived another way, what Deleuze is against is the transformation of philosophy-as-concept-creation into ‘idle talk’ (Heidegger 1996, pp. 157-159), a mode of communication that contemporary ICTs facilitate provided the degree, frequency, rate, and intensity with which people can engage each other in communicative practices ‘about communication’. Yet Heidegger cautions that ‘idle talk’ should not be mentioned “in a disparaging sense” (p. 157), when, instead, it expresses a kind of being-in-common or being-together-in-the-world. While Deleuze is affirmative of collective existence and shared political struggle, at which Heidegger, in his own fashion, also points, what would be horrific to Deleuze would be the treatment of existence and struggle as questions of similitude, identity, and stasis that ‘being’ as an operative term implies. 77

structuralism, also implies noise and miscommunication, whereby communication-as-movement is halted (or at least is slowed down).

On the political application of the order-word within the logic of the order-word, Deleuze and Guattari continue, alluding to the emancipatory potential of movement-of/in-language when they say that “There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions” (p. 110). Strangely, then, the way out of order-words is precisely through them.

Order-words can be multiplied, exhausted, obfuscated, and extended into meaninglessness, at which point passages can be formed within them to resist. But to resist what? First, we are to resist power-communication that compels one to think, act, and live according to the terms of communication over which one supposedly wields agency. And secondly, we are to resist the movement of compulsion towards communication as such, be it as a concrete vector or as a metaphor for the speeds of thought itself.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in an essay on cinema, an artistic medium comprised of movements and durations, that Deleuze (1998) takes up the relationship between power and movement. Information is important in this essay because it troubles the obvious reading of freedom-as-movement—to choose to obey or to refuse the order-word? This is to say that movement in communication (as information-circulation) becomes the representation of control itself. Deleuze makes this very point in this essay. He writes,

A control is not a discipline. In making highways, for example, you don’t enclose

people but instead multiply the means of control. I am not saying that this is the

highway’s exclusive purpose, but that people can drive can drive infinitely and

“freely” without being confined at all yet while still perfectly being controlled. This

is our future. (p. 18)

Deleuze’s example needs to be unpacked. First, people are transitive insofar that they have agency over the automobile. As such, if people control the automobile, they also control where it goes, towards any destination whatever. However, people’s bodies remain confined within the space of the vehicle itself. This confinement of the physical body is loosened when the vehicle becomes the symbol of the body’s capacity to move. Even then, people comport themselves and the behaviour of their vehicles within the flow of traffic, which conforms to the shape of the highway, as much as the highway also transforms the topography of the natural environment.28 And yet, what should be stressed is that all this supposition on Deleuze’s part assumes in the first place that one has the financial means to purchase a vehicle and the technical skill required to operate it.

However, by emphasizing control-as-movement, Deleuze also draws attention to the way that space itself becomes flattened and extended, not unlike the endless stretches of pavement that constitute the highway system. Movement here neither starts nor stops, but always happens in media res, across and within spaces. In this case, roads, streets, and highways are analogues of the circulatory system, but function in support of society and not the biological body per se. Without the continuous movement of persons or things within the circulatory system, however, neither society nor the biological body can survive. Control-as-movement is persuasive as an expression of power because spaces themselves become movements, within which people are controlled because they are caught up in the very momentum-teleology that movement provides. With this

28 As the material expressions of control-as-movement, Deleuze’s ideas about highways recall the distinction between strategies and tactics when one walks around the urban environment (de Certeau, 1984). While one can navigate the city tactically, however, and subvert the strategies of urban planning (the organization of streets, crosswalks, sidewalks, etc.), one can only move along the arteries of the highway strategically, specifically to avoid collision with other drivers inhabiting traffic space. 79

example, what Deleuze ultimately identifies is the non-spatiality of control; control as such thrives in ‘non-places’ (Augé, 2008), spaces in which movement is central, through which movements happen, but also spaces that themselves can potentially move. From Deleuze’s example we can surmise that communication-as-control can be thought of as unilateral in its vehicularity, both figuratively and literally; one can go anywhere, so long as one also goes ‘with the flow’, be it the flow of traffic or the ‘information superhighway’.29

At the end of “Having an Idea in Cinema,” Deleuze returns to the idea of information.

Disappointingly, he does not consider how the concept of the pass-word, as both an order-word within order-words and the progenitor of movement by way of creating passages for it to occur, becomes the new form of control. Instead, Deleuze speaks of the radical potential of art to resist communication-as-information-transmission. Art resists because it exists as counter-information; it does not have to transmit any information for it to legitimate its existence ‘as art’ (Adorno, 2013).

In this sense, art has political potential since it is made to be non-purposive in a world that requires communication to have purpose, a destination, and to be successful. Deleuze (1998) writes,

The only response would be that counterinformation only effectively becomes

useful when it is—and it is this by nature—or when it becomes an act of resistance.

And the act of resistance is neither information nor counterinformation.

Counterinformation is effective only when it becomes the act of resistance. (p. 18)

29 These comments follow a statement Deleuze makes in an interview titled “The Brain Is the Screen” (1986/2000a). Deleuze says, “Thought is molecular. Molecular speeds make up the slow beings that we are. As Michaux said, “Man [sic] is a slow being, who is only made possible thanks to fantastic speeds.” The circuits and linkages of the brain don’t preexist the stimuli, corpuscles, and particles [grains] that trace them” (p. 366; emphasis removed). While Deleuze here does not refer to literal speed-as-motion, instead understanding ‘speed’ as a metaphor of connectivity, quite literally as the brain’s capacity to make connections between things, his comments are still resonant when thinking about speed and the highway system as models of control. On the relationship between literal and figurative speeds, vehicularity, transportation infrastructures, and thinking, cf. Virilio, 2006. 80

But does counter-information really take on a radical political quality when it is mobilized?

Deleuze’s answer is confusing, precisely because it is difficult to ascertain what exactly he means.

To answer this question, we should return to Deleuze’s definition of communication as ‘the transmission and the propagation of a piece of information’ to consider what, in fact, counter- information is (or could be). If counter-information conveys nothing but its own existence, it cannot be shuttled through the process of information exchange, like the message-signal and the communicative channel that make up parts of the transmission model, since it is not made up of any information whatsoever. Furthermore, transmission as a communicative act would cease to be and the propagation of the political contexts that relied on communication-as-transmission would falter because there would be no constitutive content that would be made to pass through their filters. Counter-information, in this scenario, is effectively a negation of information, when it does not exist precisely because it cannot be transmitted nor received. This is unlike noise, which retains an overall informational character, albeit such that no discernible signal can be derived from it

(wherein response and meaning-making cannot happen); noise is too much information, and not the subtraction of information from itself. What Deleuze touches upon here is what he will eventually call ‘non-communication’ (1995), which, as presented in this essay in its proto-form, appears to resist the forces of power and the effects of control, which becomes all-the-more necessary especially in a world that is centrifugal and centripetal in its topsy-turviness.

Which is to say, it is in the non-communicability of art that Deleuze (1998) locates resistance, but how and why art is capable of resistance, moreover how and why art constitutes non-communication and counter-information, Deleuze is painfully uncertain: “I don’t know” (p.

18).30 This is especially damning of a non-answer because Deleuze does not consider how artistic

30 At the very least, Deleuze (1998) makes the intellectual path to his non-answer explicit. He writes, “What is the relation between the work of art and communication? None whatsoever. The work of art is not an instrument of 81

expressions, like those of cinematic media, are part and parcel of the political economy of late capitalism for which communication-as-control is a necessary procedure of global organization

(Jameson, 1991) and social management (Bourdieu, 1993). Of what use, then, is counter- information as a form of resistance against the powers of control?

The only answer Deleuze (1998) gives is a vague conception about resistance being against the phenomenon of death. “Only the act of resistance resists death,” Deleuze writes, “whether the act is in the form of a work of art or in the form of human struggle” (p. 19). In both thought and life Deleuze does not extend his line of inquiry to its logical conclusion: that as an operation of power, informational communication, when made up of either order-words or pass-words, is anti- art, anti-thought, and anti-life. Yet as philosopher Michel Serres (1982) reminds anyone who entertains thinking about the connections between communication, life, and death, this implication cannot hold. Communication begins when living beings organize collectively to survive (pp. 74n,

76n). Even Deleuze (1998) himself ultimately places hope in the capacity of ‘the social’, although he admits that the relationship between human struggle, works of art, and the communicative process, at least at the time of his writing, is “unclear” (p. 19).

At minimum, we can conclude that Deleuze sees death as a static, flat, and simple phenomenon, not unlike the form of the straight line of information exchange between a sender and a receiver or a schoolmistress and her students. Conversely, struggle and resistance are dynamic, noisy, and complex. But eventually Deleuze sees that even dynamism, noise, and complexity are new conceptual territories to exert power. When Deleuze writes about control in

communication. The work of art has nothing to do with communication. The work of art strictly does not contain the least bit of information” (p. 18). The conclusion of Deleuze’s denunciations is that communication-as-information exchange is instrumental (and perhaps even technical in nature). Instrumentality is antithetical to Deleuze’s interest in philosophy and art because they create concepts and percepts. And while concepts and percepts are used by philosophers and artists to express human struggle (against death, for instance), human struggle remains perpetually open-ended, and defies the idea of instrumentality as such (Horkheimer, 2004). 82

its most explicit formulation (1992), he does so against the background of neoliberalism, globalization, corporatization, and American hegemony. And against this background that Deleuze also identifies a different dimension of power-communication, namely opinion-as-dissemination, that is the analytic through which control becomes its most realizable.

5. Deleuze on Communication: The 1990s—Opinion

The final explication of communication that is recognizable ‘as communication’ in

Deleuzian post-structuralism, precisely to connect to the concept of the control society, can be found in What Is Philosophy? (1991/1994), Deleuze’s last collaboration with Guattari. In this text, they are unequivocal about their feelings toward communication: philosophy is not communication and communication is not philosophy (p. 6). To understand this difference Deleuze reiterates his earlier notion that only philosophy produces concepts. Conversely, communication, Deleuze and

Guattari claim, does no such thing, instead producing items like consensus and opinion (p. 6).

People may have opinions about concepts, moreover they might agree on what a concept is or how it is to be defined, but no concept is produced out of opinions or consensus when they happen, if

Deleuze and Guattari’s line of argument is to be believed. This universalization of communication, in which everyone potentially has an opinion about something, does not work for Deleuze and

Guattari because they posit that problems do not presuppose their solutions, which is what universalization implies as a ‘one size fits all’ process. Opinions and consensus as communicative expressions appear as such presuppositions—as if people operated according to the idea that ‘if only a problem could be discussed more, then it could actually be solved’.31 For Deleuze and

Guattari, such a proposition is untenable and unviable, at least, philosophically speaking.

31 Elsewhere Deleuze (2007) expands upon this point-of-view, claiming that “Discussion is just an exercise in narcissism where everybody takes turn showing off. Very quickly, you have no idea what is being discussed. But it is much more difficult to determine the problem to which a particular proposition responds. Now, if you understand the problem which someone has posed, you have no desire to discuss it: either you pose the same problem, or you 83

However, communication cannot be so easily dismissed. Opinions and consensus persist, becoming a global dilemma for Deleuze and Guattari because markets and media appropriate communication for their own purposes. The universality of communication that Deleuze and

Guattari lambast is filtered through the rules and regulations that give markets and media their shape, when everybody communicates and is made to communicate in the same way (p. 7). What

Deleuze and Guattari find so troubling about this proposition is that communication, when universalized within the economized and mediatized spheres of social existence, claims for itself the role of concept-creation. They complain, “The most shameful moment [for thinking] came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself,” a moment that transforms concepts, themselves the creations of thinking, into commodities, and problems, as events of philosophical investigation, into exhibitions in which products can be sold (p. 10; original emphasis).32 It is at this moment that

decide to pose another problem and continue in that direction. How can you have a discussion without a common source of problems, but what is there to say when you share a common source of problems? For indeterminate problems, discussion is just a waste of time. Conversation is something else entirely. We need conversation. But the lightest conversation is a great schizophrenic experiment between two individuals with common resources and a taste for ellipses and short-hand expressions. Conversation is full of long silences; it can give you ideas” (p. 384; emphases added). In this passage, Deleuze treats conversation as an encounter of different, but non-competing, ideas that sometimes leads to breakdowns in communication altogether (ellipses, silences, etc.) or that transform what it means to communicate. We can extrapolate from Deleuze’s comments a desire in his thinking to produce a kind of ‘short- circuiting’ of the linear, unilateral process of information-transmission. Conversely, we can also consider Deleuze’s reflex against discussion to be relevant to understand why conversation is better for concept-creation because he treats the former as a performance of speaking in which the contents of what is spoken are the same from one person to the next, and remain static, as packets of information, when they are transferred from person to person. In this explanation, we should refer to Deleuze’s examination of order-words vis-à-vis information as mentioned above. 32 Philosopher Bernard Stiegler (2014) has the same concerns that Deleuze and Guattari have, albeit expresses them within a Derridean idiom. From the Stieglerian point-of-view, communication, be it thought of generally as an episteme of the post-industrial age or specifically rendered ‘as opinion’ given how Deleuze and Guattari discuss it, is a process of ‘grammatization’. Which is to say, ‘communication’ is produced because of real-world exchanges between people, but is then extracted from human interaction, abstracted as a structure to organize society and consciousness, and then grafted onto society as the regulatory mechanism of human existence (the last of which Stiegler calls a process of ‘hominization’). In this last case, technologies, like smartphones and computers, are the concretizations of this extraction, abstraction, and grafting of communication, without which life as we know it would be nigh impossible. According to Stiegler, contemporary media best represent hominization-as-grammatization in action. He writes, “When people watch the same event on television, at the same time, in their tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, consciousnesses all over the world interiorize, adopt and live the same temporal objects at the same moment. When 84

we can identify a burgeoning Marxist critique of communication in Deleuze’s thought, although this is an effort that he and Guattari do not sustain.

Unfortunately, Deleuze and Guattari do not specify what they mean by the terms ‘computer science, marketing, design, and advertising’ in this text.33 The relationship between computer science and marketing or design and advertising, moreover how these terms operate together as a series, is at best only implied given the Marxist perspective that Deleuze and Guattari take to engage with ‘communication’ critically. Even then, these philosophers do not demonstrate any sort of critical engagement with Communication Studies given the above-mentioned thematics, which is frustrating because the relationship between the production of consensus, the dissemination of opinion, and the commodification of concepts is woefully undefined in What Is Philosophy?

these consciousnesses repeat the same behaviours of audiovisual consumption every day, watching the same television shows, at the same time, with perfect regularity (because everything is so arranged), these ‘consciousnesses’ end up becoming that of the same person—that is, nobody. Nobody in the sense that Ulysses encounters the Cyclops. A Cyclops has only one eye: he has no perspective, no stereoscopic vision and for him everything is flattened: he has neither depth of field, nor depth of time. This Cyclops who sees Nobody is the figure of our ill-being” (p. 20; original emphases). 33 In many respects, these remarks are general repetitions of Deleuze’s 1970s criticisms of the ‘New Philosophers’. The association with and popularity within the media on the part of the New Philosophers irritates Deleuze, since they turn philosophy into a commodity, which encapsulates the entire media enterprise, of which journalism (or willing participation with the practices of contemporaneous journalism) is exemplary. Deleuze (2007) notes, “Journalism, through radio and television, has increasingly realized its potential to create events (controlled leaks, Watergate, polls, etc.). And just as journalism needs to refer to external events less and less, since it already creates many of them, it also needs less and less to refer to external analysis, including polls of “intellectuals” or “writers.” Journalism has discovered an autonomous and sufficient thought within itself. […] This is a new type of thought, the interview- thought, the conversation-thought, the sound bite-thought” (p. 142-143). Relatedly, Oskar Negt (1983) synthesizes the overall thematics that link the New Philosophers together as an intellectual endeavour. He writes, “As leftists, the nouveaux philosophes have been called upon to testify against the left and have contributed significantly to the current climate of anti-intellectualism as well as to authoritarian, conservative propaganda which equates Marxism with terrorism. Due to this, they have assumed the identity of a brand name but remain an extremely heterogeneous group of about ten intellectuals who are held together more from without than from within. The best known among them are [André] Glucksmann, [Bernard-Henri] Lévy, [Jean-Marie] Benoist, [Guy] Lardreau, [Jean-Paul] Dollé, and [Christian] Jambet. It would be difficult, and only of philological interest, to try to work out the differences among them in any detail for they do not serve as representatives of any clearly defined political movement or force. Rather, they should be understood as symptoms. Their thought thrives on the disenchantment inherent in a social mood of resignation and rupture, the disenchantment which results from the breakdown of any organized, collective hope for political change. All that remains is a moral appeal to the political instincts of the people and the Dionysian celebration of the aesthetic subject which has severed all ties to existing society” (p. 57; original emphases). 85

This lack of specificity on the part Deleuze and Guattari recalls questions as to the ways in which Marxist thought has failed to seriously account for media and communication as political entities. For instance, Dallas W. Smythe (1977) anticipates the very links Deleuze and Guattari make, however tenuous they may be, between communication and media as political and economic agents worthy of critical analysis. Smythe goes so far to frame his interrogation of the ‘blindspots’ of Marxist thought in terms of advertising, or, more specifically, the production of audiences and readerships as ideological subjects or groups, the material stuff of media and communication, who exist within and for these media-communication relations. He notes,

Among them [the problems of Marxist theory] is the apparent fact that while the

superstructure is not ordinarily thought of as being itself engaged in infrastructural

productive activity, the mass media of communications are simultaneously in the

superstructure and engaged indispensably in the last stage of infrastructural

production where demand is produced and satisfied by purchases of consumer

goods. (p. 3; original emphases)

These relations furthermore blur the distinction between orthodox Marxist terms like ‘base’ and

‘superstructure’ as media and communications run between as well as are constitutive of each.

Similarly, George Gerbner (1983) states the issue of the lack of attention to media and communication in Marxist thought, albeit far more bluntly: “It has been said, and not without reason, that if Marx were alive today, his principal work would be entitled Communications rather than Capital” (p. 358).34 However, Deleuze and Guattari do not seem that interested in the idea of

34 In some respects, topics like ‘computer science, marketing, design, and advertising’ would be best served within the purview of the political economy of communication. Even then, however, it is unclear where exactly within the subfield’s dominant trends one would set the Deleuzoguattarian take on opinion-as-dissemination. According to Vincent Mosco (2008), the political economy of communication in the twenty-first century has five major trends, which are “the globalization of the field, the expansion of an enduring emphasis on historical research, the growth of research from alternative standpoints, especially feminism and labour, the shift from an emphasis on old to new media, and the growth of activism connected to the political economy tradition” (p. 46). Below we will discuss how Deleuze 86

being critical of communication, even in Marxist terms, in such a way that evinces a thorough engagement with the theoretical basis of the field, to the detriment of the quality of their argument

(or, superficially, their polemic).

This lack of engagement with the field of Communication Studies begets another difficulty since Deleuze and Guattari (1994) seemingly conflate communication with topics against which they are arrayed, like opinion and consensus, and perhaps even discussion, conversation, and talking themselves. For example, Deleuze and Guattari claim, “philosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say “Let’s discuss this.”” (p. 28). Yet they do not explain why exactly the utility of concepts, as the goal of philosophy, cannot be debated, and instead assert it as a matter of fact. Presumably Deleuze and

Guattari would disagree with such a perspective, that the debate about the utility of concepts is possible, moreover beneficial to thinking and political action, because one cannot debate concepts since one does not communicate a problem as such in the very act of debating. As they put it,

“Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous” (p. 28).

Indeed, the naming of a problem ‘as a problem’ has now become an item of discussion itself. And it is ‘the problem of communication’ that Deleuze and Guattari try to solve, albeit, without engaging in any communicative exchanges (other than writing this book in which communication emerges as a philosophical problem). Certainly, communication happens when we discuss what a problem is or is not, but this does not allow for any specific problem to be solved per se, so Deleuze and Guattari say. Questions about the success of the communicative process—

and Guattari consider how the idea of opinion-as-dissemination operates as a miniaturized version of globalized capitalism, but even the discussion presented here is limited by Deleuze and Guattari’s lack of engagement in What Is Philosophy? with the practices of political economy. 87

like ‘does this make sense?’, ‘what does that mean?’, ‘is that clear?’, ‘do you understand?’, and so on—ultimately stand in for problems themselves. Deleuze and Guattari state the matter in another way. They write, “A concept lacks meaning to the extent that it is not connected to other concepts and is not linked to a problem that it resolves or helps to resolve” (p. 79). What Deleuze and

Guattari are trying to say here is that communication does not explain a problem; communication itself is a problem that must be explained (p. 49).

To reiterate: philosophy is not communication, nor is communication philosophy. But this difference is not enough for Deleuze and Guattari. For instance, in the etymological sense of the term, the ‘philosopher’ is the friend of thinking. So, if philosophy is not communication, and the philosopher is the friend of thinking, what, then, is the relationship between one who communicates and the act of thinking? The necessity of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the philosopher as a ‘friend’ of thinking becomes evident when they consider the historical context in which communication occurred vis-à-vis classical Greek philosophy.

The agora, for example, was the gathering place in which people can converse with one another agonistically, in friendly competition, about philosophical problems, instead of antagonistically, as in a zero-sum game, in which one solution is favoured over others.35 But acts of commerce also took place in the agora as a common space of public life, and it is here that

Deleuze and Guattari begin to analogize economic exchange and linguistic communication.36 The

35 On agonistics as a model of contemporary politics, cf. Mouffe, 2013. 36 “But they [the Greeks] are the first to be at once near enough to and far enough away from the archaic eastern empires to be able to benefit from them without following their model. Rather than establish themselves in the pores of the empires, they are steeped in a new component; they develop a particular mode of deterritorialization that proceeds by immanence; they form a milieu of immanence. It is like an “international market” organized along the borders of the Orient between a multiplicity of independent cities or distinct societies that are nevertheless attached to one another and within which artisans and merchants find a freedom and mobility denied to them by empires” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 87; original emphasis). 88

very dissemination of “free opinion (doxa)” (p. 79) occurs in the agora, all-the-more impacting how and why one philosophizes in the first place. Deleuze and Guattari write,

Philosophy must therefore extract from opinions a “knowledge” that transforms

them but also is distinct from science. The philosophical problem thus consists in

finding, in each case, the instance that is able to gauge a truth value of opposable

opinions, either by selecting some as more wise than the others or by fixing their

respective share of the truth. (p. 79; added emphasis)

From Deleuze and Guattari’s comments, we can extrapolate that communication becomes conflated with truth, insofar that truthful statements are verifiable within the social field by evaluating who makes these statements, like experts, for example, or how such statements are made. The value of truth, in other words, emerges because of how certain kinds of opinions, as blocs of knowledge, are valued for their significance, but more importantly, for how they can be shared and circulated within society.

Within such a public, political, and economic space that the agora demarcates, communication is thus positioned by Deleuze and Guattari as a conceptual ‘Other’ vis-à-vis philosophy (p. 51) because both end up competing for attention.37 In this formulation, philosophy can never ‘be friends’ with communication, and can only engage communication antagonistically.

Because philosophy cannot escape the dialectical process with communication, philosophy ends up always being subordinated to it or defined by it—as a matter of respite from discussion. The result of this subordination or definition is that concept-creation ends up reduced to the level of discourse, i.e. when one opinion is linked to another to form a kind of knowledge paradigm within

37 On a re-reading of concerns about ‘attention economies’ vis-à-vis distraction/concentration in the age of social media, cf. Pettman, 2016. 89

which thinking occurs (p. 80).38 However, Deleuze and Guattari believe that the more philosophy is provoked by rivals, the more philosophy responds by creating even more concepts (p. 11), to the point that claimants to concept-creation will hilariously fail. Yet given the disdain with which philosophy is invoked today, especially given the perspective that scientists have about the impacts of post-structuralism upon thinking (Sokal & Bricmont, 1998), Deleuze and Guattari’s confidence in philosophy’s capacity to overcome challenge seems misplaced or doubtful. This confidence is all-the-more alarming given the historical context of the end of the Cold War, when Deleuze and

Guattari wrote What Is Philosophy?, in which Western democracy asserted its ideological dominance through the globalization of the capitalist system.

Indeed, it is against this picture of the world, one in which action, thought, and life are organized within the parameters of ‘Integrated World Capitalism’ (Guattari, 1995, pp. 121-124), that Deleuze and Guattari (1994) emphasize philosophy as the pedagogy of concept-creation versus opinion-dissemination, or communication, as an apparatus of capitalist ideology.

Philosophy-as-concept-creation should happen, they write, to prevent the reduction of life to

“commercial professional training” that allows for “universal capitalism” to thrive (p. 12). In capitalism, one finds a flattening and transformation of matter into things like means of production and labour (p. 68). In this respect, capitalism operates similarly to how communication flattens matter into objects of opinion and consensus. In turn, this flattening of relations mirrors the linear form of transmission itself, when the process of information exchange smooths the movement of message-signals between senders and receivers. In the historical example of the agora, Deleuze and Guattari locate a micro-expression of communication-as-exchange that reaches its macro-form

38 “The dialectic claims to discover a specifically philosophical discursiveness, but it can only do this by linking opinions together. It has indeed gone beyond opinion toward knowledge, but opinion breaks through and continues to break through. Even with the resources of an Urdoxa, philosophy remains a doxography” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 80). 90

as the capitalism’s domination of the entire world (as made into the agora) (p. 98).39 Given the sense of the concept of control that has been invoked thus far, i.e. the late twentieth century phenomenon of the free, unhindered capacity of movement as the illusion of freedom and agency, it is fair to say that at this moment in their thinking, Deleuze and Guattari are, figuratively speaking,

‘agoraphobic’.

Computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, then, however sketchy they might be as nominal communicative concepts in What Is Philosophy?, thus represent and materialize control-as-movement because the agora, as the key site of economic exchange, is inflated into an interiorizing space of capitalism.40 Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, if not also a philosophical opinion, is that the phenomenon of communication itself is too enmeshed in logics of exchange, first between speakers who voice and share opinions as an intersubjective process (p. 92).41 In this respect, even the classical distinction between the polis and the oikos no longer holds. The public and private spheres of human existence are thoroughly permeated with communicative activity, especially when ICTs, like smartphones, computers, and social networks, are the material instances within which communication happens, such that any idea of the separation of public and private life is no longer conceivable. We can magnify Deleuze and Guattari’s examination of the agora to

39 “Why capitalism in the West rather than in China of the third or even the eighth century? Because the West slowly brings together and adjusts these components [of wealth and labour], whereas the East prevents them from reaching fruition. Only the West extends and propagates its centres of immanence. The social field no longer refers to an external limit that restricts it from above, as in the empires, but to immanent internal limits that constantly shift by extending the system, and that reconstitute themselves through displacement” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 97; original emphasis). In this instance, Deleuze and Guattari echo the analyses of world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 2004). 40 “[N]umerous cities, villages, and landscapes are transformed de facto into stations of a limitless traffic where our lively modern capital marches through its fivefold metamorphosis as commodity, money, text, image, and celebrity. Every empirical place on the earth’s surface becomes a potential address of capital, which regards all points in space in terms of their accessibility for technical and economic measures” (Sloterdijk, 2013, p. 31). 41 “Of course, it may be tempting to see philosophy as an agreeable commerce of the mind, which, with the concept, would have its own commodity, or rather its exchange value—which, from the point of view of a lively, disinterested sociability of Western democratic conversation, is able to generate a consensus of opinion and provide communication with an ethic, as art would provide it with an aesthetic” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 99). 91

suggest that the very idea of ‘the agora’ has collapsed altogether, after which the capitalist world realizes, quite literally, utopia as ‘u-topia’, or, a non-existent place (pp. 99-100).42

Indeed, even the notion of the spatial as a distinct communicative entity starts to break down in Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization. Instead, they look to temporal experiences as the new models of communication in action. They state, “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present” (p. 108; original emphasis). In many respects, the dissemination of opinion that Deleuze and Guattari find to be typical of late capitalism fuses space and time. This is even more true today as a normal experience of existence given how space-biased media and time-biased media (Innis, 2008) become instantaneous yet fleeing, occurring everywhere but nowhere in particular. Empires and civilizations that relied on either form of media to organize nations and people around shared senses of communicative acts (Innis, 2007) have become chronotopic, in which the world itself today has become an ‘Empire’ that does not need to be tied to any specific nation-state, historical period, or people in order to function (Hardt & Negri, 2000).

Troublingly, there is no relief from the orthodoxy of capitalism as a logic of neoliberal governmentality, but Deleuze and Guattari (1994) see that there also is no release from the orthodoxy of communication, literally, orthodoxy as ‘the correct opinion’, that works hand-in- glove with capitalism. And the fact that there is ‘no way out’ of this double-bind cannot even rise to the level of the para-doxical (or the paradoxical-as-heterodoxy), since “the man [sic] of

“paradoxes” only expresses [oneself] with so many winks and such stupid self-assurance because

42 “Actually, utopia is what links philosophy with its own epoch, with European capitalism, but also already with the Greek city. In each case it is with utopia that philosophy becomes political and take the criticism of its own time to its highest point. Utopia does not split off from infinite movement: etymologically it stands for absolute deterritorialization but always at the critical point at which it is connected with the present relative milieu, and especially with the forces stifled by this milieu” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, pp. 99-100; original emphasis). 92

[one] claims to express everyone’s secret opinion and to be the [spokesperson] of that which others dare not say” (p. 146). So, what, then, is to be done?

6. Conclusion: Moving into the ‘Societies of Control’

It is at this moment in the dissertation that we can identify the crescendo of communication in Deleuzian post-structuralism that necessitates the turn to thinking about control societies. Try as one might to escape communication, as Deleuze and Guattari do in What Is Philosophy?, every action, movement, and moment against power-communication reinforces the status quo. As Paul

Watzlawick and Janet Beavin (1977) put it, “it can be summarily stated that that all behavior, not only the use of words, is communication (which is not the same as saying that behavior is only communication), and since there is no such thing as non-behavior, it is impossible to not communicate” (p. 58; original emphases). But the political impetus is that we must try anyway, to resist capitalism, communication, and power, even if it is to our ruin—to think about a form of communication that is otherwise impossible.

Frustratingly, to produce a politics of thinking, about which the problem ‘of problems’ is key, like the very creation of an impossible praxis, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) are not willing to entertain a dialogue or a debate about the veracity of their claims about communication.

Specifically, how exactly do people think about their material conditions, engage in political struggles, organize collectively, and resist forces of power without communication? Does philosophy really meet the needs of people as Deleuze and Guattari have defined it as ‘concept- creation’? Deleuze and Guattari cannot answer such questions because they lament the contemporaneous conditions of capitalism in which communication is conceived as a need, one that privileges discussion and the dissemination of opinion as the norms of functionality within society, but also reduces thinking to a process of the exchangeability of sameness that ‘discussion’,

‘opinion’, and ‘consensus’ signify as informational contents (p. 146). These non-answers are unsatisfactory because at this moment in their careers and lives Deleuze and Guattari fail to recognize communication ‘as communication’, as something other than consensus and opinion.

They are guilty of creating a fallacy of communication to crown philosophy as the prime mover of concept-creation. And most disappointingly, Deleuze and Guattari do not demonstrate how philosophy and communication can be joined, perhaps even linked to capitalism as well, to think of ways to resist power in the age of the control society.

We can even reach further back in the Deleuzian oeuvre to see that art, too, does not reach the limit beyond power and communication. As it were, Deleuze’s emphasis on the political potential of art is too modernist, in which literature, painting, and cinema all serve as demonstrations of his philosophical inquiry, rather than exist as viable media examples of the relationship between communication, capitalism, and power (whether they are modern, postmodern, or post-post-modern, in aesthetic terms). Furthermore, Deleuze himself is foreclosed to the possibility of new media that might, in the twenty-first century, supplant the social capital that one identifies with literary, painterly, and cinematic artistic practices, like video games (Galloway,

2006; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009), which enjoy popular, financial, and often critical success. As such, Deleuzian thought about art is too ‘analogical’, since it posits relations within media, like language and style in literature, colour and line in painting, and movement and time in cinema (Galloway, 2015), as being central to their function, whereas the digital is the heart of power-communication itself, as predicated upon the endless dissemination of ‘0s’ and ‘1s’.

And finally, we can go as far back as to Deleuze’s earliest articulation of critiques of communication and see that stammering, crying, and silences are all highly adaptable to the present moment. Sadly, there are too many things in the world about which we should be stammering,

crying, and silent, if not more than we already are. In the same measure, one can blog, tweet, capture photos, and film video of themselves engaging in these very behaviours, which they can then share with anyone who is interested in reading, looking at, and watching them, that Deleuze once conceived as an alternative to transmission. In which case, he was correct, but only because transmission as a communicative process has been multiplied billion times over. Even the form of the conjunctive that pushes thought and communication to their limits becomes another part of the overall functionality of power, in which the conversation never ends and no one truly has the last word—‘and, and, and…’

As such, in Chapters III, IV, and V, we turn to Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of

Control” (1992) essay to evaluate how he transforms his critiques of linearity vis-à-vis power and communication. We will see that Deleuze abandons his critiques of communication and power in terms of alternatives that concept-creation, art, stammering, crying, silence, and conjunctives all signify for him. In his naming of the configuration of power-communication as ‘control’, Deleuze will conceive of this relationship in terms of the phenomenon of movement, such that is no longer oriented in one direction—from one point of origin and to one point of destination. For Deleuzian post-structuralism, movements in the control society represent the fullest expression of power and embody the ineffable form of communication, within which one is fixed, not unlike a surfer or a hang-glider who is subject to the metaphorical ‘ebbing’ and ‘flowing’ dynamics of water and wind.

And yet, before Deleuze can explain the particulars of the control society, he must first set up a rationale of spatiality towards which he is already fearful in his agoraphobia. As it were, the first major moment in the Deleuzian contextualization of the control society is a detour through the philosophy of his contemporary, Michel Foucault. In Foucauldian thought, Deleuze finds an appropriate rationale of spatiality, but one that relies on closed spaces, and not open ones (like the

agora or the polis). In these closed spaces, bodies are confined, and movement is specified to a few sets of behaviours, depending upon where one is—a prison, a school, a hospital, a factory, an asylum, etc. Deleuze must work through the problem of the functionality of power within confined spaces so that he can fully demonstrate how power in the late twentieth century has become a wholly open, exteriorized operation, within which no one is confined—other than within communication itself.

Chapter III:

Quo Vadis?

Control, Discipline, & the Spaces Between the Seen & the Said

1. Summarizing Previous Discussions of Power & Communication

In Chapter I, we focused on one key organizational problem of the field of Communication

Studies: that scholars work to better understand the realities of power. We analogized this interest in power to Communication Studies’ very conceptualization of ‘communication’ itself, since the history of the field shows that it has not had a singular definition or understanding of its operational term. In Chapter I, we saw at work in early historical models like the Shannon-Weaver transmission process some assumptions about what communication is (or is presumed that it should be). We argued that fantasies about how power works function concurrently with how communication was first modelled, although the field soon thereafter abandoned transmission as a viable explanation of the communicative process precisely because it is too parsimonious and reductive. Alongside attempts by Communication Studies scholars to multiply what communication is, where it happens, and how it can be discussed, be it as a ‘ferment in the field’ in the 1980s or an explication of a meta-model and meta-discourse of communication theory in the 1990s, we claimed that there is also a complementary expansion of power itself. Instead of a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship between power and people (between nation-states and citizens, businesses and consumers, politicians and voters, etc.), in which power is applied unilaterally, communication today regularly operates as a many-to-many occurrence (between people and machines, between people in real life and people known only through social networking websites, etc.), in which power becomes imperceptible. In short, power itself takes hold because

there are more communications taking place, more people engaging in communication, and more need for materials—technologies, infrastructures, energy resources, and so on—to support the normality of participation in a communication-dependent world.

In Chapter II, we pivoted our analysis to conceptions of communication found in the writings of post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. While not concurrent to when the field shifted its understanding of communication from simple models to complex processes, nevertheless we found that there is a parallel conceptual evolution of articulating the relationship between power and communication within Deleuzian post-structuralism. While Deleuze also begins his examination with transmission, albeit in the 1970s, by the early 1990s he ultimately arrives at a conceptualization of communication that is, by necessity, multilinear—decentralized, non-hierarchical, distributed, and impersonal. Indeed, throughout the Deleuzian, post-structuralist exploration of communication, first as transmission, then as information, and finally as opinion, we identified a conceptual knitting between power and communication, such that they are co- dependent terms within his philosophy. More importantly, Deleuzian post-structuralism offered a critique of communication itself to take aim at power, which is relevant to the goal of many

Communication Studies scholars. In effect, what we drove at throughout Chapter II is the idea that in order for us to resist power, we must first challenge the idea of communication altogether.

Yet it was only through the connection of power-communication to the idea of movement that Deleuze discusses in his later career, represented figuratively in thought as a heuristic and literally in the world as an action that takes place, that we could articulate how power- communication functions as the background condition for late capitalist existence. In the following chapters, we will turn to another piece of writing within the Deleuzian oeuvre to further specify how the relationship between power and communication takes place, moreover what it means for

us in the twenty-first century in terms of how we think, act, and live in the world, that draws this background to the fore. Specifically, we will articulate an impetus towards the actual and virtual movements upon which the control society relies by discussing how the very concept of ‘control’ emerges as an important problem within Deleuzian post-structuralism. In saying this, we must focus our attention on the key reading within the primary literature in which Deleuze engages in his most deliberative rendering of ‘the control society’.

2. Focusing Deleuzian Commentary: On the “Postscript on the Societies of Control”

In Chapters III, IV, and V, we will engage in a close reading of Deleuze’s short essay,

“Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992), in which he brings together several of the threads about communication that he has discussed since the mid-1970s. This essay expands upon many ideas that Deleuze only superficially discusses previously in his writings, while also introducing new wrinkles and caveats about how we associate power and communication. The aim of the next three chapters is to explain, interpret, critique, and adapt many of the claims that Deleuze makes in this essay, especially for anyone in Communication Studies who is interested in what he says about topics like power, communication, social organization, technology, labour, economics, material practice, or cultural expression.

We turn to Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay at this point when explicating the relationship between power and communication for three reasons. The first is simply chronological. The

“Postscript” essay concludes Deleuze’s interest in the relationship between power and communication that has been of interest to him for over twenty years.43 As much as Deleuze’s remarks about communication have been relatively diffuse throughout his body of work, the

43 In biographical terms, François Dosse (2011) draws a connection between the philosophical and interpersonal friendship that Deleuze had with Michel Foucault, in which we can see a greater emphasis on thinking about the effects of power upon society in the work of the former after, if not also because of, the latter’s death in 1984 (pp. 328-330). 99

“Postscript” essay functions as an excellent document within which we can ground inquiry about what comes ‘after’ transmission, information, and opinion. We seek to synthesize Deleuzian claims about what comes ‘after’ these types of communication, namely, control, in such a way that his ideas can be translated into terms that are consonant with Communication Studies. Indeed, whereas Deleuze demonstrates several conceptual ‘moves’ within his philosophy—his monographs on philosophers, his collaborative works with Guattari, his treatises on art, etc.—the

“Postscript” essay is different because it heavily relies on examples and illustrations of his thinking, many of which are connected to concrete, visible, real-world communicative practices.

However, Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay is the only significant piece of writing that condenses and encapsulates these ideas, which, at approximately two thousand, five hundred words, introduces some challenges. While the “Postscript” essay is packed with ideas, Deleuze does very little to qualify these ideas. As such, this means that we should read the ideas he presents as if they were probes and provocations to thought than meaningful illustrations of empirical research as to how power works. Thus, much of the work of Chapters III, IV, and V thus will be explanatory and interpretive in nature, precisely to highlight what it is, in fact, that Deleuzian post-structuralism

‘says’ (or ‘can say’) about the recent conjoining of power-communication.

The second reason is conceptual. The remaining chapters argue that the “Postscript” essay effectively captures the relationship between power and communication on the level of movement.

Movement, we will see, occurs figuratively and literally. For example, the phenomenon of movement signifies the transmission of messages from senders to receivers, but also the migration of workers, vehicles, capital, information, and media that is specific to twenty-first century society.

Specifically, the “Postscript” essay provides us three ways to apply and test the validity of the concept of ‘the control society’ qua movement, because Deleuze gives his readers three different

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pathways to think about the relationship between power and communication. The fact that the control society has a history, a logic, and a program allows us to sketch out terrains within which we can test Deleuze’s hypotheses about power-communication. More importantly, how the

Deleuzian assessment of power-communication unfolds in the “Postscript” essay can prove useful to the problematics of Communication Studies. Chapters III, IV, and V explicate how control came into being (history), how it currently functions (logic), and how in the future it can be combated and resisted (program), respectively, in which questions about how, when, where, and why one moves within the control society will also be explored at length.

The final reason to delimit the remainder of this dissertation to an analysis of Deleuze’s

“Postscript” essay is essentially political. Despite efforts otherwise (Patton, 2000; Thoburn, 2003), the portions of Deleuzian philosophy that are not collaborations with Guattari, and furthermore not signposted as explicitly Marxist, may not easily lend themselves to political or philosophical theory. Such a critique would imply that Deleuzian post-structuralism has very little to offer in terms of materialist critique, social organization, and praxis. To the contrary, in our reading of the sections of the “Postscript” essay we will find that Deleuze is very much aware of the social, economic, and political problems of his time. Furthermore, the Deleuzian naming of ‘the control society’ in the early 1990s helps us realize just how prevalent and deep-rooted many of the concerns represented in the essay remain for us today, especially in terms of power.

Furthermore, in Chapters III, IV, and V, we are also interested in expanding upon

Deleuze’s ideas about the world that are temporally ‘closer’ or ‘approximate’ to the problems of the present day to suggest that Deleuze, by himself, is a political philosopher of sorts, especially about communication. In the “Postscript” essay, we can see several anxieties that are well-trodden in Communication Studies, but also pertinent to anyone who communicates today. These concerns

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include worries about the surveillance state (Gates & Magnet, 2007; Humphreys, 2011), the welfare of civil society (Habermas, 2006; Castells, 2008), the capitalist parameters of the political economy of communication (Dean, 2005; Mosco, 2008), and the digitization and precarization of labour (Wark, 2004; Dyer-Witheford, 2015). By focusing on a political reading of the “Postscript” essay, this dissertation seeks to recast the popular image of Deleuze who is otherwise perceived to be otherworldly (Hallward, 2006),44 incompetent such that he needs a collaborator (Žižek, 2012),45 and, furthermore, barely engaged with the problems relevant to Communication Studies (Poster,

2006).46

3. A Brief History of Power-Communication: Discipline Before Control

To begin, we should ask what, exactly, does Deleuze say about control in his “Postscript” essay? He begins by positing that control has a ‘history’, which he elaborates by comparing it to the concept of ‘discipline’ found in Foucauldian philosophy. First, Deleuze (1992) says that

44 “Although no small number of enthusiasts continue to devote much energy and ingenuity to the task, the truth is that Deleuze’s work is essentially indifferent to the politics of this world. A philosophy based on deterritorialization, dissipation and flight can only offer the most immaterial and evanescent grip on the mechanisms of exploitation and domination that continue to condition so much of what happens in our world” (Hallward, 2006, p. 162). 45 In his book on Deleuzian philosophy, Žižek (2012) can only “regret that the Anglo-Saxon reception of Deleuze (and, also, the political impact of Deleuze) is predominantly that of a “guattarized” Deleuze. It is critical to note that not a single one of Deleuze’s own texts is in any way directly political; Deleuze “in himself” is a highly elitist author, indifferent towards politics” (p. 18; original emphasis). 46 In Poster’s case, as opposed to Hallward and Žižek, the critique that Deleuzian post-structuralism is barely engaged in the real of the world is especially frustrating, since Poster himself is more firmly planted within the field of Communication Studies, and is already cognizant of the ways in which post-structuralism and political critique can be joined, especially in Foucauldian terms (1989). For example, on Deleuze’s discussion about ‘virality’ as both a metaphor of informational life and a material threat to the functionality of ICTs in relation to the overall conception of ‘control’, Poster (2006) writes, “The metaphor of the virus has the advantage of suggesting the networked quality of new types of domination, whereas control is a less-precise term and might equally apply to other, precomputerized social systems (p. 59; original emphasis). Poster finds that the concept of control in Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay is “maddeningly undefined,” going so far to suggest that “Deleuze’s understanding of networked digital information and human assemblages remains rudimentary” (p. 69). Poster’s most damning complaint is that “Deleuze’s model of control as the next stage after discipline thus overlooks different deployments of technologies of power, betraying problems at numerous levels” (p. 61). While Chapters III, IV, and V essentially agree with the overall thrust of Poster’s complaints, we will nevertheless persist in a kind of hermeneutic reading of a Deleuzian philosophy of communication qua control. Essentially, we seek to fulfill the potential in a Deleuzian interpretation of communication by way of the concept of control that Poster can only see as a failure of opportunity. 102

Foucault identifies disciplinarity as a phenomenon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which reaches its peak as a technique of power at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Disciplinary societies, Deleuze claims, “initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure,” in which the individual “never ceases passing from one closed environment to another” (p. 3; added emphases). In comparison, control societies remain spatial, but insofar that spaces no longer need to be defined by how enclosed they are. Instead, spaces are defined by the degree to which they are open, through and upon which people can move. As such, one no longer passes from space to space, but is defined by the overall turn towards moving in general across the open topography of the social field.47 It is this liberation of enclosed spaces, which in turn compels people towards movements as such in the real world, that typifies how power works in the twentieth century, from which we can draw conclusions as to how power persists today. In kind, we will see an analogous performance of communication that relies on figurative movements—of messages, information, capital, commodities, and so on—to say nothing of the fact that communication itself today is facilitated by mobile technologies that are constantly networked into electronic-digital infrastructures (Gitelman & Starosielski, 2015).

47 We can understand this idea in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s prior conception of ‘striated’ and ‘smooth’ spaces (1987, pp. 474-500). In A Thousand Plateaus, they illustrate the difference between smooth and striated spaces in terms of analogizing the differences between fabrics (striated) versus felt (smooth), knitting (striated) versus crochet (smooth), and embroidery (striated) versus patchwork (smooth). Striated spaces are vertical and horizontal, whose characteristics, respectively, situate movement and make it mobile, such that striated spaces have clear points of orientation (top-bottom, beginning-end). Smooth spaces, however, are not disparate elements that are ‘stitched’ together. Rather, they are a tangle of elements that deny having a top or a bottom, a beginning or an end, and are ‘open’, or adaptable, to any additions and subtractions of materials. Following Deleuze’s understanding of Foucauldian thought, we can surmise that power in the disciplinary society is striated, since it works everywhere, but only evenly and homogeneously, according to the construction of confined spaces that limit movements and prescribe behaviours, which are themselves heterogeneous from space to space, namely on the level of content. In the control society, however, power is smooth, since it also works everywhere, but nowhere in particular, such that power is heterogeneous because it does not limit movements and prescribe behaviours. Movements themselves can be fast or slow, intense or relaxed, jagged or curvilinear, and so on. Movement, in this case, becomes homogeneous, precisely on the level of form, given that people are compelled to move altogether. 103

Deleuze continues his explanation of Foucauldian thought, locating within it descriptions of different spaces of enclosure in disciplinary societies: the family; the school; the barracks; the factory; sometimes the hospital; and rarely the prison, even though it best realizes the thoroughness of the spatial logic of enclosure, which is the reason why Deleuze ends with it in his list of confined spaces. More precisely, it is with the prison that Deleuze analogizes the spatial logic of disciplinary power, since each microcosm of enclosure operates according to its own ‘laws’ that determine how an individual is made into a specific subject—when one shuttles from one enclosed space to the next, one is made into a different kind of subject: at school, one is a student and no longer a member of a family, in the barracks, one is a soldier and no longer a student, and so on. Deleuze connects these transformations of subject-positions to an overall a ‘convict subjectivity’, in which people are locked into performing only one kind of subject-type within one discrete setting or milieu.

Convict subjectivity thus becomes the expression of individual existence within each space of confinement, from which one cannot escape.48

Deleuze (1992) then summarizes what he believes to be the overall operations of environments of enclosure: they function in order “to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; [and] to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces” (p. 3). However, these operations of enclosure are not synonymous or totalizing, since they produce different kinds of subjects, behaviours, and movements, and work with varying degree of intensity of confinement at different times. For instance, students are confined to schools for a few hours each day, which is qualitatively and quantitatively different from how long convicts must inhabit prisons. Yet, Deleuze’s use of the infinitive verb to summarize the net results of Foucault’s work on disciplinary societies—to

48 “It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model [of power]: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of [Roberto] Rossellini’s [film] Europa ’51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts”” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 3). 104

concentrate, to distribute, to order, to compose—is revealing, since he hints at the idea that there is no one person or group of people who is responsible for the ways in which power operates within spaces of enclosure. In other words, there is no one person as such who acts intentionally to accomplish these aims; instead, they simply happen, as if out of thin air.49 Additionally, the use of infinitives by Deleuze in this instance points to the ways in which power and communication are

‘virtual’ entities (i.e. have not yet happened) insofar that they are actualized (i.e. made to happen) when they connect to other infinitives as a kind of “continual variation” of making sense

(MacKenzie & Porter, 2011, p. 89). To be effective, then, power cannot be concentrated within one operation that is exercised within a space of enclosure alone; it requires another practice to supplement it. The infinitives of power-qua-space that Deleuze finds evidenced in Foucauldian analyses of disciplinary society can only refer to other infinitives, which altogether demonstrates a figurative movement of power from one rationale (‘to concentrate’) to the next (‘to distribute’).

Essentially, the history of power, given how Deleuze understands it in the disciplinary era, is one that traces ad infinitum a movement across and within spaces that are otherwise closed off from one another, along the lines of differentiating rationales of subjectivation.50

In these operations of enclosed environments, what Deleuze is interested in describing is the impersonal exercise of power at work within disciplinary society, which is different from what

49 Foucault’s illustration (1995, pp. 195-199) of how the plague conditions of a town were intensely managed and regulated by people who are named according to their occupation—syndics, intendants, guards, magistrates, and the afflicted inhabitants of a house with plague—exemplifies the point Deleuze makes. Individuals within a network of power demarcate access to spaces and movements between them by way of completing a specific task, but are also relatively anonymous and inconsequential as individual persons, historically speaking. 50 Indeed, Foucault (1995) sees the panoptic prison-space as the key site of power, insofar that it subordinates bodies to a disciplinary gaze, such that, within every prison cell, power becomes uniform and ‘homogenized’ (p. 202). However, in the Deleuzian vein, we can see that the space of the prison cell has become abstracted and generalized: no longer are figurative ‘cells’ meant for prisoners. Instead, contemporary ‘cells’, like, say, an area within which one communicates using ICTs that are networked into wireless internet connections, capture bodies, minds, feelings, enunciations, albeit momentarily—when one has access to a wireless connection in the first place. Cf. Crow, Longford, & Sawchuk, 2010. 105

preceded it. For example, in ‘societies of sovereignty’, which we can think of as the nation-states of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (especially in Western Europe), there was a personal-institutional impetus to the application of power. Specifically, as the head-of-state, a king or queen could create new taxes or put someone to death by way of decree. The sovereign, or monarch, was the guarantor of the ‘social contract’ (Hobbes, 1994) insofar that his or her power was drawn from outside of the social order, and yet, more precisely, exercised within it as well

(Agamben, 1998). Particularly, in the sovereign era, the power of the monarch rested in one’s performative statements, like ‘you shall be put to death’. In sovereign societies, the public space of the scaffold-as-spectacle and the closed space of the torture dungeon are two examples that are subordinated to the personal, performative dimension of the sovereign agent who communicates his or her power (through wielding and exercising it via violence) (Foucault, 1995, pp. 32-69).

Conversely, in disciplinary societies, spaces of confinement abstract communication by uncoupling it from subjective, personal statements of the sovereign, and instead enshrine it within an environment in which it can be even more deeply be effected upon and within the body.

Consequently, disciplinary societies organize the production and administration of life in ways that are not subject to the decrees of a given political figurehead. Instead, disciplinary societies are the effects of knowledge practices that concretize over time into common-sense procedures of managing human existence.51 As such, expressions of power and communication consequently beget more, different, and new instances of power and communication. For instance, when

Foucault explains how the ‘Panopticon’ prison model, as developed by philosopher Jeremy

51 “When the diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the ‘bio-power’ or ‘bio-politics’ of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as the new object of power” (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 76). On the role that media and technological communications have on delimiting concepts of ‘the human’, the administration of life, and the controversies that surround how societies reproduce and organize themselves, cf. Sloterdijk, 2009. 106

Bentham (1748-1832), idealizes the rationale of power, we can see a double disavowal of any subjective communicative act. Within the space of the Panopticon, the prisoner, on one hand, is seen, but cannot see, and is, in effect, “an object of information, never a subject of communication”

(Foucault, 1995, p. 200). Complementary to this objectification of the prisoner within a confined space that is subject to potential, omnipresent scrutiny, Foucault also draws out a distinction in the application of power, in which the panoptic prison-space also “automatizes and disinvidualizes” power (p. 202). In other words, there does not have to be anyone present—a guard, a warden, a counsellor, or whomever—to witness the prisoner in a confined space for the prisoner to comport himself or herself to the idea of being seen as such. More precisely, power works subtly since it does not need to be connected to a figure or subject ‘who communicates’ for it to have legitimation over thought and upon the body ‘as communication’.

We can draw one conclusion from Deleuze’s re-interpretation of the Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary society if we connect the remarks made in the “Postscript” essay back to Deleuze’s metaphor of power-as-movement that surfing and hang-gliding signify. On one hand, we can surmise that power-communication is productive because it generates knowledge-conducts that are different from one ‘societal era’ to the next, which the shift from personal expressions of power

(in performatives) to impersonal loci of power (in infinitives) demonstrates. Yet, on the other hand, we can also say that power-communication is reproductive, since knowledge-conducts as such are only realizable since they constitute the relays between space-qua-space, body-qua-body, and space-qua-body, namely, those materials (i.e. bodies) that are altogether enclosed, concentrated, distributed, ordered, and composed. But all this together typifies the older working of power,

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which Deleuze constructs for his reader so he can begin to point at new ways that power and communication function in late capitalist life.52

4. Control as the Crisis of Disciplinary Spatiality

In the “Postscript” essay, Deleuze (1992) also suggests there exists a heterogeneous, unassailable dimension to contemporary power, for which disciplinary rationales of power cannot account. Since World War II, he claims, disciplinary societies have undergone crisis. Indeed, he goes so far to suggest that since then there has been a “generalized crisis” (p. 3) that has permeated all the traditional spaces of enclosure, meaning that these spaces are effectively ‘breaking down’.

Prisons, schools, hospitals, factories, and other such spaces are no longer working as they should; their power to coordinate movement has started to be abandoned, which means that the very rationale of confining bodies to specific sites of social being no longer makes sense. One might suspect that the shift to a neoliberal governmentality on the part of Western nation-states during the 1970s and 1980s effected something new in terms of cognizing where, when, and why power works as it does (Zamora & Behrent, 2016). If so, it should come as no surprise, then, that Deleuze seizes upon crisis as a re-orientation of power that will become something else other than

‘disciplinary’. As Michael Hardt (1998a) puts it, “The end of the crisis of modernity has given rise to a proliferation of minor and indefinite crisis in the imperial society of control, or as we prefer,

52 The distinction here between the productive and reproductive aspects of power-communication can be mapped onto the ‘active’ and ‘reactive’ relationship that Deleuze reads in Nietzschean philosophy, albeit according to how both Deleuze and Foucault conceive of desire. Deleuze (1997a), “The last time we saw each other, Michel told me, with much kindness and affection, something like, I cannot bear the word desire; even if you use it differently, I cannot keep myself from thinking or living that desire = lack, or that desire is repressed. Michel added, whereas myself, what I call pleasure is perhaps what you call desire; but in any case I need another word than desire” (p. 189). In Deleuzian terms, desire is production, which is active, whereas in the Foucauldian sense, desire is lack, which is reactive. As it were, desire-production-active forces of power create new circumstances of freedom, while desire- lack-reactive forces of power only perpetuate the already-existing frameworks of ressentiment (or the hostility one feels when one cannot change anything). Yet, if control is a modulation as Deleuze claims, in which one rides a wave or a current but does not exert influence over it, then power, paradoxically, fuses production with lack, moreover active forces with reactive ones—some freedom to act, think, and live in the world, but not enough to change anything about these facts. 108

to an omni-crisis” (p. 143). Presumably, since institutional sites have broken down, and presumably that confined spaces have now become liberated, one would think that now people are free to move from space to space or within spaces as they so choose.

But this new situation of ‘crisis’ is not something that Deleuze celebrates, precisely because the old methods of power, which were practiced in spaces of confinement, are faulty and in disrepair. Rather, Deleuze (1992) claims that despite this general condition of crisis, or ‘omni- crisis’ as Hardt refers to it, the “administrations in charge” demand reforms to stem these crises, if not avert them altogether (p. 4). It follows that if disciplinary spaces are defined by their capacity to confine as such, in which subjects are produced according to different kinds of interior states of being depending upon which institution they occupy at a given moment, then the crisis of disciplinarity should produce a change in kind in individuals who existed solely as prisoners in prison, only as students in school, and so on. Effectively, the phenomenon of crisis makes all spaces and subjectivities equivalent by flattening distinctions between them. From Deleuze’s interpretation of crisis, we can surmise that power itself has not been destroyed nor abandoned because spaces of confinement no longer function efficiently. Instead, we suggest that power has been freed from its various boxes of enclosure, like the prison or the school, and has now spread across the entirety of the social topography (Hardt, 1998b, p. 31).53 It is this new rationale of power, that takes hold in mind and body because people think they can move wherever, whenever, and however they want within the opened spaces of society, that Deleuze designates as ‘control’.

53 “Social space is smooth, not in the sense that it has been cleared of the disciplinary striations but rather in the sense that those striations have been generalized across society. Social space has not been emptied of the disciplinary institutions but completely filled with the modulations of control. The relationship between society and the State no longer primarily involves the mediation and organization of the institutions for discipline and rule but rather sets the State in motion directly through the perpetual circuitry of social production” (Hardt, 1998b, p. 31). 109

‘Control’ is the term that Deleuze (1992) borrows from writer William S. Burroughs, but also a concept he claims that Foucault already recognized “as our immediate future” (p. 4).54 What does this future look like? Here Deleuze gestures to the existence of “ultrarapid forms of free- floating control that [have] replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system” (p. 4). Presumably, if discipline is tied to enclosure, as Deleuze claims it is when he considers Foucault’s work, then control is exemplified by the liberation of power from spatial logics (and perhaps even time limits as well). More directly, disciplinarity is tied to spaces that are static, whereas control itself is flexible and can move where. He alludes to this fact by suggesting that liberating and enslaving forces of power today “confront each other” (p. 4), insofar that the former forces up transforming into the latter ones—liberation (of movement) becomes enslavement (by movement). There is a similar maneuver between the shift in power from a disciplinary model to a control schema, in which disciplinary spaces do not disappear as such, as if they were abandoned, but instead become aligned to the overall social body of control, as more organs of physical and mental domination (Kelly, 2015).

For example, Deleuze (1992) suggests that “neighbourhood clinics, hospices, and day care”

(p. 4) could act of their own free will to minimize the negative effects of crisis. Some of these negative effects would include as defunding, deregulation, privatization, etc. Yet in their coming together to stem the problems given rise by crisis, these clinics, hospices, and day cares would deepen the effects of power altogether—by normalizing the condition of crisis, by fostering

54 Burroughs (1975) makes explicit the dimension of spatiality and liberation to which Deleuze only implies, writing, “All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely there would be nothing left to control. Suppose for example a control system installed electrodes in the brains of all prospective workers at birth. Control is now complete. Even the thought of rebellion is neurologically impossible. No police force is necessary. No psychological control is necessary, other than pressing buttons to achieve certain activations and operations” (section III). In this respect, what Burroughs sees as control Deleuze returns to as the idea of control-as-movement with the example of surfing; one can move any which way within the ebb and flow of the wave of water, but it is impossible to take escape from its crests and troughs. Absolute control would freeze movement, hindering the inscription of power within the body of the subject. 110

dependency, by assuming unnecessary risk, and by responsibilizing day-to-day struggles as the fault of the individual. What Deleuze describes in the early 1990s, then, is what we could call today ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2007), when governments and corporations exploit social, political, economic, and environmental crises for their own ends—to generate profit, to pass otherwise unpopular, questionable legislation, to bolster the monopoly of power that ‘repressive state apparatuses’ enjoy (Althusser, 2008), and so on.55

The historical shift from crisis to omni-crisis also creates another line of comparison between discipline and control. Whereas in disciplinary societies it was possible to conceive of escapes from power by way of conceiving some sort of ‘outside’ of interiorizing spaces, in control societies there is no such inside, or, rather, the interior has been turned ‘inside out’ and made into a wholly exposed, exteriorized space altogether. This shift from the desire for ‘the outside’ (as a question of escape) in the disciplinary society to a loss of any sense of ‘the inside’ (as a question of resistance) in the control society has implications for thinking about the politics of power. For example, a crisis in the disciplinary era might have been relegated to one biological-sociological problem, like natality and mortality rates of a given population vis-à-vis the spread of disease— stop the disease, solve the problem of people dying. The omni-crisis in the control era, however, includes natality and mortality rates, global pandemics, concerns about climate change, anxieties about national identity, security concerns about terrorism, and so on, and furthermore all at once— stop the disease, yet remain ineffective at halting climate change. It is the very condition of crisis as omni-crisis that points to the diffusion of power across the entire skein of the social field: there

55 Elsewhere Foucault (2008) historicizes the phenomenon of crisis by relating it to the functionality of governmentality. The solidification of disciplinary spaces and panoptic mechanisms in the eighteenth century finds its correlate in the emergence of governmentality as a regime of rational action that regulates ‘the conduct of conduct’. Furthermore, Foucault does not limit the crisis of governmentality to any specific economic paradigm, but to the overall problem of governmentality’s implementation as a ‘generalized apparatus’. Cf. Agamben, 2009. 111

is nowhere to hide from the effects of power, nor from the failure of social institutions to fulfill their purposes of protection and service; power is everywhere, but, paradoxically, remains nowhere in particular.

In turn, there is no subjective or objective perspective that sees control ‘where’ and ‘when’ it happens, nor any ‘place’ from which to launch resistance or oppositional practices against control (Pruchnic, 2013, p. 131). As such, there is effectively no limit to control in contemporary society, since “Reality is actual-virtual. Hence, insofar as control can only function upon what is

(the actual), it is an imperfect mechanism. Control can only imperfectly think in terms of what is not-yet” (Wallin, 2013, p. 8; original emphasis). Indeed, in addition to opening spaces of confinement and flattening distinctions between discrete institutional spaces, control as a spatial phenomenon might be understood as a movement towards the cartographic frontier (Harvey, 2001, pp. 201-233), like space exploration, but also a retreat into the biological interior, like neuroscience

(Pitts-Taylor, 2010) or the mapping of the human genome (Einsiedel & Timmermans, 2005). In which case, control looks for the next territory to be exploited towards which society is put into motion. While Deleuze does not go so far to suggest as much, today we must wonder if there is nothing that cannot be folded into apparatuses of power, as if we were to extend capitalism, racism, sexism, and social privilege into outer space, but also whether there is any interior, private locale, which carries any random assortment of thoughts, opinions, desires, and feelings, that cannot be exposed to the scrutiny of public opinion and the marketplace.

However, it is precisely this not-yet condition that allows control to take better hold of bodies and minds given how power is applied in daily life and how, when, and where communicative acts can take place. As it were, discipline could not penetrate power as deeply into social, psychological, and emotional life since it was too rigid, too confined by its own limitations

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as a spatial phenomenon in which movements were restricted to a few expressions. As Burroughs

(1975) writes, “Control needs time in which to exercise control. Because control also needs opposition or acquiescence; otherwise, it ceases to be control. I control a hypnotized subject (at least partially); I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don't control a tape recorder—you use it” (section III; original emphases). On one hand, Burroughs is correct, since the complete application of control dissolves the questions of choice and agency altogether, which is especially problematic if people choose to be willing participants in oppression and fascism.56 However, Burroughs is incorrect, insofar that complete control as use becomes inverted in the Deleuzian formulation. Power-as-use (to be used by the forces of power, like within a disciplinary configuration) becomes use-as-power, wherein people can fully think, act, and live when they assume that they think that they choose to use and engage in the things that they do, like movement, of their own accord.57 The gap between (incomplete) ninety-nine percent control and (complete) one hundred percent control, in other words, is the

‘open space’, the one percent difference between incomplete and complete control, that allows one

56 This is the problem that Foucault (2009) sees as the central concern of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. He writes, “[T]he major enemy, the strategic enemy is fascism… And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (p. xiii; added emphasis). However, what Burroughs describes as an activity or agency of oneself vis-à-vis power, Deleuze considers as a passivity, at least, in terms of information, which, like Foucault, he also relates to the existence of fascism as an extreme example of power and domination. Deleuze (1989) writes, “no information, whatever it might be, is sufficient to defeat Hitler. All the documents could be shown, all the testimonies could be heard, but in vain: what makes information all-powerful (the newspapers, and then the radio, and now television), is its very nullity, its radical ineffectiveness. Information plays on its ineffectiveness in order to establish its power, its very power is to be ineffective, and thereby all the more dangerous” (p. 269; original emphasis). 57 Burroughs’ elaboration of control (1975) refers to ‘mind control’ specifically, although it is fairly easy to read a consideration of ideology in his essay. In which case, control-as-ideology becomes realizable becomes it remains a communicative, i.e. linguistic, entity. He writes, “But words are still the principal instruments of control. Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine so far devised can operate without words, and any control machine which attempts to do so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control” (section II). 113

to think that one is free because one is able to move however, whenever, and wherever, without questioning why movement itself is desirable and necessary.

Politically speaking, the Deleuzian response to such a dilemma is ironic, since it invokes both action as a productive movement against forces of oppression and a spatial metaphor. On one hand, in terms of the former, Deleuze (1992) claims that today “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” (p. 4) by interrogating whether power is a weapon that can be pointed at both ends. Such is the quality of thinking itself within the Deleuzian paradigm. As Brian

Massumi (1992) plainly states, “Rather than reflecting the world, [concepts] are immersed in a changing state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window” (p. 5). Again, we see a refusal of the spatial in this aphorism, like the rejection of building ‘a courthouse of reason’, in favour of opening things up, sometimes violently, by breaking down thresholds of interiorizing spaces altogether that windows signify.

On the other hand, in terms of the latter, Deleuze (1995) also speaks to the need to create

“vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control” so that we might otherwise be able to act, think, and live truly of our own volition (p. 175).58 Does the reliance on yet another spatial construction, like the vacuole, truly allow for one to elude the effects of power, when power itself has taken up the production of spatiality as a rationale for its wider dissemination throughout the social field? To better answer this question, we need to turn to a deeper interpretation of Deleuze’s analysis of Foucauldian post-structuralism, in which the former understands the latter primarily not as a thinker of discourse, nor even a thinker of surveillance, but as a cartographer, a philosopher of space. Indeed, Deleuze’s own reading of the Foucauldian

58 “But when power in this way [as bio-power or bio-politics] takes life as its aim or object, then resistance to power already puts itself on the side of life, and turns against power: ‘life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it’” (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 76). 114

conception of the panoptic space points to ways in which we can think about how power and communication are joined as the necessary precondition out of which control emerges as a new representation of reality.

5. Before Visuality & Discourse? The Dislocation of Spaces Qua the Spatial

The summary of the history of power, from sovereignty to discipline to control, that

Deleuze lays out in the “Postscript” essay recapitulates his earlier evaluations of Foucauldian post- structuralism in the monograph written in his deceased colleague’s name, Foucault (1986/2006a).

In this text, Deleuze treats Foucault more as a ‘cartographer’ of thinking than a linguist or a historian. In many respects, the Deleuzian ‘Foucault’ that is constructed in this monograph is very different from the ‘Foucault’ one finds in Communication Studies. Today what has been normalized as the ‘mode of information’, or electronically-mediated communication, in which an individual’s engagement with the social field is multiplied, fragmented, decentred, and unstable

(Poster, 1994), nevertheless refers to an underlying linguistic basis upon which changes in the world are the result of changes in the materials, practices, rhythms, and patterns of language

(Poster, 1990). However, language in Foucauldian terms is only relevant to Deleuze’s purposes when it supports the construction and solidification of spatial confinements. Similarly, critiques about the managerialism of contemporary corporate culture lean into Foucauldian readings of workplaces as disciplinary spaces, but fall back upon discursive formations that one enunciates to navigate the cutthroat, competitive world of late capitalist society (Deetz, 1992). While Deleuze will take an interest in corporate culture in the ‘logic’ section of the “Postscript” essay, it is primarily the prison with which he associates demarcations of ‘the spatial’ as functions of power.

This is to say that, in terms of a philosophy of communication, Foucauldian thought often cannot be dislocated from the pas-de-deux of discourse and power (Mangion, 2011, pp. 59-91), in

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which the tension between subjectivity and language, represented by questions like ‘who speaks?’ and ‘how does one speak?’ (Merquior, 1986), is rehearsed. Similarly, discussions of topics like representation, meaning, understanding, and vulnerability that are articulated within a post- structuralist, post-modernist framework, which namecheck Foucault, proceed insofar that communication is threatened by simulacra, falsehood, confusion, and deconstruction (Mumby,

1997), terms that are central to thinking about the relationship between language and thought. Even

Foucault himself does not make it easy to downplay the centrality of language that others have emphasized about his work. A moment of ‘eventualization’, or problematization, which emerges via delinquency and criminality in the disciplinary era, for example, belies a necessary traversal of discursive systems to draw some political conclusions about how power functions; as those who take an explicit interest in communication, after Foucault (1991a, 1991b), it is almost impossible not to think ‘politics equals discourse’ (pp. 53-72; pp. 73-86).

Likewise, the linguistic component is undeniable even in the earliest Deleuzian conceptions of power. As we discussed in Chapter II, first, the redundancy of the transmission of communication normalizes permittable, repeatable, and normalized utterances. Secondly, the order-word performs power relations when one person in a position of authority commands or authorizes the actions of someone in a position of deference, like a school-mistress over her students. Third, Deleuze’s examination of the agora is a metaphor about how opinions are shared, evaluated, and disseminated in public life, when some opinions are deemed more worthy, meaningful, and valuable to public communication than others. Finally, even the understanding that the Foucauldian disciplinary society operates according to a linguistic paradigm of infinitives to regulate movement within a circumscribed milieu finds Deleuze parroting the association of

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power with language (even when he speaks of the application of power as enunciated by no one in particular in the “Postscript” essay).

However, in his monograph on Foucault, Deleuze labours not to read his contemporary’s philosophy solely as a linguistic analysis of histories qua spaces. Perhaps this is the reason why

Deleuze relies on the prison, and specifically Foucault’s discussion of the Benthamesque

‘Panopticon’ prison setting, in both his “Postscript” essay and Foucault monograph. Secondary interpretations of Foucauldian power, as a matter of the space of the Panopticon, have taken up the

Deleuzian influence upon understanding the importance that visuality has upon conceiving of power as extra-discursive (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000; Yar, 2002; Elmer, 2003; Wood, 2007;

Caluya, 2010). Specifically, Deleuze (2006a) finds in Foucault’s analysis an effusive description of the Panopticon that suggests that power cannot be defined by discourse alone. He writes,

Discipline and Punish describes prison architecture, the Panopticon, as a luminous

form that bathes the peripheral cells in light but leaves the central tower opaque,

distributing prisoners who are seen without being able to see, and the observer who

sees everything without being seen. As [discursive] statements are inseparable from

systems, so visibilities are inseparable from machines. A machine does not have to

be optical; but it is an assembly of organs and functions that make something visible

and conspicuous. (pp. 49-50)

The prison, in other words, gives visibility to the prisoner, but also the crime of the prisoner, and the full effects to fix the body of the prisoner within a confined space, such that the prison system itself buttresses and legitimates the legal system, which is otherwise discursive-juridical, by way of spectacle (p. 26). As it were, Deleuze suggests that one should not read Foucault primarily for descriptions of ‘the articulable’, or discourse, but for the very “form of the visible” that emerges

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concurrently with the medicalization of the body and biopolitical management of populations that rely on making things thinkable within visual parameters (p. 28).59

Though, what is curious in Deleuze’s interpretation of Foucauldian thought is the fact that he hovels out a conceptual space between visuality (within the Panopticon) and discourse (in terms of Foucault’s popular reception). Indeed, the fact that Deleuze notes a tension between ‘the seen’ and ‘the said’, or, between the practices of visuality and discourse that are produced within disciplinary society as surveillance and statements, respectively, makes sense given how we can think of control as the propensity towards any-movement-whatever. Precisely, because spaces have broken down (and there is nowhere else to go), why not engage in communication, if not also being seen engaging in communication as a kind of performance (McKelvie, 2001)?60 And yet,

Deleuze is careful to separate the seen and the said. “A system of light and a system of language are not the same form,” he notes, “and do not have the same formation” (p. 28). About this Deleuze is certain, stressing that “All knowledge runs from a visible element to an articulable one, and vice versa; yet there is no such thing as a common totalizing form” (p. 34). Instead, the visual and the discursive together form an epistemic bloc because each is applied to solve some sort of dilemma

59 “Discipline and Punish marks a new stage. Even a ‘thing’ like prison is seen as an environmental formation (the ‘prison’ environment) and a form of content (where the content is the prisoner). But this thing or form does not refer back to a ‘word’ designating it, or to a signifier for which it would be the signified. It refers to completely different words and concepts, such as delinquency or delinquent, which expresses a new way of articulating infractions, sentences and their subjects” (Deleuze, 2006a, pp. 27-28). 60 Jon McKelvie (2001) describes such a communication as a ‘performance stratum’. He writes, “Performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth: an onto- historical formation of power and knowledge. […] Performatives [of statements] and performances [of practices] are our system and our style, our ways of saying and seeing. As distributions of language and light, they are the emergent forms through which things are said and seen. Performance Studies, Performance Management, Techno-Performance, these and other research paradigms join and seal together different collections of practices and discourses, different combinations of performances and performatives. The subject and object fields of these paradigms stretch across the stratum whose building blocks they have also helped to solidify. But more powerfully, more generally than these paradigms, performatives and performances are in the midst of becoming the onto-historical conditions for saying and seeing anything at all. “Everything is performative,” “everything is performance”—what is most striking about these sweeping generalizations is that their ontological exaggeration carries a historical precision” (p. 176; original emphasis). 118

specific to each age, which is reducible to the fact there is something for which society has yet to account. This is all-the-more relevant since visuality and discourse work together such that when one fails, the other begins. Precisely, the problem of ‘the delinquent’ or ‘the criminal’ are those who are caught within visualizing and discursive frameworks of power that disciplinary society seeks to weed out and render inert, by either identifying them within discourse as delinquents or criminals or by rendering them visible to a punitive, carceral regime of inspection.

Yet, in the disciplinary era, delinquents and criminals only constitute small populations vis-à-vis the social whole. In the control era, however, there are seven-plus billion people for whom various national and international social institutions must coordinate. As such, it is the very relay between visuality and discourse (and, relatedly, between one surveillance practice to the next and one discursive statement to another) that gives shape to the contours of the control society where speed, velocity, and propulsion reign, and moreover categorize the overall desire to move. This desire towards movement is all-the-more facilitated by the opening of spaces of enclosure altogether, which result in a consequential opening, or loosening, of the spatial parameters of visual and discursive technologies (p. 45).61

Here the Deleuzian reading of Foucauldian post-structuralism, which anticipates what we find in the “Postscript” essay, repeats an idea of what came before, when, in a conversation,

Deleuze and Foucault grapple with the conception of power and the possibility of resistances against it, such that political action and consciousness cannot be ‘fed’ back into the overall system

(Foucault, 1977a).62 In this vein, in his monograph Deleuze (2006a) performs an unconventional

61 “We must break things open. Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer. […] [Discourse] must open up qualities, things and objects. It must extract from words and language the statements corresponding to each stratum and its thresholds, but equally extract from things and sight the visibilities and ‘self-evidences’ unique to each stratum” (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 45; original emphasis). 62 “[A]s soon as we struggle against exploitation, the proletariat not only leads the struggle but also defines its targets, its methods, and the places and instruments of confrontation; and to ally oneself with the proletariat is to accept its 119

reading of Foucault that is appropriate to the figure who is being surveyed, by emphasizing the

“topological” elements of Foucauldian genealogy over discursive formations and surveillant visuality (p. 13). Foucault himself draws attention to these, even when he is at his most discursive- communicative.63 As it were, we can read Foucault ‘backwards’, in which power does not determine, but is determined by the arrangement of social relations, which includes the construction of concrete spaces of enclosure as one of its preconditions. Deleuze, too, concludes as much when he summarizes that power is, basically, writes, “a social space” (p. 24; emphasis added). In other words, to think about space is to think about society, and vice versa. But if the disciplinary society is replete within confined spaces in which people fantasize about escaping to

‘the outside’, and the control society obliterates confinement as such wherein there is no more

‘inside’ into which one can retreat, then where, exactly, can one locate ‘the social’?

Deleuze is unable to answer this question convincingly, because in his interpretation of

Foucault’s philosophy, he cannot abandon the inside/outside binary relationship at this point in his philosophy (i.e. before the “Postscript” essay). Throughout his monograph on Foucault, Deleuze makes clear that power and communication constantly jut against their very limits, which he calls

‘the outside’, which is less ‘blank’, or an unknown territory, and more a cusp or threshold that cannot be crossed. Rather, the outside impinges upon the disciplinary society altogether, in which the production of social space is determined and situated. Deleuze comments, “there is nothing lying beneath, above, or even outside the strata [of the visible and the articulable]. The relations

position, its ideology, and its motives for combat. This means total identification. But if the fight is directed against power, then all those on whom power is exercised to their detriment, all who find it intolerable, can begin the struggle on their own terrain and on the basis of their proper activity (or passivity)” (Foucault, 1977a, p. 216). 63 “A discursive formation [that the statement expresses] is not, therefore, an ideal, continuous, smooth text that runs beneath the multiplicity of contradictions, and resolves them in the calm unity of coherent thought; nor is it the surface in which, in a thousand different aspects, a contradiction is reflected that is always in retreat, but everywhere dominant. It is rather a space of multiple dissensions; a set of different oppositions whose levels and roles must be described” (Foucault, 2002, p. 173; emphasis added). 120

between forces, which are mobile, faint, and diffuse, do not lie outside strata but form the outside of strata. This is why the elements a priori to history are themselves historical” (p. 70; added emphasis).

In other words, for disciplinary society to work efficiently, it is necessary to construct spaces, bodies, and behaviours in which no ‘outside’ is conceivable when power is exercised. As such, there is no outside to power altogether, because the idea of ‘the outside’ is historically determined by the conditions in which ‘the outside’ is thinkable (but otherwise impossible to enact). In particular, the disciplinary society exemplifies the production of social spaces by way of spaces of enclosure and confinement; the panopticon is pre-eminent among these spaces, in which stone walls do, in fact, a prison make, and iron bars a cage, but all in service of fixing bodies to a surveillant gaze and within a carceral discourse that relies on a punitive lexicon.64 The control society, then, simply reverses the polarity of the overall thrust of power: now ‘the inside’ is thinkable, but otherwise impossible to enact, because the stone walls and iron bars of prisons are no longer necessary to fix bodies to surveillant gazes and carceral discourses, because subjects are captured within their very momentum and freedom to move, do, and say whatever they want—so long as they obey the impulse to move, do, and say something, anything, everything. ‘Nothing’, however, is not an option.

Yet, Foucault himself arrives at the very conclusion that we find in Deleuze’s monograph.

For instance, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976/1990), he writes,

Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this

resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said

64 “The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (Foucault, 1995, p. 30; added emphasis). 121

that one is always “inside” power, there is no “escaping” it, there is no absolute

outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? (p. 95)

However, apropos Foucault, Deleuze also notes that we should not conflate ‘exteriority’ with ‘the outside’. This qualification makes sense when we think about how the control society, in contradistinction to the disciplinary society, operates. By this Deleuze means that exterior spaces are still enmeshed in practices of knowledge in which power is exercised, precisely by making things visible (in terms of surveillance) or sayable (in terms of discourse) in service of an overarching procedure of interiorization or domestication.65 Thus, the outside proceeds by obliterating any sense of relations, places, and histories altogether; within the realm of the outside,

Deleuze claims (2006a), Foucault finds ‘non-relations’, ‘non-places’, and the emergence of time

(p. 72). However, in the control society, the outside loses its political charge (as a post-spatial construction). We might understand such non-relations and non-places as points of transit and transition, in which people and things occupy a specific moment in time in a go-between trajectory from point A to point B. Standing in line, walking around a shopping mall, being stuck in commuter traffic, and sitting at a gate at an airport, for example, are all instances of occupying a space, but nowhere in particular, such that we are saturated in time as much as we are liberated from spatial constraints (Augé, 2008).

65 Deleuze (2006a) notes a difference between two types of knowledges in Foucault’s work, where there exists knowledge in general (savoir) and particular (connaissance) bodies of knowledge. Deleuze connects the production of these types of knowledges to the questions of how statements are made utterable and how they come to circulate within society. Here Deleuze reinforces his interpretation of Foucault as a philosopher of spatiality by suggesting that there are three spaces that allow for the existence of discursive statements (pp. 6-11). One, there is collateral space, in which statements are categorized alongside other statements within an overall domain in which they belong together. Two, there is correlative space, in which statements index the kinds of subjects, objects, and/or concepts to which they give rise. And finally, there is complementary space, in which non-discursive formations inhere as political mechanisms, that including taking shape as constitutions, charters, contracts, registrations, and enrolments, and political institutions that regulate them. 122

It is in this outside-space of Foucault’s philosophy that Deleuze (2006a) locates an opening for thought, in which some resistances to power, perhaps with communication itself, might be staged. He writes, “If seeing and speaking are forms of exteriority, thinking addresses itself to an outside that has no form. To think is to reach the non-stratified. Seeing is thinking, and speaking is thinking, but thinking occurs in the interstice, or the disjunction, between seeing and speaking”

(p. 72). What Deleuze touches upon here is the way in which power transcends its function as the relation of forces, of action-qua-action, and gives rise to an ‘architectonics of being’, a structure of permission as to how one is to behave by choosing the very parameters that govern choices altogether. Paradoxically, this also includes the choice to communicate, in which it is impossible to not ‘not communicate’, but also the choice to consent to the effects of power, even when we disagree with and are negatively impacted by them nonetheless (Herman & Chomsky, 2002).

As it were, the rationale of the prison, as the exemplary site of disciplinary power, radiates throughout society, such that the courts and the police are the complementary discursive and visualizing institutions that legitimate the rationale of producing spaces of enclosure. For instance, the courts gather their power articulating various discursive formations that are enunciated to discipline subjects via pronouncing sentence (‘you are hereby declared guilty’). The police, similarly, function as the intermediary of regulating who can exist within and outside of social order, in which the very construction of ‘the community’ is defined by policing practices

(Rancière, 2001). Together, the prison, the courts, and the police consolidate social spaces and procedures of power. They support one another, as much as the floors, walls, and ceilings of a house all share a common structural foundation.

In some sense, then, the architectural rendering of power that we find in Deleuze’s reading of Foucauldian post-structuralism can be thought of as a structure ‘without structure’. Basically,

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power is caught in a perpetual middle of mediation; it functions as the operation within and the relation between structures as such. It is concretized within institutional spaces, on one hand, like prison, hospital, asylum, and school environments. On the other hand, power is actualized by the specific subjects (or agents) who live and work within these structures, moreover who also move through them. Foucault (1990) basically confirms such a perspective. He writes,

The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating

everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment

to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.

Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes

from everywhere. […] [P]ower is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is

it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a

complex strategical situation in a particular society. (p. 93; added emphasis)

Yet, this is not to say that ‘structures equal spaces’ as much as one should resist conflating spaces with power altogether. Deleuze (2006a) makes this plain, stating that “discipline cannot be identified with any one institution or apparatus precisely because it is a type of power, a technology, that traverses every kind of apparatus or institution, linking them, prolonging them, and making them converge and function in a new way” (p. 23). Concretized in panoptic surveillance, disciplinary techniques are the results of questions asked about how to manage and maintain populations within a given territory. The prison, the hospital, the school, and so on, are the concrete answers about how life is to be administered: carefully, under constant supervision and strict regulation of what can be done within any given setting.66

66 In Madness and Civilization (1961/1988), Foucault (1988b) speaks of the emergence of the asylum not just as an actual space to house people with various forms of mental illnesses, but also as a virtual space in which the visual and discursive technologies of panoptic discipline were implemented. “Until the end of the eighteenth century, the world of madmen [sic] was peopled by the abstract, faceless power which kept them confined; within these limits, it was 124

If power is exercised within structures but is not itself structural, i.e. that it is, in fact, operational and relational (Deleuze, 2006a, p. 24), and cannot be limited to one environment in which it is applied and exercised, can we not say that this understanding of power also bears resemblance to the kinds of linear models of communication about which Deleuze is highly critical? Precisely, communication also extends itself, not unlike the prison space, but can only be identified by its status as a middle condition. And it is this middle condition of communication that Deleuze has associated with power throughout the decades, which culminates with control.

The control society does not prescribe any specific characteristic to the manners of communication, moreover the conduct of movement, other than both must happen, and participation in communication exemplifies the illusion of agency over one’s life and one’s thoughts that the concept of movement thematizes. Here the architectures of power as structures of permission, which, in disciplinary society, is communicated, ‘you must’, reach their fullest effect in the control society: ‘you may’ (Žižek, 1999, para. 20).67 And yet, the Deleuzian riposte to such a proclamation is to ask, obstinately, ‘why?’

empty, empty of all that was not madness itself; the guards were often recruited among the inmates themselves. […] The space reserved by society for insanity would now be haunted by those who were “from the other side” and who represented both the prestige of authority that confines and the rigor of the reason that judges. The keeper intervenes, without weapons, without instruments of constraint, with observation and language only; [one] advances upon madness, deprived of all that could protect [one] or make [one] seem threatening, risking an immediate confrontation without recourse” (p. 251). 67 Here Deleuze’s comments about movement-as-control that contemporary sports literalize can be connected to Žižek’s examination of permission-as-duty and duty-as-pleasure. In many respects, Žižek explicates what was only implicit in Deleuze’s comments. Žižek (1999) writes, “The superficial opposition between pleasure and duty is overcome in two different ways. Totalitarian power goes even further than traditional authoritarian power. What it says, in effect, is not, ‘Do your duty, I don’t care whether you like it or not,’ but: ‘You must do your duty, and you must enjoy doing it.’ (This is how totalitarian democracy works: it is not enough for the people to follow their leader, they must love him.) Duty becomes pleasure. Second, there is the obverse paradox of pleasure becoming duty in a ‘permissive’ society. Subjects experience the need to ‘have a good time’, to enjoy themselves, as a kind of duty, and, consequently, feel guilty for failing to be happy. The superego controls the zone in which these two opposites overlap—in which the command to enjoy doing your duty coincides with the duty to enjoy yourself” (para. 22). 125

6. Updating the Disciplinary Rationale of Spatial Power: Where Is Control Going?

To better contextualize the Deleuzian emphasis on the opening of spaces of confinement, in which the function of visual and discursive technologies is determined by the compulsion towards literal movement of bodies and figurative movement of communicative acts, we need to pull an example from the ‘program’ section of Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay. In the final section of this essay, Deleuze (1992) claims that the control society is not a work of “science fiction,” but a concrete reality in which power is effected by coordinating “the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether [an] animal in a reserve or [a] human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar)” (p. 7; added emphasis). Essentially, he posits that the effectiveness of control is spatial in nature, but also temporal (which will be discussed in Chapter

IV), precisely because one is ‘trapped’ by his or her very freedom to move across the social field however one so chooses. The very openness of space, in other words, is constrictive.

Yet at this point in his formulation, Deleuze also finds it necessary to tie the openness of control practices to a specific ‘materially discursive’ object (Barad, 2003) that thematizes control- as-movement: the electronic card, which signifies and codifies one’s identity and information.

The electronic card is transportable, but also always attached to physical bodies caught up within various velocities of moving behaviour.68 By tying control mechanisms to a materially discursive

68 In Chapter IV, we will discuss at length Deleuze’s concept of ‘the dividual’, which for now we can define as an infinitely divisible potential of people to be turned into sources of data production. We will see that dividuals becomes realized as individuals in terms of ownership and possession of such an object like an electronic card. In effect, Deleuze gives attention, however scant, to the question of the matter of power—quite literally, how power is taken up in material relations. Similarly, Karen Barad’s account of the performativity of bodies (2003) also recognizes material discourse as a cleavage that organizes the world (not unlike power in the Deleuzian and Foucauldian estimations). She writes, ““Human” bodies are not inherently different from “nonhuman” ones. What constitutes the “human” (and the “nonhuman”) is not a fixed or pregiven notion, but nor is it a free-floating ideality. What is at issue is not some ill-defined process by which human-based linguistic practices (materially supported in some unspecified way) manage to produce substantive bodies/bodily substances but rather a material dynamics of intra-activity: material apparatuses produce material phenomena through specific causal intra-actions, where “material” is always already material-discursive—that is what it means to matter. Theories that focus exclusively on the materialization of “human” bodies miss the crucial point that the very practices by which the differential boundaries of the “human” and 126

object like an electronic card, Deleuze invokes ideas developed by his colleague, Félix Guattari, in which the multiple kinds of electronic cards used by millions of people signifies a hyper- fragmentation of power, a specific articulation of power per person per navigated space.69 Pace

Guattari, for whom said fracture of power could be revolutionary, Deleuze (1992) envisions “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” (p. 7). The electronic card is thus the objectification of the capacity of movement; without one, we are unable to ‘pass’ into a new space or area, and even unable to move altogether. The capacity of control-as-movement is tied to the ways in which one is permitted and compelled to move as such through the ownership of whichever electronic card—debit card, credit card, driver’s licence, identification badge, etc. Just the same, with an electronic card, one could be denied certain kinds of movements or refused access to given spaces, for reasons as benign as the technologies that are required to effectively ‘read’ the card could be malfunctioning.

Yet Deleuze provides an addendum, arguing that “what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position—licit or illicit—and effects a universal modulation”

(p. 7). With the term ‘modulation’, Deleuze tries to capture the supple, subtle, and imperceptible

the “nonhuman” are drawn are always already implicated in particular materializations” (pp. 823-824; original emphasis). 69 “[A]ll prior formations of power and their particular ways of shaping the world have been deterritorialised. Money, identity, social control fall under the aegis of the smart card. Far from being a return to earth, the events in Iraq made us lift off into an almost delirious universe of mass-media subjectivity. New technologies foster efficiency and madness in the same flow. The growing power of software engineering does not necessarily lead to the power of Big Brother. In fact it is way more cracked than it seems. It can blow up like a windshield under the impact of molecular alternative practices” (Guattari 2013: 27; added emphasis). However, Michael Goddard (1996) sees in Guattari’s conception of ‘post-media’ not a resignation in the face of power, but, rather, an appropriate resistance to it. Indeed, the ‘post’ in ‘post-media’ connotes a shift away from mass media, or massifying media, in which oligarchical corporations dictate the means of communicative production as a one-to-many process. Post-media communication for Guattari involved something like networks of pirate radio broadcasters that could disseminate messages and politics in equal measure, so long as the mass media system, which seek to produce consensus, itself was deconstructed to produce dissensus. Today’s social networking websites seemingly do both, in which people can disagree with each other (on the level of content), but agree and consent to the impulse to communicate as such (on the level of expression). 127

effects of power, especially when control can be “characterized by creating a space for the individual, as if he or she has the freedom to tangle and to create, while their production as well as their ends follow the logic of intangible forces” (Hui, 2015, p. 75; original emphasis). Essentially, the electronic card is always already an information card and an identification card that both authenticates one’s participation in the communicative realm and identifies where in that realm this participation is taking place. Thus, communication is always our choice—how, when, why, with whom—but also modulates, or contorts, our very being in the world. The ramification of the

Deleuzoguattarian electronic card described here is that we pay little attention to the larger algorithmic sets of relations that are effectively ‘black-boxed’ through the licensing, ownership, use, and regulation of our communications data by corporate and governmental actors, who identify us as subjects (be they consumers or citizens) and collect information about our existence

(as subjects) (Cheney-Lippold, 2017, p. 107).

To own an electronic card, then, is to have the privilege of movement into otherwise forbidden spaces, although such a privilege entails a ceding of one’s data of how, where, when, and why one needs to use an electronic card to access a space altogether. Nevertheless, those who are sans-papiers, or, who are quite literally ‘undocumented’, be they refugees, asylum-seekers, migrant workers, immigrants, and so on, often do not enjoy such privileges.70 Today, discussions about diasporic populations touch upon questions about who has the right to move, how one

70 About refugees, for example, Giorgio Agamben (2000) sees a shift in logics of citizenship, which are tied to the territories of nation-states, to logics of denizenship, which emerge in the interstitial spaces between nation-states, which include the very delineation of a border altogether, across which people (but also information, capital, and commodities) traverse. He writes, “The refugee should be considered for what it is, that is, nothing less than a limit- concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed. […] The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better yet, aterritoriality) that would thus be implied could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it might be possible to imagine two political communities insisting on the same region and in a condition of exodus from each other-communities that would articulate each other via a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius (right) of the citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of the singular” (pp. 21, 24). 128

exercises the right to move, and who has the right to inhabit spaces like the nation-state.71

Conceived in this vein, control-as-movement negotiates the very notion of ‘community’, moreover the ‘security’ of the community, in which some people are included by way of circulation into the spaces and practices of a common people, while others are not (Rose, 2000, p. 329).72 The ramification of this line of inquiry is that we are left to think about how concepts of community and communication work in tandem as policing procedures of spaces (inside versus outside), conducts (belonging versus exclusion), and contents (acceptable-normative versus unacceptable- deviant)

Even then, the idea of a physical electronic card that Deleuze and Guattari discuss today might seem like an obsolete, outdated notion (for those who can afford to dismiss such notions).

The smartphone, for example, as both a mobile and convergent technology (Jenkins, 2006, 2014), encapsulates several functions of the electronic card—for debit, credit, banking, points collection, and so on—without relying on any physical item, while also fulfilling other tasks and activities— photography, video recording, texting, telephoning, etc. What is implicit in the Deleuzian construction of a materially discursive object, like an electronic card that allows one to pass through spaces, then, is the disintegration of spatial logics altogether, if not also the abstraction of the material world, which we take as a given when using ICTs insofar that information is transmitted and stored ‘in the cloud’. ‘The cloud’, or, more specifically, the networks and infrastructures of cloud computing technologies, is the negation of physical space within which power reconstitutes itself. The data that are collected by cloud computing technologies represent

71 On the relationship between hostility and hospitality vis-à-vis nation-state actors who allow economic and political entrants into their territories, cf. Derrida, 2001, pp. 10-14. 72 “Community is not simply the territory within which crime is to be controlled, it is itself a means of government: its detailed knowledge about itself and the activities of its inhabitants are to be utilized, its ties, bonds, forces and affiliations are to be celebrated, its centres of authority and methods of dispute resolution are to be encouraged, nurtured, shaped and instrumentalized to enhance the security of each and of all” (Rose, 2000, p. 329; original emphasis). On the further relationship between community and biopolitics, cf. Esposito, 2009, 2013. 129

multiple facets of contemporary power in which actual space is simultaneously obliterated but also reconstructed as sites of new articulations of domination. As Tung-Hui Hu (2015) notes, the cloud, be it as a concept, object, and organization of communication, can be used for reasons as benign as marketing via social media, as everyday as taking ‘selfie’ photographs, or as insidious as assassination by way of the aggregation and weaponization of metadata collection (pp. ix-xviii), wherein control, discipline, and sovereignty converge through the destruction and reconstruction of ‘the spatial itself’. In which case, in the control society, one is ‘seen’, or recognized, by cloud computing technologies, as much as one ‘talks’ or ‘writes’ when he or she communicates, at least in the Foucauldian sense.73

7. Conclusion: Control—From History to Logics, or, From Rationale to Expressions

In summary, the Deleuzian interpretation of Foucauldian post-structuralism gives those interested in the nexus between power and communication some preparatory remarks to situate how we might think of control in its fullest flourish. It would be foolish to think today that enclosed spaces and disciplinary rationales of biopolitical management have been abandoned; the emergence of the contemporary, new age, emancipatory form of power, named ‘control’, is only possible because the spatial logic of power has become so normalized that it blends into the background. We do not scoff at the fact that prisons, schools, hospitals, factories, workplaces, courts, and civic buildings all occupy spaces in our midst. Indeed, we frequently pass and are filtered through these spaces without giving pause to how we are, in effect, made into given subjects according to the architectonics of power.

73 “Why do we consent to transferring our personal data to private companies; data centers? The simplest answer is because it is mostly “free,” and because the free cost of storage is “freeing”… we also give our consent [to private companies] because digital culture continually invokes the idea of a potential threat to our data. While securing data in the cloud typically works through the gentle structures of control—for instance, antivirus programs invisibly scan downloads for their users—the military camp-like structures that have reappeared in the form of data centers suggest a largely unseen yet militarized aspect of data security that cannot be described by regulatory power alone” (Hu, 2015, p. 81). 130

However, in his “Postscript” essay, Deleuze also makes the point that these very same spaces today frustrate us. Often, they do not work how we expect them to; they might be inefficient, ineffective, or both. People who inhabit these spaces—guards, teachers, doctors, workers, assistants, lawyers, and more—are aware of this fact, but lack the capacity to do anything about it.

And yet, we are meant to feel frustrated. For example, the wait time one experiences at a hospital regarding a significant health issue might compel one to feel responsible for one’s condition—to

‘take care’ of oneself to avoid having to visit a hospital space in the first place. We internalize our own failure of self-production by inhabiting spaces that in turn reproduce us as a responsibilizing subject in the first place—in other words, we do not want to be uneducated, deviant, sick, dying, or incapable.

The Deleuzian interpretation of disciplinary society as a predominantly spatial society as alluded to in the “Postscript” essay furthermore posits a ground or site upon which individualizing practices of responsibilization can be realized. It is not enough to simply exist ‘there’, in an enclosed space, but one must also want to flee it at all costs. It is this desire that is oriented towards escape that materializes the relationship between movement and power; we move from a private space, like the home, to a public space, like the commuting arena, to occupy another private space, like a place of employment, in which we work to earn the means to support ourselves back in the private sphere. In this trajectory of movement across and within milieus, one participates in necessary communicative acts—one is seen inhabiting a train, a bus, a vehicle; one is seen working by a supervisor or boss; one might read the news or engage in social media activity in the morning while heading to work and at the end of the day while heading home; one might also speak, write, and type as a facet of their vocation, but also in order to engage with others in a given habitus. In

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other words, while the social field is entirely communicative, we cannot be so sure to say that the communicative world is entirely social (Horning, 2014).74

Ultimately, the major intervention of this chapter is an alternate emphasis of the salient elements of Foucauldian post-structuralism as illuminated by the Deleuzian investigation into power. This is not to downplay the important of discursive and visual technologies that populate

Foucault’s various documentations of power; rather, the Deleuzian interest in Foucault as a philosopher of space posits that discourse and visuality themselves are determined by the sites in which power is exercised. Indeed, by reading Foucauldian concepts against Deleuzian literature, we can identify a tension, or conceptual space, between visuality and discourse that is materialized in finite environments in which bodies are situated, moreover, in which the movements of bodies are confined and codified.

As such, we should read Deleuze, despite criticisms to the contrary, as a materialist given his discussions of space in his “Postscript” essay and his monograph on Foucault. This is to say, power is actual, whether it is constructed, on one hand, on the level of concepts and problems within the social field, which topics like delinquency and criminality denote, or, on the other hand, whether it is practiced on the level of physical bodies within concrete spaces that delimit what subjects can and cannot do. Power is immediately felt and understood by the ways in which one is fixed within a prison, a school, a hospital, an asylum, and so on. However, power is also virtual, since spatiality itself cannot be exhausted; bodies, subjects, and movements can be captured in

74 “Hence, social media, which masquerades as communication between peers but primarily functions as individuals consuming the social as isolated atoms while compiling and generating data for the system. Social media are a huge effort to prevent the masses from being silent in Baudrillard’s subversive sense—if the masses are silent, they move beyond manipulation, beyond influence, beyond desire, beyond control, beyond comprehension by the forces attempting to exercise sovereignty over them. If the masses seem to speak, as they now do in social media (and through all the other means for surveilling their everyday activities with “smart” devices), they yield the data that appears to make them manageable. They become “social” again, in the sense of being amenable to the mechanisms of social control” (Horning, 2014, para. 4). Cf. Baudrillard, 2007. 132

infinite ways as much as there are ever-developing problems in society that require spatial solutions, be they conceptual and/or concrete in nature. A significant takeaway of this chapter is the historical emphasis on the transition from the disciplinary society to the control society that

Deleuze underscores by conceiving of power on the level of the reality of space (open, not closed; exterior, not interior; uninhibited, not limited, etc.). Together, we might think of the actuality and reality of space as a rationale—first, power thrives because people are enclosed in spaces, then power extends into all facets of thought and existence because enclosed spaces are then opened. It is this rationale of opening spaces that allows for any and every kind of movement possible that serves as the pretext for Deleuze’s transition to the next aspect of the control society that requires explanation.

In the next chapter of this dissertation, we will examine the ‘logic’ section of his

“Postscript” essay, in which Deleuze, by necessity, moves from discussing the rationale of power to its very expression. More precisely, power becomes concretized in the material practices of the control society. Deleuze maps out how control logics express and actualize power in two ways.

First, he articulates and finetunes the differences between disciplinary and control societies, in which the former is a historical jumping off point from which we understand the latter as a contemporary phenomenon. And secondly, Deleuze identifies the expression of power within material practices that he limits to spheres of technology, labour, and economics. What remains implicit, however, in Deleuze’s mapping of control logics is the temporal dimension of power.

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Chapter IV:

Tempus Fugit?

Some Remarks About Instances of Material Practices of Control Logics

1. Re-Articulating Control: From a History of Power to a Logic of Communication

In Chapter I, we treated the relationship between power and communication as the central problem of Communication Studies. Since the field’s inception, this relationship has been tied to how communication has been modelled and defined. We charted a history of defining and modelling communication within Communication Studies that first aimed for simplicity but, by necessity, over time came to introduce complexity given the various ontological, epistemological, and political understandings of what communication ‘is’ (as an operational term and a concept for philosophical inquiry) and why people engage in it as a process (of social, political, electronically mediated interaction).

In Chapter II, we found a similar chronology of the conception of communication within

Deleuzian post-structuralist philosophy, which also was organized around the relationship between power and communication as a problem of thinking. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early

1990s, Deleuze tried to conceive of alternative types of communication that resist linear explanation, which for Deleuze were signified by terms like ‘transmission’, ‘information’, and

‘opinion’. These examples of counter-forms of communication were typified by topics like stammering, crying, silence, non-commercial art, and dissensus. Yet, by the time Deleuze exhausted these encounters with communication, he was no closer to identifying how power and communication work together in concert. This problem was pronounced especially within the post-

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Cold War context in which Deleuze wrote his “Postscript” essay, whereby the possibility of conceiving of resistances to globalized, neoliberal, corporate capitalism seemed fleeting.

In Chapter III, we began a close examination of Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of

Control” essay, which first led us to consider the history of control, as a contemporary phenomenon of power-communication, by way of the disciplinary configuration that preceded it. More pointedly, we unpacked the narrative about the history of power as it moves from discipline to control, or from a rationale of power to its very expressions. To qualify our unpacking of Deleuze’s historical narrative, we had to critically interpret Deleuze’s remarks about the philosophy of his colleague, Michel Foucault, within which Deleuze articulated a schema of power that was primarily represented as a spatial phenomenon. Specifically, by tracing the Deleuzofoucauldian analyses of the disciplinary era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we saw that power was exercised with spaces that are defined by walls, ceilings and floors, in which one is made into a subject insofar as certain behaviours are promoted as productive while others are punished as unproductive. However, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, power no longer operates best by way of capturing bodies and movements within enclosures; instead, it is the very opening of spaces of enclosure that situate and determine the biopolitical existences of people, albeit within momenta, vectors, and trajectories, as the spaces through which people formerly shuttled, from one to the next, are rendered flat and indistinct from one another. In other words, in the control society, the prison is the school is the hospital is the asylum is the factory.

In Chapter IV, we turn our focus to the ‘logic’ section of Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay. In this chapter, we will continue to explore the distinctions that Deleuze makes between power as a disciplinary rationale versus power as expressed in terms of control. However, we will contextualize these differences given how Deleuze shifts his focus to recent material practices of

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communication. These material practices of communication to which Deleuze limits himself include how technology, labour, and economics have changed over the past two-hundred fifty years. Like the previous chapter, in which we followed the Deleuzian narrative about changes in the emphasis in power from spaces of enclosure, within which movements are limited and prescribed, to spaces of liberation, within which movements are unlimited and undetermined (other than people are compelled to move as such), in this chapter we will trace a figurative ‘loosening’ of power-communication, albeit in terms of the immediate. We will see that Deleuze suggests that the evolution of power-communication over the decades involves an abstraction, multiplication, and precarization of how people engage with the private sphere that conditions how we think about

‘the new normal’ of our present moment.

2. The Bleeding Edge of Control, or, Time as the Pedagogy of Power

Approximately at the halfway point of the ‘logic’ section of his “Postscript” essay, Deleuze

(1992) draws upon the conceptual figures of the corporation and the university to demonstrate how, where, and when control is put into practice today. In effect, by tying the corporation model of economics to the university model of education, Deleuze suggests that the contemporary form of power is pedagogical, although in this conceptual conjunction, he will also touch upon how control today is exercised according to registers of time, in addition to the opening of enclosed spaces. On one hand, in the case of the corporation, Deleuze writes, we see that it “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” (p.

4). Competition is the raison d’être of the corporation, within which people live in a constant state of zero-sum being—win or lose, eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, publish or perish, etc. The spirit

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of competition that Deleuze chastises in the “Postscript” essay is thus temporal in nature, insofar that one cannot be settled in time, but instead must be constantly alert, so that one can respond to any new challenge or crisis. In this scenario, the corporation literalizes the aphorism that ‘time is money’, where wasted, unproductive time means a loss of profits.75 Furthermore, the figure of movement, upon which we have drawn in previous chapters, also exemplifies this condition of competition qua time, wherein if you stop moving, you cease to be altogether.

On the other hand, in the case of the university, Deleuze sees a similar slouching towards the idea of competition, but one that is dynamic and impermanent from what is evinced even in corporate scenarios. We might surmise that the educational system, from kindergarten to university or college, represents the very funneling of bodies through mechanisms of constant inspection, training, and evaluation. As Deleuze writes, “Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory

[as the social site of production], 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” (p. 5; third and fourth emphases added). Essentially, Deleuze’s point is that the perpetuity and continuity of power are the driving engines of the educational system, since there will always be a demand for more and new kinds of learning—which starts with skills like how to read, how to write, how to do basic mathematics, and, perhaps most importantly, how to communicate these accumulated knowledge practices, especially within work environments.

In this corporation/university dichotomy, Deleuze alludes to the very temporality of existence, without explicitly saying as much. In the control society, work and learning are never finished, but are constantly ‘open’ or incomplete processes, not unlike the liberation of spaces from

75 On the relationship between time and gift economies, specifically how cultures of gift sharing frustrate cultures of economic exchange, because what is ‘given’ cannot be ‘returned’ without reducing it to the logic of commodification (whereby money functions as a means to equalize of time), cf. Derrida, 1992, pp. 170-172. 137

the instrumentality of enclosure. More provocatively, in the control society, work and learning are the same thing, or, at least, happen at the same time. What Deleuze calls ‘modulation’ and

‘perpetual metastability’ in the corporate example, and what he calls ‘perpetual training’ and

‘continuous control’ in the university example, are both attempts to account for the here and now, in which the immediate future of the next moment must be accounted. As such, the corporation and the university constantly game, test, and evaluate their subjects, to have workers and students demonstrate that they belong (and if they fail, then they are removed from those institutions; they are, in effect, ‘excommunicated’). By analogy, Deleuze suggests that power functions within the control society in the same way, in which it adapts to every moment to contain, account for, and neutralize it.

This conceptual conjunction of the corporation/university situates the overall thematics of the ‘logic’ section of Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay, even though it is located peculiarly between more explanations of differences between disciplinary and control systems of power, on one hand, and the exhaustion of changes in communication, on the other hand. Namely, Deleuze must turn his attention to questions about how is power practiced precisely by touching upon its material expressions that are highly communicative in nature, in which the corporation/university conjunction signals a shift in emphasis. Therefore, along with Deleuze, we are not interested in simply updating and applying Foucauldian concepts about power to contemporary situations, like the construction of new sites where power can be engineered and exercised. Rather, what Deleuze aims at, despite his lack of clarification, is a ‘next generation’ conception of how power works once disciplinarity as has been dispersed and dissolved throughout the social field such that it becomes invisible, but also how it transforms into something new. Consequently, we should read the difference in scoping in the Deleuzian line of thinking, from discussions of control vis-à-vis

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discipline to specific practices of control that are visible in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as one that treats power and communication as ever-changing phenomena, responding to any conflict, upheaval, or transformation that occurs within society, which includes the very resistances to the centrality of power over everyday life, the necessity to engage in communicative acts, and the material stuffs that facilitate such action.

We can conceive of this dilemma another way, especially in terms of a metaphorical understanding of physics that is consonant with Deleuze’s construction of force-as-movement. For example, the seizure of the moment when power-communication takes place is not unlike the

‘observer effect’ within quantum mechanics, in which an electron that is ‘observed’ (but not by any actual person) exhibits the qualities of a particle, but behaves like a wave when unobserved

(Weizmann Institute of Science, 1998).76 Within this example we can identify an analogy for the overall difficulty of thinking about the control society within the Deleuzian paradigm. The major problems of identifying any given instance of power-communication, moreover the very existence of the control society, then, are questions about identifying the precise moment when change happens or when a line is drawn that dissects one thing from something else. For instance, when is the exact moment that discipline transforms into control? Where do we draw the line between spatiality-as-confinement and movement-as-freedom? How do historical descriptions of power become logical prescriptions of communication? Control, then, cannot be observed as it happens, but anticipated and felt, before and after the fact of its occurrence, in which we both pass through

76 “When a quantum “observer” is watching Quantum mechanics states that particles can also behave as waves. This can be true for electrons at the submicron level, i.e., at distances measuring less than one micron, or one thousandth of a millimeter. When behaving as waves, they can simultaneously pass through several openings in a barrier and then meet again at the other side of the barrier. This “meeting” is known as interference. Strange as it may sound, interference can only occur when no one is watching. Once an observer begins to watch the particles going through the openings, the picture changes dramatically: if a particle can be seen going through one opening, then it's clear it didn't go through another. In other words, when under observation, electrons are being “forced” to behave like particles and not like waves. Thus the mere act of observation affects the experimental findings” (Weizmann Institute of Science, 1998, para. 3-4). 139

time, but also forever anticipate the arrival of a future that is free from control. Movement, then, no longer hews to the cardinal organizations of space (the right angles of disciplinary sites of enclosure), but happens along the lines of the ordinal directions of time (the diagonal transit of one who exists and subsists in each duration).

3. The Time of Control After Deleuzian Post-Structuralism: Other Examples?

As such, the treatment of the Deleuzian conception of control, here represented as a temporal phenomenon, is different from other readings of the “Postscript” essay or utilizations of post-structuralism within Communication Studies more generally. For example, using the couplet

‘power-communication’, we can dramatize how control explains possible conditions of being-in- the-world that exist in our lifetime. By conceiving of power-communication as both the content and expression of control, we allude to what Mark Poster (1990) calls ‘the mode of information’.

For Poster, the mode of information is both a category and metaphor of contemporary economic and social production. He writes, “history may be periodized by variations in the structure [of productions] in this case of symbolic exchange, but also that the current culture gives a certain fetishistic importance to “information”” (p. 6). As it were, the mode of information compresses into a single concept what Deleuze delineates as a history, logic, and program of control, although

‘control’ itself is not so simple, given how Deleuze is effusive in his multiple examples of how control occurs today, which we will examine in greater detail below.

Unlike Poster, however, we do not want to reduce the mode of information as an explanation of post-structuralist theory within Communication Studies to problems of subjectivity vis-à-vis language (1990, p. 18).77 Instead, the mode of information, at least at the time of Poster’s

77 “The strategy I adopt and the one enacted in this book follows a double imperative: it locates sectors of electronically mediated communication and in each case invokes a poststructuralist position to highlight and examine the self- referential linguistic mechanism instantiated therein. The poststructuralist position illuminates decentering effects of the electronically mediated communication on the subject and, reciprocally, the electronically mediated 140

writing, should be treated as a kind of ‘interface’ (Galloway, 2007) that blurs the distinction between category and metaphor of communication altogether, at which Deleuze himself seemingly points as a reality of late capitalist life. ‘Interfacing’ is part and parcel of the mode of information of the ‘second media age’ (Poster, 1995) because communication, instead of being a one-to-one

(i.e. discussion) or one-to-many (i.e. broadcasting) process, becomes many-to-many (i.e. computer network). Because of this shift toward many-to-many communications, binary organization— along the lines of producers and consumers, high art and low art, form and function, content and meaning, and so on—dissolves because communication becomes synonymous with simultaneous interactions of bodies, subjectivities, practices, places, times, technologies, media, and types of information (Cavanagh, 2007, pp. 74-75).78

Properly, then, the mode of information as a kind of interfacing can thus be conceived as a state of being in which one is beset from all sides by communicative acts as one moves about the world. Interfacing stipulates the capacity and way one moves, albeit because the choice to move

(or to not move) is, paradoxically, obfuscated by movement’s transparency (Galloway, 2007, p.

25).79 In our unpacking of the logics of control in this chapter, then, we thus want to draw attention

communication subverts the authority effects of the poststructuralist position by imposing the social context as a decentering ground for theory” (Poster, 1990, p. 18). We should take seriously Poster’s efforts to treat electronically mediated communication and social contexts as contents of post-structuralist theory, and in this chapter, we explore the ramifications of these themes alongside Deleuzian post-structuralism. And yet, the various relationships between subjectivity and language that Poster emphasizes here is less important to our understanding of power-communication as practiced within metaphorical and literal movements. 78 “With representational machines such as the computer the question of the interface becomes especially salient because each side of the human/machine divide now begins to claim its own reality; on the one side of the screen is Newtonian space, on the other, cyberspace. Interfaces of high quality allow seamless crossings between the two worlds, thereby facilitating the disappearance of the difference between them and thereby, as well, altering the type of negotiation between the human and the machinic as well as the pivot of an emerging new set of human/machine relations” (Poster, 1995, p. 21). We can extrapolate from this criss-crossing within the interfacing membrane a similar effect on the level of multiple material objects, things, and/or categories of relationships. 79 “The catoptrics of the society of the spectacle is now the dioptrics of the society of control. Reflective surfaces have been overthrown by transparent thresholds. The metal detector arch, or the graphics frustum, or the Unix socket— these are the new emblems of the age. Frames, windows, doors, and other thresholds are those transparent devices that achieve more the less they do: for every moment of virtuosic immersion and connectivity, for every moment of 141

to the ways in which the Deleuzian control society bears resemblance to both the mode of information that periodizes both the characteristics of power-communication since the late twentieth century but also the quality of interfacing that mediates binary relationships necessary to socio-political organization altogether (inside-outside, surface-depth, theory-practice, past- present, present-future, etc.), albeit without focusing specifically on electronically mediated communication. As such, Poster’s ‘mode of information’ is not timely enough for our purposes.

However, there exists an entirely different rendering of control that speaks to the concerns of the Deleuzian control society. For example, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2006) interprets

Deleuzian control as a paranoiac explanation of power. Chun’s version of control is steeped in the politics of a post-9/11 world, which takes shape in the forms of surveillance, electronically mediated sexuality, and the extension/amputation of race that cyborg bodies incorporate into their functionality. These expressions of power, at least in Deleuzian terms, stem from the overall relationship between technology and politics in a global climate that is apprehensive about terrorism and the means of securitization to stop it. And yet, Chun does not entirely endorse

Deleuze’s descriptions of control. Instead, she sees an over-estimation of the realities of power of the control society in the Deleuzian interpretation. “This is not to say that Deleuze’s analysis is not correct,” Chun writes, “but rather that it—like so many other analyses of technology— unintentionally fulfills the aims of control by imaginatively ascribing to control power that it does not yet have and by erasing its failures” (p. 9). Indeed, Chun sees in Deleuzian control a paranoia about power because it too readily accepts the “propaganda” about power vis-à-vis technology as a social reality, as well as conferring to apparatuses of power the actuality of oppression (as a possibility) that are in fact only speculative (as a probability) (p. 9).

volumetric delivery, of inopacity, the threshold becomes one more notch invisible, one more notch inoperable” (Galloway, 2007, p. 25; added emphasis). 142

As such, Chun asserts that humans remain in control of technological developments, and, by proxy, over the political systems in which freedom is exercised. Specifically, the former (i.e. technologies) does not and cannot curtail the latter (i.e. politics). She writes, “we must reject current understandings of freedom that make it into a gated community writ large. We must explore the democratic potential of communications technologies—a potential that stems from our vulnerabilities rather than our control. And we must face and seize freedom with determination rather than fears and alibis” (p. 297). What Chun sets out to achieve, in terms of human relationships vis-à-vis technology, finds its logical extension in the anarchist position, which focuses on the conceptualization and practice of contemporary political struggle, in terms of human relationships vis-à-vis other human beings. For example, Saul Newman (2015) denies the influence that power has over people in a way that is like Deleuze’s denial of the influence that communication has over thought. Drawing upon conceptions of power after Foucauldian and

Deleuzian post-structuralisms, Newman writes, “the existence of power is based on our acknowledgement of it—and even in some ways our opposition to it; yet, if we simply affirm ourselves, and thereby declare our indifference to power, we give ourselves the freedom to act as though power no longer existed. […] To say that power is an illusion is not of course to say that it does not have real effects; rather, it is to deny power’s power over us” (p. 105; original emphases). Together, Chun and Newman provide a persuasive critique of the Deleuzian control society—that power is not automatically supported by the uncritical use of technologies, but also that the use of these technologies allows us to communicate the fact that power does not hold sway over the socio-political field as much as we think it does.

But technology is only but one source of evidence provided by Deleuze to explain what a control society is and how its power over populations works. To limit one’s critique to the materials

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of technology means that one misses the effects of power as a mechanism of dynamism, in which people are made to move and made to communicate, and often at the same time. Furthermore, one should read Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay with the idea in mind that the conception of ‘the political’ itself should not be assumed to be arrayed against power (as a force of domination) such that people are able to reclaim their freedom. One exercises positive and negative aspects of freedom—

‘freedom to’/’freedom from’—within an institutional-juridical framework that permits these exercises as being legitimate in the first place (like the securitized state).80 Additionally, the freedom of communication that one might enjoy is not necessarily an index of one’s overall freedom per se. The propensity of communications in a post-9/11 era of surveillance, on which

Chun bases her understanding of control contra freedom, simply provides surveillant regimes informational content to legitimate their scrutinizing power. In this sense, the time ‘after 9/11’ signals that there is no more thinking of a period ‘before 9/11’. On the matter of communication qua surveillance, we can then suggest that the freedom of communication can be thought of as a replacement of one’s overall loss of freedom in the collective sense—as a citizen, who lives in common with others, but who does not engage communicatively with everyone (since people who are otherwise anonymous are not a part of the concentric circles of our immediate social experience), and whose civil rights are being eroded by the very governments that protect them, in conjunction with the very corporations that facilitate electronically-mediated communicative acts.

In this chapter, then, pace Chun and Newman, we suggest that perhaps Deleuze is not paranoid enough, especially when power is coupled to and co-constituted by communication.

Chun (2006) recognizes the potential of such a version of a hyper-stimulated paranoia when access to Internet technologies becomes more and more available, especially in the age of the War on

80 On the relationship between race, geography, communication, security, and diaspora, cf. Puar, 2007, pp. 148-151. 144

Terror. By ‘potential’, we can identify in paranoia both a viable model of interpreting and validating information via the Internet (i.e. whether it is true or false, productive or unproductive, and so on), but also a procedure used to justify discriminatory tactics—racial profiling, mass surveillance, torture, etc.—in the name of security (pp. 257-258). Additionally, by ‘potential’, we also mean that paranoia about power in control societies cannot be reduced to a subjective- psychological perspective. Here the discussion of paranoia can be connected to comments made about agoraphobia in Chapter III. On one hand, paranoia can also take the form of agoraphobia, especially when interiorizing spaces that subjectivity and psychology denote are exposed to constant communicative acts ‘from the outside’. On the other hand, this does not mean that we refer to actual experiences of paranoia and agoraphobia that people have. Ideally, then, paranoia and agoraphobia vis-a-vis control-as-movement should be treated as analytics to signify a given moment when specific material practices that exist in time becomes central to the success of power-communication. Nonetheless, it is also important to recognize that such a rendering of paranoia and agoraphobia, at best, pathologizes power-communication, and, at worst, perpetuates ableist discourses about mental health that treat phobias as undesirable conditions of being.

Bracketing these concerns, we turn to Chun’s treatment of the control society because she draws definite political conclusions about the relationship between control and freedom that thinkers like Deleuze and Foucault map onto spatio-temporal techniques. She writes, “control and freedom are not opposites but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (p. 71; emphases added). As a matter of space, be it from an X-Y co-ordination (in two-dimensional terms) to an X-Y-Z configuration (in three-dimensional terms), and a question of time, in the form of X-Y-Z-T (the continuum of spacetime), we should be skeptical, like Deleuze, of conflating

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freedom and movement, especially when “Openness may itself not be [constitutive of] democracy”

(Chun, 2006, p. 71) or other forms of political engagement.

As such, we should not conflate the Deleuzian interpretation of control logics, exemplified by material practices of communication, with topics like twenty-first media culture (Pisters, 2001) or contemporary approaches to technology (Poster & Savat, 2009) when exploring the immediate contexts of control-as-movement. For example, recent research efforts within the Deleuzian vein avoid such conflation, but also focus on issues of digital culture (Franklin, 2015) and informational society (Faucher, 2013) that look at communication as a relevant process to the exercise of power, but not substantively as a philosophy of communication, in Deleuzian terms, per se. Similarly, it is also tempting to associate the concept of ‘control’, as a contemporary condition of social, political, and economic life, with the concept of ‘network’ (Castells, 2000; Terranova, 2004).

Indeed, the dispersive, distributive quality of control, in terms of power-communication, when expressed across spaces and within instances of time as suggested below, recalls the shape of the

‘actor-network’ (Latour, 1997, 2005). Instead, we can treat the idea of ‘control’ as a gravitational force of contemporary communication around which topics like media, technology, economy, and organization consequently orbit, in revolutions of ecstasy (Baudrillard, 2012).81 In this vein, we can surmise that control, on one hand, after Foucauldian analysis, flattens the distinction of discrete spaces by eclipsing the very idea of ‘the spatial’ altogether. On the other hand, however, we can also conclude that control is the figurative ‘black hole’ of power, an empty, yet effervescent square,82 in which even time itself is swallowed and pulverized.

81 “And what about time, this vast leisure time we are left with, and which engulfs us like an empty terrain; an expanse rendered futile in its unfolding from the moment that the instantaneousness of communication miniaturizes our exchanges into series of instants?” (Baudrillard, 2012, p. 24). 82 Deleuze refers to the idea of ‘the empty square’ in the essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” (1967/2004) Concentrating especially on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Deleuze conceives of this voided non-space as the operative site within which stable, binary structures can be displaced (and, more specifically, as the conceptual engine that makes the difference between one structure vis-à-vis another). Essentially, the empty square is the necessary, excluded 146

4. Back to Foucauldian Post-Structuralism? Logics of Control Contra Discipline

Paradoxically, it is in the ‘logic’ section of his “Postscript” essay, and not in the ‘history’ section before it, that Deleuze draws the sharpest distinctions between his conception of control and the Foucauldian understanding of discipline, especially in terms of immediacy. We return to

Foucauldian post-structuralism in general, and to the differences between control and discipline specifically, in this chapter to develop a schema in which the relationship between power and communication can be re-conceived. In Chapter III, we argued that discipline, at least in the

Deleuzian idiom, constitutes a kind of history of power-communication that exemplified techniques of confinement and a broader emphasis on spatiality to mediate the political relations between people vis-à-vis society. In this chapter, however, we shift our focus to the extension of spaces beyond the confines of walls, floors, and ceilings. Whereas in Chapter III we were interested in asking questions about where power-communication was practiced and exercised, in Chapter

IV we are now interested in asking when power-communication emerges as the content of control and how control takes form, in both social imagination and physical reality.

Specifically, in the ‘logic’ section of the “Postscript” essay, we can see that Deleuze ultimately locates three spheres in which control-as-movement, be it figuratively or literally, assumes its function as a logic (in terms of ‘when’ and ‘how’): with technologies; within labour; and by way of economics. However, before we see how control comes into being, we must first tease out the finer differences between discipline and control that contextualize the logic of control as such, which Deleuze himself leaves absent in his history of power-communication. These differences codify the very conditions in which one asks questions about the temporality and

third part, or middle, of structuralist philosophy, which gives rise to a kind of movement of structures of thought themselves (which cannot be accounted for and represented by these structures) (pp. 184-189). 147

quality of control, which follows from how the differences between the spatiality and quantity of discipline vis-à-vis control were elucidated in the last chapter.

The major distinction between discipline and control that Deleuze (1992) makes in the

‘logic’ section of his “Postscript” essay is how notions of space are materialized. On this matter,

Deleuze is clear, yet brief. He writes, “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” (p. 4; original emphases).

Disciplinary spaces are like molds because they are concrete environments; they have clearly defined beginnings and endings (from one space to the next) and points of entry and exit (that instantiate the space as a site of subjectivation). Conversely, control spaces are modulative insofar that there is only one milieu, a sort of ur-space, that responds to changes of movement of the subject (as expressed within a space) but also to external pressures, be they natural, social, economic, political, etc., that transform the overall comportment of permitted movements within the modulation. For example, any specific workspace, be it a factory or an office, functions like a mold. There is a literal outside-space that people ‘enter’ and ‘leave’ to begin and cease work for the day. However, ‘work’ itself becomes a kind of ur-space condition since it is possible to work outside of discrete spaces altogether—from home, on vacation, when commuting, and before and after the period of the proper ‘work day’. In this rendering, the spatialization, of work itself becomes modulative, taking place outside of the molded spaces of factories or offices.

Another way that molds and modulations can be conceived is in terms of dimensionality, even though Deleuze does not express his ideas in this fashion. The disciplinary gaze, for example, is two-dimensional, locking the object of its focus, be it a prisoner, student, patient, or worker, into a grid of legibility, in which the body is plotted not unlike an X-Y graph. As a prisoner or student,

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one’s movements can only exist within such plotting. As one instance of power, discipline works, on one hand, because it accounts for a range of possible bodies and behaviours within a circumscribed set of spaces that can regiment the forces of the body to act in a limited amount of ways—in the prison as a prisoner, in the school as a student, and so on. Discipline, thus, is prescriptive-inscriptive. Control, however, takes the body’s capacity for movement and subjects it to an infinite range of vectors—up, down, forward, backward, left, right, etc. This means that control is a three-dimensional, X-Y-Z rendering of spatiality. On the other hand, control, as another instance of power that builds upon the disciplinary foundation, succeeds because it is highly adaptive. It does not define bodies and behaviours as such within a clearly demarcated environment, but instead allows for the very quality and quantity of movements to become the means to enmesh or ensnare one within techniques of power. Control, thus, is descriptive- attributive. Power works differently, and perhaps more efficiently, in the control society versus the disciplinary society because it extends the permission to move to everyone without defining what movement is, what it should look like, how it is to be done, and where or when it is to take place.

The second relevant distinction between discipline and control that Deleuze makes continues the emphasis on spatiality, since he treats the difference between the two regimes of power-communication as a matter of origins and destinations versus movements. On the transition from beginning to end, which is typical of disciplinary society, he writes, “each time one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical” (p. 4; original emphasis). Spaces are analogical insofar that power is equally and evenly applied in whichever setting, although the specific characteristics of the prison will differ from the school, the hospital, the factory, and the asylum, and vice versa. As such, one repeatedly adopts and abandons the trappings of subjectivity as one subjects oneself to punitive gazes,

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pedagogical evaluation, medical discourse, or psychiatric care, depending upon which institutional environment one inhabits at any given moment, within which one ‘starts from zero’ again and again. Nevertheless, what is most analogical about disciplinary space is the fleshy condition of the body altogether. Bodies themselves analogize a sectioning-off of space that binds them to a given circumference. In other words, we can only inhabit the space of our bodies at any one time.

However, the physical-material fact that bodies exist, and moreover are constitutive of being—

‘there are bodies; bodies are there’—cannot be effaced, no matter the myriad ways in which they are rationalized, subordinated, transformed, and rendered into utilizable matter through disciplinary techniques.83

Conversely, “the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations,” Deleuze writes,

“forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary)” (p. 4; original emphasis). The numerical power of control-as-movement is thus a question of what can be counted or measured altogether. Control underscores the potential of movement of bodies that are free from the constraints of disciplinary techniques. Control societies thus ask questions like ‘what can a body do?’ (Buchanan, 1997) to incorporate new, novel, different, and diverse ways of being, on the level of movement, into its purview (precisely through accounting and measurement practices).84 The same can be said of communication. Any

83 This fact is immediately felt today given discussions about whose/which bodies matter and whose/which ones do not. Bodies that are deemed ‘to not matter’, or that are perceived to be ‘ungrievable’ (Butler, 2010), are still subject to an overall carceral logic of power that defines and delimits who can live, moreover how one is to live, which also reinforces the fulfillment of the sovereign logic of power in terms of also deciding who can be put to death. On the relationship between the ‘matter’ of the body and the ‘matter of the body’ of the prison, cf. Butler, 2011, p. 9. 84 The Deleuzian interpretation of control as a numerical-modulative technique recalls the McLuhanian ‘extension/amputation’ schema of media (McLuhan, 1994, pp. 41-47). Yet, a Deleuzomcluhanian critique of the relationship between communication and media would not celebrate the phenomenon of social consciousness, for example, that one finds as an object of discussion today on various social networking websites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), since it is unclear to what degree and how frequently one pays attention to (and is critical of) the communicative impulse as such—extension, in other words, cannot happen without some kind of amputation. As McLuhan (1994) puts it, “The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended or exposed, or we will die. […] In the electric age we wear all mankind [sic] as our skin” (p. 47). 150

new type of communication, on the level of form, content, medium, and meaning, potentially becomes another device that buttresses the effects of power. Communication cannot flourish haphazardly, wildly, or any which way whatever, then, but must be pruned to perpetuate power relations, lest it is turned against itself. This effect is doubled when bodies and subjectivities function on the level of the content-objects of communication for control societies as the very material ‘stuff’ that make movements possible.85

It is important that we emphasize the necessity of thinking about the difference between discipline and control as both problems of space and communication, qua movement, because

Deleuze in the ‘logic’ section of his “Postscript” essay begins to depart from the power of space, instead locating the fangs of control in instances of time. For example, drawing on themes in the works of writer Franz Kafka, Deleuze writes, “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 juridical life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it’s because we are leaving one in order to enter into the other” (p. 5; original emphases).

Said another way, one always ‘starts again’ within disciplinary societies, whereas one ‘never finishes’ anything within control societies. It is this vein that Deleuze begins to crack open the temporal aspects of the control society, in which the police, the courts, and the prison, as overlapping social institutions and spaces, give way to waiting rooms, being on hold on the telephone, and standing in line, as various representations of never-ending delay that always bring us closer to the bureaucratization and mechanization of power.86

85 This phenomenon can be acutely understood in terms of wearable technologies, especially those that are used to track the biological behaviour of the body—heart rate, steps walked in an hour or day, caloric intake, menstrual cycles, etc. In terms of a ‘quantifiable self’ that emerges vis-à-vis health and wellness trackers, cf. Gilmore, 2016. 86 Especially when bureaucratization and mechanization are effectively the same thing, at least in Kafkaesque terms. “There isn’t a desire for power; it is power itself that is desire. Not a desire-lack, but desire as plenitude, exercise, and functioning, even in the most subaltern of workers. Being an assemblage, desire is precisely one with the gears and the components of the machine, one with the power of the machine. And the desire that someone has for power is only 151

However, it is interesting that Deleuze sees crisis as the junction in which one moves from rationales of space to logics of time, precisely because one is ‘suspended’ in the overall breaking down of the idea of ‘the social’ as tied to institutional spaces. As mentioned in Chapter III, Deleuze diagnoses a general condition of crisis within disciplinary society from which control emerges as a rationale over action, thought, and life, precisely because the spatial power of institutions is paralyzed by the permeation of crisis in all corners of the social field. Conversely, the control society, since it makes an epistemic break from the disciplinary regime, does not entirely obliterate space, but hovels within time a kind of spatial condition vis-à-vis crisis. Said another way, discipline is not jettisoned altogether, but miniaturized and grafted to the heart of control. We are basically ‘trapped’ in our willingness to wait, to be put on hold, and to stand in line. Movement thus is the state of being when one is caught within the inertia of the two Kafkaesque

‘incarcerations’. Analogously, we can say that if one cannot ‘not communicate’, so too can one not ‘not move’, wherein movement is constant and improvisational. Likewise, power adopts movement as a fixture of its extension across the globe, also compelling bodies to move, at any and every speed and in every possible expression or combination of behaviour. Power is variable in this scenario since it is no longer bound to a given spatial configuration. Instead, people and bodies are unstuck from space, yet constantly take up being attached to time.

This emphasis on the temporal dimension of control allows Deleuze (1992) to abstract the forces of power that remain resolutely physical and material in the Foucauldian analysis. He achieves this level of abstraction by conceiving of differences of subjects upon and within whom power is exercised. In disciplinary societies, there are ‘individuals’ who exist within a spectrum

[one’s] fascination for these gears, [one’s] desire to make certain of these gears go into operation, to be [oneself] one of the gears—or, for want of anything better, to be the material treated by these gears, a material that is a gear in its own way” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 56). 152

of power. On one end of the spectrum, individuals consign themselves to power by ceding to institutions his or her ‘signature’, consenting to whatever subjection and subjugation is necessary within a localized space. In many respects, the individual highlights the discursive elements of power, when one is rendered into language because one testifies to the ownership of one’s name

(and being named by others). On the other end of the spectrum, individuals are no longer solitary entities who float from space to space and institution to institution, but are assigned a number that denotes their position within a ‘mass’ formation, like a statistic within a population group— prisoners, students, patients, workers, and so on (p. 5).

Here Deleuze alludes to the tension between individuality and collectivity, when the former is a part of the latter, but the latter itself is comprised of multiple versions of the former. The individual thus analogizes his or her relation vis-à-vis society; the idea of ‘society’ itself is but another spatio-institutional configuration that fixes someone at a given moment. Yet these deployments of disciplinary power are not contradictory. “[D]isciplines never say any incompatibility between these two,” Deleuze writes, because “at the same time power [both] 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” (p. 5). The problems of delinquency and criminality, then, grant licence to the rationalization of power during the disciplinary age in which movements flow away from the prison as the site of power. The problem of the control society, however, is a question of ‘how to turn people into convicts without them being convicts as such?’ This can only be answered by tying power to movement and time as wholly exterior, or ‘open’, phenomena, instead of inscribing bodies within confined spaces that rely on visual and discursive technologies to manage subjects. As a result, what emerges is an overall biopolitics, or a maintenance of collective life in terms of a statistical sociology of birth,

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death, health, and illness, that is always collective in nature. The biopolitical procedure of disciplinary society thus delimits the prison as the space in which one does not want to be (since one is otherwise ‘unproductive’ as a citizen). Consequently, the individual is made into a microscopic, component part of this collective social ‘body’.

However, it is with the control society that we can locate the fullest representation of

Deleuze’s abstraction of power because there no is longer any guarantee that an individual-as- subject still exists. If discipline produces individuals, then control produces what Deleuze calls

‘dividuals’. The dividual, not unlike the individual, also exists within a spectrum of power whose poles are singular and collective in nature.87 On the singular side, signatures give way to

‘passwords’. The password is the discursive performance that facilitates movement or transfer.

When one erects a physical barricade, blockage, or wall, the use of passwords allows one to filter people who belong from those who do not, precisely because someone knows (or does not know) the password to be granted access. Similarly, passwords function within virtual spaces as well as concrete ones. A password for one’s e-mail address, smartphone, wireless Internet connection, and bank account precipitates the privilege of movement altogether. For one to have any of these things signifies how one can enjoy more advantages of movement. For instance, if one has access to disposable income in a chequing account that can be accessed anywhere and at any time so long as one possesses a bank card and a personal identification number, one is capable of many and more kinds of movements than those who do not (and cannot). On the collective side, however,

87 Deleuze’s use of in/dividuation in his “Postscript” essay implicitly draws upon the ideas of philosopher Gilbert Simondon. Simondon (1992, pp. 299-301) argues that how we think about ontogenesis, or the production of individualization, is confused, because one presupposes that there are individuals who exist, from which the process of individuation becomes possible—in other words, ‘individuals individuate’. Instead of individuals who pre-exist the conditions of their being, Simondon treats them as the effect of the process of individuation. But such a process is never total, whole, or complete. Rather, the being of the individual as the effect of individuation does not imply any sort of conclusion, but instead a ‘becoming’, or constant rate of change. In terms of discipline, then, power is maladaptive because it is irrevocably tied to spaces of confinement. Control, however, is adaptive because it occurs as the moment of transition of movement in which a difference is made. 154

the dividual is an infinitely divisible content for ‘banks’ of information, partitioned into items like samples, data, and markets.88 In the control society, dividuals conjoin passwords and banks of information, since one can have multiple e-mail addresses, electronic-digital technologies, points of Internet access, and financial diversifications, but one also becomes the product of these services as well, despite one’s own participation in interactions of ‘mass self-communication’ (Castells,

2007).

Indeed, it is this emphasis on changes of monetization practices that Deleuze (1992) treats as the fulcrum of in/dividual-ity between disciplinary and control societies. He writes, “Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold in as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulating according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies” (p. 5). This economization of political life that dissolves individuality altogether into financial ‘standing-reserve’ Deleuze does not explore in much detail, say, as a political economy of communication. A Deleuzian political economy of communication could, for instance, treat the object of money as the symbol of how power is relaxed, unanchored from any given space, practice, or rationale of the disciplinary society that precedes the control paradigm. At best,

Deleuze elsewhere (1995) makes general concessions to the idea that capitalism has corrupted communicative acts. He suggests that “Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted.

They’re thoroughly permeated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature” (p. 175).89

88 Indeed, while today, within the parameters of the control society, we might be free to move however we so choose, communicate with whomever we want, and use whichever mobile technology that facilitates our engagement with texting and social networking, we are nevertheless ‘targeted’ by marketing, policing, and military apparatuses that seek to track our every vector (Chamayou 2014). ‘Targeting’ on the dividualist scale recalls the metaphors of mass communication as ‘hypodermic needle’ or ‘magic bullet’ effects. 89 In the writings of Christian Marazzi (2008), the convergence in the twenty-first century between capitalist production and linguistic communities is unavoidable. He writes, “Today’s productivity is increasingly determined by the capacity to respond to unforeseen and unforeseeable situations, emergent situations, those situations which make any sort of planning impracticable, assigning a central role to occasionality. But this productivity would be 155

But beyond this claim, Deleuze offers no explanation or qualification, other than that this condition is unsatisfactory. So how, then, does Deleuze respond to this condition that has seemingly become fact for us who live within the capitalist confines of the control society?

5. Material Practices of Control Logics

It is the latter end of the ‘logic’ section of his “Postscript” essay that Deleuze sketches a few specific instantiations of control that qualify how it is practiced, especially in ways that are inseparable from economic consideration.90 No longer tethered to the spatial practices of the disciplinary society, these control practices that Deleuze invokes are conceived along the lines of historical transformations of technology, labour-production, and debt. The turn to these material expressions of control logics at this point in the chapter is meant to connect Deleuzian control to instances that are relevant to unpack just how much ‘communication’ has become imbricated with power relations that are especially temporal in character, at the very least as a modelling of the progression of time from the sovereign era, to the disciplinary era, and finally to the control era.

The best way to begin such intellectual labour is to explain how the metaphors that Deleuze uses work as illustrations of his thinking. In his “Postscript” essay, Deleuze (1992) uses animal metaphors to demonstrate the very shift from discipline to control. “The old monetary mole is the

unthinkable without the dematerialization of support systems and means of transmitting knowledge, without the constant mentalization of capital, its fusion with living labor. The reproducibility, at low cost and in less and less time, of knowledge not embodied in fixed machines is another factor at the origin of increasing returns, of the possibility to unshackle productivity from scarce resources, such as labour and constant capital in the Fordist economy. In the post-Fordist paradigm, the limit, the necessary cost of production, becomes the life itself of the linguistic community” (p. 51; original emphases). 90 Georg Simmel draws connections between communication, money, and technology that are like how Deleuze combines them when conceiving of control societies. Simmel (2011) writes, “It is true that we have acetylene and electric light instead of oil lamps; but the enthusiasm for the progress achieved in lighting makes us sometimes forget that the essential thing is not the lighting itself but what becomes more fully visible. People’s ecstasy concerning the triumphs of the telegraph and the telephone often makes them overlook the fact that what really matters is the value of what one has to say, and that, compared with this, the speed or slowness of the means of communication is often that could only attain its present status only by usurpation” (p. 524). In many respects, it is this usurpation of communication by capital that Deleuze tries to conceive in relation to the control society that utilizes those same forms and contents of communication. 156

animal of the spaces of enclosure,” he writes, “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 in which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others” (p. 5). Later in the essay he claims that “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill” (p.

7). This animal conception of the change from discipline to control demonstrates an internalization of power, from outside the body (like the burrows of a mole hill) into the body itself (first upon the surface of the body in the form of scales, but also within it given the muscles needed for serpentine slithering). We can think of power in these metaphors as being highly interconnected, deeply exercised (in the mind and the soul of the dividual-as-body), and propulsive, wherein one moves across and on top of spaces in the open society of control, rather than within them. What

Deleuze describes here is basically a ‘cognitive mapping’ of power (Jameson, 1988), albeit with unfamiliar representations like animal species-being.91

In the next three sections of this chapter, we will undertake a comparable cognitive mapping of Deleuzian control logics by way of delineating the various chronological narratives of development in the realms of technology, labour, and economics, which are all adjacent to one another in terms of effecting changes within physical reality and social imagination. Specifically, the examples that Deleuze sketches allow us to think about how power qua communication has been rearranged, refined, and entrenched within different types of social structures, like sovereignty and discipline. However, control, as but the latest type of social structure, makes speaking about the reciprocity of physical reality and social imagination difficult because one

91 While not animalistic in its design nor application, Jameson’s cognitive mapping is both spatial and temporal in nature, not unlike the Deleuzian control society, which is, for all intents and purposes, a social structure. Jameson (1988) writes, “The conception of cognitive mapping proposed here therefore involves an extrapolation of Lynch’s spatial analysis to the realm of social structure, that is to say, in our historical moment, to the totality of class relations on a global (or should I say multinational) scale. The secondary premise is also maintained, namely, that the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience” (p. 353; added emphases). 157

cannot find where the former ends and the latter starts if we use technology, labour, and economics as the ordinal points of our cognitive mapping; we can only ever ‘speak’ of power in a present tense that always passes us by. And while we can construct anterior and posterior positions vis-à- vis the present, like ‘the past’ and ‘the future’, which Deleuze does throughout the “Postscript” essay, we are left wanting in our attempts to capture a conceptual picture (Heidegger, 1977) of power-communication in ‘the now’, especially when power-communication impact how we think about our own existences as finite creatures. What Deleuze is left with, then, is a listing of some material practices of the now, which themselves have histories and consequences.

a. Technology as a Material Practice

The first material practice of control logics is technological, which Deleuze lays out in a chronological, narrative fashion. In this construction, Deleuze (1992) is not a ‘hard’ technological determinist per se. Rather, he identifies technological developments as the outgrowths of the societies that produced them. “Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society,”

Deleuze writes, “not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating and using them” (p. 6). Deleuze’s comments can be interpreted in two ways: one, that technologies are representations of a society at any given moment; and two, technologies are, by necessity, connected to some sort of use or function within the larger social field. In this sense, the logic of control should be treated a material effect of myriad uses of technology, insofar that technologies concretize both knowledge about and practice of physical objects that power traverses. The chrono-narrative history of technologies that Deleuze draws proceeds similarly, in parallel fashion to the shifts in the emphases in power, from sovereignty to discipline to control, that he already laid out in the history section of his “Postscript” essay.

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With which historical period does Deleuze begin his truncated narrative of socio- technological progress? The society of sovereignty. He writes, “The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines—levers, pulleys, clocks” (p. 6). Although he does not explicitly discuss technologies of sovereignty in these terms, Deleuze’s choice of technologies is interesting, since levers, pulleys, and clocks are simple machines that do ‘work’, at least, as understood in the scientific sense of the word. Work is the measure of the application of force upon an object to make it move across some distance over time. In this sense, work is unilateral or unidirectional, because it implies a cause-and-effect relationship of force applied to a displaced object that moves from point A to point B. However, in this rendering, work is also analogous to the transmission model of communication that is anathema to Deleuzian philosophy. The message-signal, for example, is that which is displaced, but only because the sender applies the force of communication that is only completed when the receiver intercepts the transmitted message-signal. In this overall scenario, we can begin to read an additional transformation in the ways in which communication emerges vis-à-vis concatenations of power into Deleuze’s brief story about the changes in technology that mirror changes in society.

Deleuze then pivots to the disciplinary society as the next significant epoch for which control-as-logic maps onto the vector of technological evolution. “[B]ut the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy,” notes Deleuze, “with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage” (p. 6). Again, the lack of qualification by

Deleuze is frustrating because he does not identify any significant technologies that thematize anxieties about entropy or sabotage. However, because he invokes the idea of passive and active dangers within the disciplinary society formation, we might infer Deleuze to say that there is a shift in work itself as a measure of human action. Work, literally and figuratively, becomes power.

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Power, in the scientific meaning of the term, is a measure of work, when the rate at which energy is converted is gauged and the amount of work that is completed is observed.92

For purposes of the control society, however, communication is the inexorable tie that connects matter and energy to the exercises of power that exemplify the period of disciplinarity, in which there is a shift in technologization, from simple machines to energetic ones. Discipline, then, as Deleuze understands it, is an emergent rationale to vitiate the ancien régime of sovereignty, when power is exercised as a ‘permission to live’ rather than a ‘putting to death’. This very condition of ‘permission to live’ is the fullest expression of the control society at which

Deleuze arrives to conclude his narrative about technological innovation. Control societies

“operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the introduction of viruses” (p. 6), which Deleuze organizes along a passive-active axis. Surprisingly, Deleuze refers to jamming as a passive danger. If sabotage is an active danger within disciplinary societies, along the lines of machine-breaking, then jamming, presumably, is a strictly technical problem, meaning that power fails when technologies either fall into disrepair (planned obsolescence) or are rendered momentarily unusable (power outages, downed services, unavailable coverage, etc.).93 Conversely, piracy and viruses imply activity

92 Foucault (1995) himself also cautions against both a technological and social determinism of power. He writes that “it would be unjust to compare the disciplinary techniques with such inventions as the steam engine or Amici’s microscope. They are much less; and yet, in a way, they are much more. If a historical equivalent or at least a point of comparison had to be found for them, it would rather be in the ‘inquisitorial’ technique” (p. 225). Yet on the page prior, he cannot resist speaking of how techniques of power capture bodies not unlike how contemporaneous technologies fix, store, and release heat energy (of which the body is both the most significant content and producer of heat energy for society, quite literally, its thermodynamic engine). Foucault notes, “it was this link, proper to the technological systems, that made possible within the disciplinary element the formation of clinical medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, education psychology, the rationalization of labour. It is a double process, then: an epistemological ‘thaw’ through a refinement of power relations; a multiplication of the effects of power through the formation and accumulation of new forms of knowledge” (p. 224; added emphasis). 93 To reiterate, Deleuze’s use of the term ‘jamming’ is surprising because in the “Postscript” essay he does not entertain the possibility of using computers to produce acts of ‘culture jamming’. Culture jamming is an idea that is conversant, at least in spirit and not in letter, to the same kinds of artistic ‘resistances’ that Deleuze discusses in the 1980s vis-à- vis information, since it involves turning the contents of capitalism against itself in order “to undermine the marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations, specifically through such practices as media hoaxing, corporate sabotage, 160

because somebody is responsible for computerized appropriation (of data, capital, content, etc.) and disruption (spyware, malware, phishing, hacking, etc.), although this person, as the agent of these inconveniences, often remains anonymous or unknown. Yet despite the passive-active axis, at work in this Deleuzian configuration is a conjoining of the biological, technological, and the social, such that they should be thought of as inseparable, if only because communication contaminates them all.94

The culmination of the technological history with the control society at work in the

“Postscript” essay, which ends with computers and computerization, does not mean that Deleuze is simply repeating analyses of how society has shifted from industrial production to a post- industrial condition (Bell, 1974, 1980). In many respects, rather, the control society fulfills the fears that Lewis Mumford (1966) has when he conceives of ‘the megamachine’, which connotes the expansion of domination over space and time via technologization. Control is not inherently a negative in Mumford’s estimation, but instead must be exerted by people over technology (and not the other way around). If such government over technology does not occur, Mumford worries, this means that the “social aberrations that have accompanied the perfection of a machine technology” will repeat and worsen the wrongs of human civilization (p. 2). As Mumford puts it, technologies can be perfected and the human effort put into such perfection can be extraordinary given the capacity of achieving the impossible, but behind such technological development is mass human suffering (p. 6). Similarly, the anxiety of the disciplinary society, about criminality and delinquency that gives rise to techniques of power that are consecrated in visuality and discourse,

billboard “liberation,” and trademark infringement” (Harold, 2004, p. 190). Culture jamming thus is a subcultural practice that operates against mainstream, corporate, capitalist, ‘common sense’ culture (Hebdige, 2006). 94 Tony D. Sampson (2012) understands contemporary communication theory in terms of two complementary stratagems—one that is immunological (spreading, sharing, exchanging, etc.), the other biopolitical (securing, protecting, fearful, etc.)—that are consonant with their post-9/11 contexts (pp. 127-157). 161

can be summarized in a Juvenalian fashion—‘who watches the watchers?’ But Mumford and

Deleuze speak to another kind of anxiety about the political effects of technology at the moment of control—‘what governs the governors?’95

However, the Deleuzian historical evolution of technologies that reach their end with the control society reads less as a megamachine and more as a ‘micromachine’. This means that panics about ICTs, like the discourses surrounding the negative effects of social media, for example, and anxieties about computer failures that would lead mass extinction, like fears about Y2K, for instance, are too large of ‘metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984) and lose their explanatory potential of diagnosing power. Instead, the control society is a micromachine that functions because it incorporates communication into its rationale as both necessity and fact. The need to communicate, since we cannot ‘not communicate’, serves as the mechanism by which power is legitimated.

b. Labour as a Material Practice

But what Deleuze lacks in terms of depth of analysis in his “Postscript” essay, which he evinces given the broad strokes with which he conceives of the history of technology, he makes up for by the breadth of the logic of control. Deleuze (1992) demonstrates this eclecticism by connecting these shifts in technological practices to complementary changes within the labour sphere. “This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism,”

95 This is an allusion to a concern about whether human beings truly wield control over cybernetic technologies, a problem into which someone like Norbert Wiener (1954) was already conceptually plugged. He writes, “The machine à gouverner […] is not frightening because of any danger that it may achieve autonomous control over humanity. It is far too crude and imperfect to exhibit a one-thousandth part of the purposive independent behavior of the human being. Its real danger, however, is the quite different one that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a human being or block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the human race or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations by means not of machines themselves but through political techniques as narrow and indifferent to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically. The great weakness of the machine—the weakness that saves us so far from being dominated by it—is that it cannot yet take into account the vast range of probability that characterize the human situation. The dominance of the machine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where the statistical differences among individuals are nil. Fortunately we have not yet reached such a state” (pp. 180-181). 162

he writes, “an already well-known or familiar mutation” (p. 6). Following the trajectories that he lays out in the ‘history’ section of the “Postscript” essay, from sovereignty to discipline to control, which he repeats here in the ‘logic’ section, Deleuze sees an overall modification of how labour itself is produced within the parameters of the capitalist system. The mass appropriation of land and people that one associates with the age of sovereignty, when imperial nation-states were engaged in the colonization of the globe, serves as the pretext for the fulfillment of capitalism in the disciplinary period. Deleuze says, “nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects the 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” (p. 6). This analogy of factory-space under the auspices of capitalism can be understood in two ways. First, it is within the disciplinary period that capitalism analogizes the space of the factory by turning the entire world into a figurative factory- space. For example, the mercantilism of the colonialist, sovereign era of power is but a proto- capitalism by which resources and slaves around the world were identified as such by kings and queens, albeit against the wishes of the former. In many instances, it was in the colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from which land and people were already expropriated, that experimentations were developed to subject and subjugate bodies, especially racialized bodies of colour, to punishment and death. These experimental techniques were then softened and transported back to the colonising nation-states to be applied to white populations under categories of ‘biopolitics’ or ‘State-apparatuses’ (Mbembe, 2003).

Secondly, the later emergence of the idea of ‘the market’ within disciplinary society takes hold through the production and circulation of commodity products to be bought and sold. The factory itself, then, becomes the necessary and metaphorical site of production, in which all spaces

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are subordinated to the procedure of producing something and someone—namely regimes of knowledge and specific subject-types, as much as it also already a literal site of production. Beyond perpetuating panoptic techniques, the factory within Deleuzian post-structuralism also thematizes the fullness and concreteness of power’s effects.96 Power must in fact produce something; if nothing is produced, then power cannot be exercised as a relation of force qua force to compel someone or something to do something else. The consummation of power here is doubled when thinking about the actual factories of the nineteenth century in the age of discipline that produced the very commodity objects that, when purchased, legitimated the observation, measurement, and micro-management of specialized labour and assembly-line manufacturing of Taylorism and

Fordism (Quan-Haase, 2013, pp. 108-109).

However, in the control society, at the end of the late twentieth century, labour is no longer bound solely to the production of commodities. Instead, today, “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 [today] of higher-order production” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 6). What Deleuze describes as the condition of labour we can call ‘meta-production’, the production of production itself, in which there is no ‘end-product’. Meta-production does not need to be tied to any material, tactile thing that a book, an automobile, a computer, and a smartphone all concretize, for power to function. In parallel, power is multiplied and channelled throughout the social field because it has effectively been ‘immaterialized’, or unshackled from its application in discrete spaces of confinement that factories symbolize, through the meta-productive turn.

96 “[P]roduction is immediately consumption and a recording process (enregistrement), without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; production of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties, and of pain. Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2009, p. 4; original emphases). 164

Here Deleuze (1992) explicitly connects himself to his historical context when he explains the state of capitalism of the early 1990s to show how this immaterialization of power occurs.

Capitalism, he writes, “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 and what it wants to buy is stocks” (p. 6). In this passage Deleuze touches upon the emergent phenomena of service industries (Hardt & Negri, 2000) and ‘just-in-time’ production (Nealon, 2012) that become the new engines of capitalist expansion. Computers, as the technological ‘world-picture’ of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, are but one representation of the practice of control in action because with them people produce information, data, knowledge, and new relationships that are simultaneously actual (or material-concrete) and virtual (or immaterial-imaginary). Meta- production thus reproduces the economic system of capitalism within which large sections of the global labour consciousness is situated. But what Deleuze describes as the “dispersive” (p. 6) quality of control-as-power takes hold of the world via the combination of computerization and corporatization, precisely at the same time globalization liberalizes movements of capital, labour forces, and information across geographical space, obliterating the borders of nation-states.97

However, we should not treat the control society simply as the precursor of popular concepts like ‘Empire’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000) or ‘Multitude’ (Hardt & Negri, 2005) that are keyed into the relationship between world-integrated, transnational, corporate capitalism and multiple, local-global, political resistance movements. While Empire is, in many respects, post-national, the control society, conversely, does not need to be tied to the territory of any country, even when

97 On the treatment of globalization as a specifically capitalist idea, vis-à-vis a communist configuration of ‘world- forming’, or ‘mondialisation’ (which results from the different understandings in French of ‘globe’ and ‘world’ that in English are relatively synonymous), which would necessitate a being-in-common without equalizing existence to capacities of monetary exchange, cf. Nancy, 2007, pp. 36-37. 165

surpassing ideas of ‘territory’ and ‘country’ altogether.98 Likewise, the control society also does not need to rise to the level of the institution that trans-national and non-governmental organizations, sometimes including corporations, represent as the existential state of Empire.

Indeed, while all corporations are control societies, not all control societies are corporations—a city, a neighbourhood, and even a family can all work as ‘control societies’ of some sort, in which power becomes a question of scale and not of effect. Control, as such, is a case of any-power- whatever, since it does not have to be tied to any specific locale or social space to function efficiently.99 In sum, the occurrence of power in the control society trumps its location.

Conversely, Multitude is not defined by any specific group, class, or mass of people. In many respects, it evokes the idea of ‘a people yet to come’ that Deleuze invokes when he conceives of communication as information and opinion in his other writings before his “Postscript” essay

(1998; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Instead, Multitude implies a democratic consciousness on the level of ‘the common’ who make political demands, but not towards any political apparatus as

98 In some respects, a communicative imaginary, as expressed in terms of information, control, and capital, finds the coordinates of its mapping in the idea of the nation-state-as-imagined-community, or, as a limited and sovereign territory that outlines, shapes, or defines the social relations of people therein. Nation-states are, simply put, models of communication. As Benedict Anderson (2006) notes, “[the nation] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in their minds of each lives the image of their communion… Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (p. 6; original emphasis). Comparatively, it could be argued today that it is the imagined community that is the nation-state itself which is mapped upon the configuration of a communicative imaginary defined by information, control, and capital. In the era of Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000, p. 107), Anderson’s formulation of the nation becomes inverted, whereby the nation becomes the only way to imagine the idea of community. Hardt and Negri extend this idea beyond the limits and sovereignty of the nation. They write, “The development of communications networks has an organic relationship to the emergence of the new world order—it is, in other words, effect and cause, product and producer. Communication not only expresses but also organizes the movement of globalization. It organizes the movement by multiplying and structuring interconnections through networks. It expresses the movement and controls the sense and direction of the imaginary that runs throughout these communicative connections; in other words, the imaginary is guided and channeled within the communicative machine” (pp. 32-33). 99 Deleuze (1986) uses the idea of ‘any-space-whatever’ to think about ideas of movement in cinema. He writes, “Any- space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connections of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as a pure locus of the possible” (p. 109). 166

such, but to reaffirm their very existence as ‘the common’ in common. Multitude still proceeds, however, according to the same necessity and means of communication that are part and parcel of

Empire.100 It has not yet risen to the level of questioning the compulsion towards communication that one finds in Deleuzian post-structuralism, even when Multitude favours ‘communication’ in terms of the shared etymological root—the common, the commons, commonality, community, communism, etc.

Following the Deleuzian highlighting of changes in labour, the dispersive quality of corporatization within the control society should be treated as a reconfiguration of power, which no longer succeeds when wedded to apparatuses that need to be centralized, hierarchized, and concentrated. The power of the logic of control, rather, ‘corrupts’ the ‘soul’ of existence, Deleuze claims, by becoming decentralized, lateralized, and distributed. Control is thus an intensification of the ‘the conduct of conduct’ that one finds in the Foucauldian analysis of governmentality. But we can qualify control, especially in terms of movement. How, then, does one move, exactly, figuratively and literally speaking? How is one taken up in the crest of a wave of water or the current of a gust of wind that compel human beings via momentum?

c. Economics as a Material Practice

Strangely enough, it is Deleuze’s turn to a properly economic understanding of the logic of control that gives flesh to the skeleton of power upon which he has been building his narrative.

If, in the disciplinary society, the soul becomes the prison of the body, as Foucault once claimed, then in the control society it is the soul of the corporation within which everyone is housed. At

100 “Insofar that the multitude is neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like the masses), the internal difference of the multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together. […] Our communication, collaboration, and cooperation are not only bases on the common, but they in turn produce the common in an expanding spiral relationship. This production of the common tends today to be central to every form of social production, no matter how locally circumscribed, and it is, in fact, the primary characteristic of labor today. Labor itself, in other words, tends through the transformation of the economy to create end be embedded in cooperative and communicative networks” (Hardt & Negri, 2005, p. xv; original emphasis). 167

first, Deleuze (1992) proceeds by way of broadsides, writing, “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” (p. 6). While it is tempting at this point to dismiss his remarks as mere polemic, armchair philosophizing at best and cranky complaining at worst, these comments about how deeply control is affected, especially as a process of economic life, which marketing and corporatization signify, are the pretext of another characteristic that grounds how power works in the twenty-first century: to be subject to power means one must take on financial debt.

On this point, Deleuze is quite succinct when he concludes that “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 [sic] is no longer man [sic] enclosed, but man [sic] in debt” (p. 6). To be a subject within the control society, then, is to be a kind of homo economicus, an economic subject before all other subjectivations (Lazzarato, 2012). The economic subject is thus an effect of the ontologization of capital in which one uses communication (on the level of technologies) and one does communication (on the level of labour): capitalism, as a facet of control, becomes the framework by which one perceives reality, for which one becomes a part of communication altogether.

Yet, today, the realities of debt are patently normalized, which speaks to Deleuze’s prescience. For example, on 2016, Canadians held $1.68 dollars in credit debt for every dollar of income (CBC News, 2016). The average Canadian consumer debt is $22,081, regardless whether one holds any debt whatsoever (Evans, 2016). And while debt itself is not entirely a new social phenomenon (Graeber, 2011), what Deleuze gestures at is an overall flexibility, fungibility, and liquidity of capital that also represents the dynamics of a society caught up within the momentum

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of its own desire towards realizing the future, which is synonymous with economics.101 As Deleuze

(1992) puts it, “The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production” (p. 6). And while capitalism draws power from debt, it also does so by excluding large swaths of humanity from its spoils, even excluding many from the social privilege of even having debt in the first place. Just the same, there are too many poor people to fit into the spaces of confinement, Deleuze claims, going so far to draw a connection between the dissolution of borders by way of the multiplication of spaces, be they “ghettos” or “shanty towns” (pp. 6-7), in which one finds the poor, the homeless, the sick, the dying, the undocumented, and refugees.

Thus, the economic debt society is the precursor of the communication-as-debt relation within which power continuously circulates. In economic debt society, people take on massive amounts of debt in various forms—consumer debt, credit card debt, student debt, mortgage loans, insurances, etc. Debt, in other words, is both an economic promise and a social responsibility not to err too much, in terms of costs, investments, and risks, such that one does not want to be in the position in which one cannot repay what is owed. Communication functions similarly. One is obligated to respond to a communicative act, be it an interrogative, imperative, performative, or even a constative, and within the parameters of obligation is forced to make a promise to communicate (as reply). As much as the adoption of economic debt today becomes expected in order for one to exist in the world of late capitalism, namely, when debt is normalized as a social

101 This is to say that the Deleuzian control society as an economic phenomenon is, in the words of Zygmunt Bauman (2000), quite literally, ‘post-Panoptical’, for which something like communication, even when it reinforces the asymmetry of power relations, itself seems to be lost. Bauman writes, “The end of Panopticon augurs the end of the era of mutual engagement: between the supervisors and the supervised, capital and labour, leaders and their followers, armies at war. The prime technique of power is now escape, slippage, elision and avoidance, the effective rejection of any territorial confinement with its cumbersome corollaries of order-building, order-maintenance and the responsibility for the consequences of it all as well as of the necessity to bear their costs” (p. 11; original emphasis). 169

pressure that builds and builds to the point of bankruptcy, foreclosure, and destitution, what is implicit in Deleuze’s understanding here is a similar formulation: that as economic power expands and settles, so too the compulsion to communication in order to survive expands and settles as a fait accompli of socio-political existence. Just as much as one is encumbered by the metaphoric chains of debt, in lieu of actual chains of bondage, so, too, are people fettered by communication.102

For Deleuze, debt, be it economic or communicative, is problematic, precisely because people think that they can escape it by delving further into debt as a way out. Debt, then, exists on the cusp of power, precisely when one becomes immobilized—when one who surfs becomes the one who drowns. But just how tenable is this situation?

6. Conclusion: ‘What Counts Is That We Are at the Beginning of Something’

As mentioned above, Deleuze sees in control descriptions of power that are attributed to the modulation of movements that flatten spaces of confinement and extend across the social topography. In this chapter, we have emphasized the immediately temporal dimension of power in which movement is staged analogically, as a matter of historical-epistemic change from sovereignty to discipline, that is also important when thinking about the shift from disciplinary techniques to control practices. Specifically, the temporal dimension of control qualifies how power-communication at the present can be characterized—it is technological in nature, economic in effect, and expressed in several categories of labour. In many respects, the Deleuzian method of description provides examples in which the relationship between power, communication, and movement can be considered.

But is this enough? We should ask ourselves this question because in his “Postscript” essay so far, Deleuze does not really present any solutions to resist the control society. What he focuses

102 On the relationship between language, debt, and contemporary economics, cf. Berardi, 2012. 170

on as logics of control—computerization-informationalization, meta-production, and the accumulation of debt—presumably cannot be rejected without a similar rejection of technology, labour, and economics that underpin the effects of power. Certainly, if one wants to communicate or move about society (or move things about society), then control logics and their underpinning material structures are essential to do so. This means that the modulating and dividualizing effects of power, which are the primary factors that differentiate the control society from the disciplinary society, become ‘background noise’ to the overall necessity to communication in the twenty-first century. As a result, even if we consider the examinations of communication in his previous writings, Deleuze at best can only gesture towards vague or undefined positions that could serve as possible avenues to challenge the status quo, which are thoroughly absent in the logic section of the “Postscript” essay. As such, because of the lack of praxis at this moment in Deleuzian post- structuralism, we are left to wonder whether descriptions of control are complicit with its functionality. Moreover, is it possible to conceive of any means by which one can escape power- communication? In the next chapter, we will argue that Deleuze himself has not gone far enough in his thinking to answer such questions.

Specifically, in Chapter V, we will invest consideration into the least conceptually developed pockets in Deleuzian philosophy that allow us to engage in thought experiments about what, exactly, a resistance to communication would look like, and why such a resistance would be desirable for anyone who is against the control society. As Deleuze (1992) puts it in the final section of his “Postscript” essay, the ‘program’ section, “What counts is that we are at the beginning of something” (p. 7). In saying this, Deleuze surmises that control will work in the future by ‘substituting’ new procedures of power into the older confined spaces of discipline that have already broken down. In effect, control will ‘progress’ into every conceivable aspect of action,

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thought, and life via ‘dispersion’, wherein power will be function hyper-individually, in micro- transactions and micro-regulations of activity, through the desecration and monetization of critical thinking, according to a predictive, risk-assessment functionality, such that the solidity of the material world melts away.103

It is this very idea of ‘substitution’ that we will carry over into Chapter V, in which we will argue that Deleuzian post-structuralism, as evinced in the “Postscript” essay, runs out of alternatives to resist power-communication. As such, we will substitute Deleuzian post- structuralism with ‘non-philosophy’, which is to what Deleuze and Guattari turn in their last collaboration. More precisely, non-philosophy as a means of thinking ‘about thinking’ provides us with some qualifications that Deleuze (1995) only skims when he posits that when one lives in the control society, that one must inhabit ‘vacuoles of non-communication’ (p. 175) to elude the forces of power. As it were, we will treat ‘non-communication’ as a kind of substitution of communication vis-à-vis power, wherein the efficacy of power—which is indicated by the enunciation of communications, the orientation of movements, and the situation of open spaces within which communications and movements occur—is no longer reproduced, precisely because communication has been weaponized and turned against itself.

103 “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” (Deleuze 1992, p. 7; original emphases). 172

Chapter V:

Sine Qua Non:

Post-Structuralism, Non-Philosophy, & the Limits of Communication

1. Summarizing the Trajectory of Dissertation (So Far)

In Chapter I, we posited that the major problem of the field of Communication Studies is power, precisely, what is the relationship between power and communication? In response to this question, the field has repeatedly tried to define and model the communicative process. One of the earliest attempts at delimiting communication, the Shannon-Weaver transmission model, exemplified the idealization of power vis-à-vis communication. However, what transmission does well in terms of simplifying the communicative process, that communication-as-transmission is inherently linear, it obscures the many other kinds of communications in which the field is invested. Today, we might say that communication is multilinear, multifaceted, and plentiful— social media, actor-networks, infrastructures, and digital technologies are all viable facilitators of communication, things for which transmission alone is insufficient to account. However, even though it is no longer in use as a concrete, empirical instance of communication in action, transmission nevertheless represents fantasies about communication—that it exists, succeeds, is transparent, and effects a response in something or someone to whom we communicate.

In Chapter II, we turned to various instances in Deleuzian post-structuralism to see if there are different explanations of how power operates in conjunction with communication, since within the primarily literature there is an analogous interest in thinking about communication beyond the linearity of transmission. When examining Deleuzian post-structuralism, we found a historical evolution of the relationship between power and communication that extended beyond a

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philosophy of transmission, into inquiries about information and opinion, although these instances were relegated more to essays, interviews, and brief passages in major texts, as opposed to forming a substantive bloc of conceptualization. In his examples of transmission, information, and opinion, what remained persistent in Deleuze’s examination was the association of communication with movement, whereby messages move between senders and receivers, information moves between those who wield power and those who do not, opinions move between members of a community, and communication itself moves throughout an interconnected, globalized society. Towards the end of his philosophy, movement was conceived as both a literal and figurative expression of communication, which found its correlate with power. In this confluence of communication and power, Deleuze located in a new configuration of the lifeworld that he named ‘the control society’.

Chapters III and IV undertook a close reading of Deleuze’s “Postscript of the Societies of

Control” essay, in which the relationship between power and communication eschewed linear explanation that transmission once provided. The concept of ‘the control society’ that Deleuze develops in this essay demonstrates how power and communication work in a complex, heterogeneous fashion, such that they are supplementary to one another, yet inseparable. The

Deleuzian mapping of the phenomenon of control—in its history and logic—provided provocative pathways to think about this confluence of power-communication. In Chapters III and IV, we evaluated how concrete and figurative movements take place within the control society so that we can illuminate how connected power and communication are today. This evaluation of movement within the control society required us to explain several of the specific ideas Deleuze discusses in his “Postscript” essay.

Specifically, in Chapter III, we began to unpack Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay, starting with his history of power, in which he narrated a change in emphasis given power’s relationship to

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space. Borrowing from the work of his colleague, Michel Foucault, Deleuze argued that power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was disciplinary in nature. Precisely, disciplinary societies of that era were focused on confining bodies within circumscribed spaces. As a result, the freedom of movements was restricted to a few behaviours, and, within the exemplary site of power—the prison—movement was hindered altogether. In Deleuze’s reading of Foucauldian philosophy, both in the “Postscript” essay and in his monograph about his philosophical compatriot, we found a rationale for the existence of power, since prison spaces, for example, are inexorably tied to sociological problems of delinquency, criminality, and abnormality that were to be amended, if not solved altogether.

But at the end of his history of power in the “Postscript” essay, we saw an inversion of the rationale of power, which nevertheless maintains its effect. In other words, in the control society, bodies should not be confined, nor movements limited. Instead, in the twentieth century, and more acutely in the twenty-first century, spaces are opened, bodies are liberated, and movements are encouraged. As such, the freedom of movement becomes yet another mechanism to enslave people, since people are compelled into transit to be able to work, think, and live in the world.

More importantly, however, we drew links between the opening of spaces, the encouragement towards movement, and the necessity of communication in control societies. As much as one is compelled to move to enjoy his or her freedom from confinement, one is also thrust into constant communication. The extension of power is supported by the stretching of communication across the entirety of the social field. But Deleuze only qualified how this entrenchment of power- communication takes place by delimiting his focus to contextual circumstances, and specifically the material practices of various historical periods, in which the eventual transition from disciplinary societies into control societies happened.

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In Chapter IV, we continued our close reading of Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay, where we moved from the disciplinary society of the eighteenth and nineteenth century to the control society, in full bloom, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. First, we clearly demarcated how the disciplinary society transforms into the control society by defining the sets of binary concepts that Deleuze extrapolated from Foucault’s thought—molds versus modulations, individuals versus dividuals, signatures versus passwords, masses versus banks, etc. We then considered Deleuze’s expansion of the implementation of control, in which he sought a logic of how and why one moves, especially when movement itself is the perfect example of contemporary existence. This expansion of control was limited to the technological, labour, and economic arenas, in which their historical developments often overlapped, but came to work in synchronicity by the late twentieth century.

More specifically, we saw in the ‘logic’ section of the “Postscript” essay a complementary operation or form of movement that was both macro-historical and micro-social in nature. On one hand, the differences between discipline and control signify a rationale for the emergence of power-communication today that is abstract or virtual in nature—when society shifts from closed spaces to opened ones, from fixed behaviours to unlimited performances, from finite applications to infinite evaluations, and so on. On the other hand, the technological, labour, and economic characteristics of the control society function concretely in the material world. Power- communication only succeeds on the level of consciousness when it is first taken up in the concrete, material realm, as a rendering or recording of the present as it passes into history. In summary, what Deleuze explains in the logic section of the “Postscript” essay is an expression of power that is licensed by real-world communicative acts. This expression of power is primarily contextual and contemporary in nature, because Deleuze is concerned with what will happen to people who will come after his naming of ‘the control society’. Namely, today, how are we

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subordinated to the forces of power? And more importantly, how might we begin resisting forces of power, especially with communication itself?

2. Control-as-Program, or, the Political Limitations of Deleuzian Post-Structuralism

At this point in the dissertation, however, we discover that the answers that Deleuze could possibly provide us are moot. This is because the final section of Deleuze’s “Postscript” essay, when he conceives of a ‘program’ of power, is the least developed, conceptually speaking, especially when compared to what precedes it. The program of control is unlike the history section, which Deleuze organizes around the central conceit of spaces of power in Foucauldian archaeology. Furthermore, the program of control is also unlike the logic section, which Deleuze explains by way of comparing contemporary control practices versus disciplinary techniques, and moreover takes up in multiple, overlapping ways, in terms of technology, labour, and economics.

In the ‘program’ section of his “Postscript” essay, Deleuze does not and cannot provide an argumentative thrust as to where the control society is headed.

However, perhaps naïvely, he still puts hope in the vague idea of ‘resistances’ that will emerge to combat control, but in terms of any program of control, he does not suggest who will take up such a goal, nor how, exactly, they will implement it, especially when power- communication appears to be totalizing in its very openness, flexibility, spontaneity, and contingency. This is especially frustrating, since we have seen throughout the Deleuzian body of work an emerging interest in tying rationales and expressions of power to the growing importance of communicative acts. And yet, Deleuze leaves his reader adrift, unsure how to reconcile the association with power and communication. Do we in fact control communication? Does communication have control over us? Can we mobilize communication against power? Or is communication itself weaponized against us in service of power?

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In asking all this, we can only read Deleuze’s remaining comments quite charitably. At best, in the ‘program’ section of his essay, Deleuze reiterates the centrality of movement to the operation of control when tied to some sort of identification-information card, for example, which we already considered in Chapter III. While the electronic card is a potent example of the convergence of power and communication, especially when thinking about how the spatial rationale of the disciplinary society has transformed into an entirely open operation within the control society, it gives us no clue as to ‘the future’ of power and communication. This is because

Deleuze does not provide any solutions about what we are to do, in the here and now (of the early

1990s when he was writing), about control-as-movement vis-à-vis power-communication.

Instead, Deleuze (1992) merely shifts into remarks about how the control society is a systematization of power, in which each institution/space—the prison, the school, the hospital, and the corporation—signifies “the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination” (p. 7). He repeats how these institutional spaces set about practicing control, and can only surmise that unions, as collective arrangements of people, must reject their ineptitude in the face of this new reality. Deleuze writes, “tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they [unions] be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control?” (p. 7).

This rhetorical questioning on Deleuze’s part is troubling for two reasons. The first reason is because he conflates the ineptitude of unions precisely with the fact that they only exist today because they have adapted and affixed themselves to new situations of power. As such, they lose their persuasiveness as collective enterprises of counter-power, as they were in the era in which disciplinarity and spatiality were key to the rationale of power (from which we derived shorter working days, days off, better working conditions, better living wages, and so on). Yet the fact

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that strikes and work-actions on the part of unions still exist should suggest that unions still maintain a modicum of influence today that they possessed decades ago.104 More pertinent to our concerns, however, as people who have already come after the settling of the Deleuzian control society, are contemporary protest and recognition movements. LGBT Pride, the Arab Spring,

Occupy Wall Street, Idle No More, and other similar socio-political assemblages inhabit and exist today’s spaces, although they are not properly the ‘unions’ for which Deleuze desires. Instead, they take up processes of ‘unionization’ in which the everyday regularity of movement and work are disrupted by walks, marches, parades, sit-ins, and flash-mobs. These disparate groups come together as collectives, often without any consistent set of goals or coherent demands, nor interest in engaging with the organs of institutional government; indeed, the idea of coming together to form collectives is sufficient.

The second reason is that Deleuze does not even hint at what a resistance on the part of unions could be, what it would look like, and how it could be effected. Or, if unions have in fact failed, what else could take their place? If, instead of unions, protest and recognition movements are the collectives that engage in political struggle, for whom do they struggle? While Deleuzian thought lends itself to thinking about effecting social justice today, the turn towards the fringe of the political ‘right wing’ in the United States, the resurgence of fascist parties, and the increase in nationalist sentiment in Europe and North America, for instance, are no less ‘populist’ than their

104 Deleuze’s remarks here are perhaps owed, in part, to his relationship with the events in France in May 1968, when general strikes occurred throughout the country, led by various movements of students and workers that occupied university and factory spaces. Ten years after May 1968, Deleuze (2007) looks back and touches upon for what the event stood, writing, “What counts [about May 1968] is what amounted to a visionary phenomenon, as if a society suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and saw the possibility for something else. It is a collective phenomenon in the form of “Give me the possible, or else I’ll suffocate…” The possible does not pre-exist, it is created by the event. It is a question of life. The event creates a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity (new relations with the body, with time, sexuality, the immediate surroundings, with culture, work…)” (p. 234; added emphases). What Deleuze describes in 1978 presages his conceptualization of the control society approximately fifteen years later, in which we should never be content with what life is, but should always aspire towards what life could be. 179

leftist counterparts. In this vein, Deleuzian concepts are political, but ambivalently so, despite his stated intentions otherwise, because their prescription does not inherently match their application.

Indeed, at the end of the ‘program’ section of the “Postscript” essay, Deleuze can only conclude that control succeeds at managing action, thought, and life, insofar that it completes a process of systematization, in which power is made particular, fragmented, numerous, and perhaps even contradictory. This systematization is unlike the universal, whole, singular, and harmonious sites, respectively, of the disciplinary society. But is this conclusion satisfactory, especially for anyone who reads Deleuzian post-structuralism today? Should we be resigned to this inevitability?

As it were, the lack of political alternatives to control in the late Deleuzian oeuvre suggests a failure of imagination of conceiving of anything that does not have a necessary relationship to the control society as a social structure (nor even to the rhizomatics of the control society as a kind of anti-social structure). While we might want to take seriously the idea that Deleuzian post- structuralism, or at least the popular image of Deleuzian philosophy (Land, 1995), should be forgotten, Deleuze himself does not make this easy. For example, Alexander R. Galloway claims to forget Deleuze, “but only a limited and somewhat perverted interpretation of Deleuze. In fact, there are two Deleuzes, the Deleuze of 1972 and the Deleuze of 1990. The ’72 Deleuze is the thinker of machinic subjectivity and differential systematicity. The ’90 Deleuze is the thinker of control and historical transformation” (Berry & Galloway, 2016, p. 158). It is this second Deleuze who has been examined throughout this dissertation, but at this point, for the rest of Chapter V, we must forget him, too, albeit for different reasons than what Galloway suggests. Specifically, to think of a way out of the control society and its relations of power-communication, it is necessary to ‘move beyond’ Deleuze.

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At the very least, some definite conclusions about the “Postscript” essay vis-à-vis the primary Deleuzian post-structuralist literature can be derived. Overall, there are sketches throughout the primary Deleuzian literature about ideas and concepts of communication that purposefully do not cohere into any sort of identifiable ‘theory of communication’. As such,

Deleuze should be treated as a theorist of anti-communication in relation to Communication

Studies, insofar as communication makes up a specific content within his philosophy to be critiqued, especially when it operates in conjunction with power and phenomena of movement. On the other hand, Deleuze should be treated, despite his stated opinions to the contrary, as a theorist of meta-communication in relation to the field because he does, in fact, discuss communication

‘as communication’, as a problem to which philosophical inquiry must attend.

However, because Deleuze’s statements about communication have been used throughout this dissertation to situate how the control society works as a social structure in which power functions by compelling people to move, we consequently run into the problem of a conceptual- political ‘double-bind’ (Bateson, 2000, pp. 206-212). How does one develop a Deleuzian philosophy of communication that is predicated upon a critique of the control society and the concrete-metaphorical movements that give it its power, albeit without feeding into that same system some new concepts or methods to exact domination upon the minds and bodies of people?

3. From Control to Non-Communication: Stipulating the Laruellean Intervention

For us to answer such a question, we should take Deleuze’s use of the term ‘non- communication’ to be legitimate (1995, p. 175), insofar that it suggests a model for how one resists the control society. In other words, one must escape the rationale and expressions of control by inhabiting or occupying ‘non-spaces’, or vacuoles, in which movement does not take place, nor communication enunciated, and as such, also where power cannot be exercised. This is not to say

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that resistance is futile. Rather, we must conceive of a form of resistance that does not give rise to power, which is to what Foucault alludes as an impossibility in the first volume of The History of

Sexuality (1990, p. 95). Effectively, one must ‘short-circuit’ the effects of the control society so that action, thought, and life can flourish. The double-bind of communication—‘meta- communication or anti-communication?’—upon which the control society relies must be refused.

But how, exactly, does one set about such a sabotage? Throughout the rest of Chapter V, we will reply with non-philosophy, which is invoked in the sense that Deleuze uses it at the point in his career in which he also conceives of the control society.

For example, in only a few instances in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) refer to the idea of ‘non-philosophy’ and the writings of ‘non-philosopher’ François Laruelle

(1937-), to whom they point as someone who is doing intellectual work that is consonant with their philosophical approach to the ‘pedagogy of the concept’. For example, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the ‘nonphilosophical’ is probably closer to the work of thinking of new thought than that of the ‘philosophical’, insofar that it proceeds by the supposition that it has no presuppositions altogether. By this, Deleuze and Guattari mean that Laruelle’s non-philosophy, for their purposes, is experimental, because it refuses ‘to speak’ the same language as philosophy.105 It does not just produce concepts, in other words, but also the very ground or foundation from which one can develop concepts (p. 41).106

105 In other words, Deleuze and Guattari turn to Laruelle precisely to conceive of philosophy differently. In this respect, Laruelle is in good company given the history of twentieth century philosophy. For example, in the analytic tradition, a philosopher like Ludwig Wittgenstein is willing to part ways with philosophy insofar that problems proper to philosophy are basically reducible to differences in linguistic practices, the utility of which can only be considered after the fact when the process of philosophizing, i.e. the rendering of thought into propositions, is rendered useless at best and nonsensical at worst (2001, p. 89). Conversely, in the continental tradition, a thinker like Theodor W. Adorno tries to freeze the conceptual movement of the dialectic, arresting processes of synthesis-as-sublation altogether (when the Enlightenment reached its conceptual-historical fulfillment in the mass eradication of people as evinced by the Nazi concentration camps) (1973, p. 362). 106 On the labour of grounding philosophy, in terms of its relationship to the history of philosophy as well as the site upon which one thinks ‘the new’, cf. Deleuze, 2015. 182

Given their interest in Laruellean non-philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari seem anxious as philosophers, as if they wish to be something else entirely. They explain this unease, once again using the metaphor of animal life as a condition of human life as well. “The agony of a rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought,” they write, “not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man [sic] and animal in which something of one passes into the other. This is the constitutive relationship of philosophy with nonphilosophy” (p. 109; added emphases). Non- philosophy appears to be the conceptual ‘outside’ to philosophy in which movement occurs reciprocally or equally, that effects change in the two points of exchange, but in such a way where power is not putting force into relation with other forces. If there is no effect of power upon someone or something else in the non-philosophical process of thinking, then no form of power can be exercised as such.

This neutralization of power can be considered another way. For instance, non-philosophy, given how Deleuze and Guattari speak of it, is the means for one to introduce a small amount of disorder, chance, and randomness into thinking, to ‘get out’, in other words, of our own heads when we try to think, such that we can be exposed to ‘chaos’.107 If there is too much chaos, philosophy degrades into entropy; if there is too little chaos, philosophy breaks down into the rote repetition of doxa, or opinion-as-communication. From this configuration of philosophy qua chaos, they state the Laruellean connection most plainly, saying that “Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience” (p. 218; emphases removed). The use of the prefix ‘non’ in

‘non-philosophy’ can be understood as a situating of disciplines; non-philosophy, non-art, and

107 “Philosophy can thus be recast in terms of an ethics of chaos, a particular way of living with chaos—and against the sterile clichés of opinion (doxa)—by creating conceptual forms capable of sustaining the infinite speed of chaos whilst not succumbing to the stupidity, thoughtlessness or folly of the indeterminate” (Parr, 2005, pp. 43-44). 183

non-science are not the preconditions of philosophy, art, and science, but as those performances of thinking that resolutely refuse to be folded into these knowledge paradigms (Seigworth, 2014, pp. 109, 115-116). As such, Deleuze’s specific invocation of ‘non-communication’ should be treated similarly, namely, as a form of communication that obstinately will not allow itself to become any form, content, or expression of movement that secures the control society in body, mind, and soul.

We can conclude that non-communication should be the culmination of Deleuze’s suppositions about communication vis-à-vis control that has been elaborated throughout this dissertation, which here proceeded by way of an inspired reading of his limited comments about anti-communication and meta-communication. Starting from the Deleuzian post-structuralist position, one can posit that non-communication works alongside communication to attempt the same procedure that one will find in Laruellean non-philosophy: to think about communication, if not ‘to communicate’, without reproducing it or its very action/practice, to effectively not ‘not communicate’. The problem, then, can be posed not so much as ‘what is communication?’, which has been a perennial problem with respect to the dialogical, dialectical tensions of Communication

Studies (Craig, 1999), but rather ‘to what end is communication oriented?’ Possible answers include success, transparency, consensus, and action, undoubtedly, but also the very necessity of communication to articulate these ideas about the world and how people are to live together ‘in common’.

Yet despite being another contemporaneous thinker to Deleuze, Laruelle’s work in non- philosophy in recent years has slowly received attention within English-speaking continental philosophy circles as translations of primary texts become more readily available (2010a, 2010b,

2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013, 2015) and secondary commentaries elucidate his oeuvre (Brassier,

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2003a, 2010; Mullarkey, 2006; Galloway, 2010b, 2012, 2014; Bryant, Srnick, & Harman, 2011;

James, 2012; Mullarkey & Smith 2012; Gangle, 2013; Galloway, Thacker, & Wark 2014;

Kolozova, 2014). Most significant to the purposes of the remainder of this chapter, however, is a short essay by Laruelle, “The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and

Communication” (2010c), which is drawn upon to explain how, exactly, non-communication could work (Theophanidis, 2014). Ironically, in this essay Laruelle is even more caustic towards the idea of communication than Deleuze has been. As such, because Laruellean non-philosophy is pertinent to the elucidation of a Deleuzian conception of ‘non-communication’, it might appear that communication and philosophy are destroyed in the same move. However, this is not the case.

Laruellean non-philosophy is not used here vis-à-vis Deleuzian post-structuralism simply to negate philosophy, but to account for the possibility of thinking that avoids reproducing philosophical discourse simply with a new veneer.108 The goal of this chapter is to repeat such an approach in its rendering of non-communication qua communication. Indeed, Laruellean scholars already provide a schema to affirm topics of analysis without reproducing them, in which they see a relationship between non-philosophy and philosophy that is not unlike how non-Euclidean geometry is related to Euclidean geometry or non-Newtonian physics to Newtonian physics

(Mullarkey, 2012, p. 148). For one to take flight from philosophy, then, as Deleuze and Guattari try, one must investigate thinking from the non-philosophical position. Likewise, to escape the realities of the concept of the control society, we must proceed first by contextualizing how a non-

108 Nor does non-communication, as it is discussed throughout this chapter, follow from Lyotard’s idea of a ‘non- conceptual communication’ (1991), which is something he ties specifically to art and aesthetics. Certainly, what Lyotard describes as a ‘gift’ of the experience of feeling in a work of art to which one can only respond passively, by accepting the gift when given, recalls Deleuze’s reflex of art-as-resistance against the effects of opinion-as-control. Together, Lyotard and Deleuze are working against the mediation of sensation in representation, which also signifies communication. However, in the Laruellean idiom, Lyotard’s approach is still too philosophical, for he separates art and aesthetics, in which the former exists as a reflection of the latter, i.e. the aesthetics of art, and takes precedence in philosophical thinking, i.e. aesthetics over art. Laruelle, contrariwise, wants to democratize art, instead locating an aesthetics within art, in other words, an artistic aesthetics. Cf. Laruelle, 2012b, pp. 3-10. 185

communication is possible, having already exhausted Deleuzian post-structuralism, but then by connecting that intellectual framework to the one that Laruellean non-philosophy provides. A non- communication thus tries to see and perceive communication from a parallax point-of-view.109

4. Refining the Laruellean Intervention of Non-Philosophy

Key to the argument in favour of non-communication is what Laruelle generally says about his non-philosophical project. Perhaps what is most important to non-philosophy is the withdrawal from ‘the philosophical decision’. Specifically, in his writings Laruelle withdraws from the dilemma of trying to capture thinking and knowing in the same measure, by refusing to acknowledge the prelapsarian moment of the tearing of thought from the world, the world from thought, which he accuses philosophy of doing. The world and its numerous phenomena, as it were, do not exist for philosophical reflection, which is what, according to Laruelle, philosophy presumes when it aspires to thinking. Philosophy creates divisions and binary conceptual relationships when it attempts to explain itself when it happens. Relationships like identity and difference, being and becoming, essence and existence, theory and practice, appearance and depth, and so on, are all stagings of the philosophical decision, in which new concepts are produced, but that can never explain the moment of thought itself.110 Philosophy, in short, is a never-ending

109 “[A]fter the exhaustion of the emancipatory politics which culminated in 1989, (whatever remained of) the Left was split between “cautious reformism and post-revolutionary despair.” We have, on the one side, the diversity of pragmatic-realist liberals in pursuit of “a reasonable chance of peaceful coexistence and mutual respect,” talking about dialogue, communication, recognition of otherness, and so on—the whole gang of usual suspects, from Habermas to Rorty—and, on the other side, those who still cling to some notion of radical Change, but whose Messianism is caught up in the self-defeating vicious circle of self-postponing, of a permanent “to-come,” which displays a “fundamental obscurity or paralysis—thought confronted by situations in which it is impossible to react (Deleuze), by demands that cannot be met (Levinas), needs that can never be reconciled (Lyotard), promises that can never be kept (Derrida)” (Žižek, 2006, p. 321). 110 “Philosophy posits the event as a real in itself but in reality it is the effect of a philosophical decision, inscribed within the order of possibilities proffered by philosophy, with regard to which it constitutes the most extreme form as well as the highest realization. If the event focuses within its apparently ineffable simplicity the entire structure of that which I call the philosophical Decision along with its double-articulation, then inversely that Decision is itself the proto-event, the self-positing of the event, and hence the Event which contains its own reason: ‘the philosophy or world-Event’. It then becomes necessary to maintain simultaneously, on the one hand that the philosophies of the event, insofar as they are manifold and opposing philosophies, particular combinations of meta and epekeina, are not 186

genealogy, because it always ends up reproducing itself, precisely in the attempt to get out of itself altogether. For Laruelle, this is a foolish enterprise. As Ray Brassier (2003b) puts it, “The point,

Laruelle insists, is not to get out of philosophy but to realise that you were never in it in the first place; to liberate yourself from the intrinsically philosophical hallucination that you need to be liberated from philosophy” (p. 171). In effect, Laruellean non-philosophy thus tries to think alongside philosophy without reproducing it. Withdrawal from the philosophical decision is but the first conceptual move that Laruelle makes.

However, we have already seen such a philosophical decision at play in Deleuzian post- structuralism. In Chapter II, for example, we have seen that Deleuze conceives of communication antagonistically vis-à-vis philosophy, in which he privileges one concept over the other.

Stammering, crying, and silence are all better than transmission; artistic expression is better than information; and concept-creation is better than opinion-sharing. Furthermore, while Deleuze and

Guattari are conciliatory towards Laruelle in their association of non-philosophy with chaos, as the precondition for which thinking can begin, this gesture is not reciprocated by Laruelle. Indeed, despite their claims otherwise, Laruelle reads Deleuze and Guattari’s version of philosophy (as concept-creation) as being entirely indebted to a communicative impulse (Laruelle, 2012a, p.

40).111 Although Deleuze and Guattari claim to speak to an immanent form of philosophy that is defined by the creation of a ground upon which concepts can be built and with which they can be

‘events’, there being nothing older than the philosophy which encompasses them; and on the other hand, that philosophy, which is not particular, is the only event or the essence, the ‘eventality’ of the event, there being nothing more emergent, more exceptional and singular than philosophy” (Laruelle, 2000, p. 178). 111 “By simply mocking the excesses of the ‘communicational’ ethos, as Deleuze and Guattari do, one risks appearing genuinely naïve in espousing the rights of philosophical naïveté or philosophical faith. Philosophy has never been a ‘Sermon on the Mount’ promising the ‘Beatitudes of thought’ to idiots. It would at least be wise to recall that the philosopher who passes for the paragon of dogmatism is also the one who inscribes communication and the epistolary ‘relation’ into the essence of being. But perhaps the example of Leibniz shows that his concept and practice of communication are themselves dogmatic and destroy or reify themselves, as witnessed by his own philosophy’s overall failure to communicate itself? Is this very paradox, now inverted, not the one that affect’s Deleuze’s philosophy, much communicated but little understood, and still less utilized?” (Laruelle 2012a, p. 40). 187

experimented, this is only because they transcend the communicative realm altogether. In other words, the choice that Deleuze and Guattari present—‘communication or philosophy?’—is, in

Laruellean terms, a false one, since one should not desire to engage in such a choice at all. As such,

Laruelle lambasts Deleuzian philosophy for being ‘stillborn’ (2012a, p. 72) and having the temerity to suggest that it is ‘beyond’ communication when it is not even ‘above’ it.112

The second major move at work in Laruellean non-philosophy is that it claims that it is not a new form or version of philosophy, nor is it reducible to philosophical thinking. Rather, as

Laruelle describes it, non-philosophy uses philosophy as the material stuff to think the Real or to think alongside the Real, while being contingent, heterogeneous, and other vis-à-vis philosophy.

As he conceives of it, non-philosophy is “the manner of thinking that does not know a priori what it is to think or to think the One [which is another name for the Real]. It no longer possesses an idea of science, or an idea of the idea. Its only project is to think the One, and consequently, all it has, alongside the One, are the data of philosophy, now available as material” (2012a, p. 67). ‘The

Real’ can be understood here to be that which is not, has not, and cannot be thought in philosophy, a kind of un-thought. “You have to start from the real,” Laruelle writes, “otherwise you’ll never get to it” (2012a, p. 91).113 If philosophy is always aiming at the unthought, it will never arrive at its destination, since what was once unthought becomes another instance of the philosophical in

112 “Nothing of philosophy or of philosophical understanding is foreign to [Deleuze]—he has invested in it with an alacrity that is disconcerting—and yet he seems not to have heard the news so unsensational that no philosophical ‘communication’, nor even the critique of non-philosophical communication, has managed to transmit it to him, which is the fact that philosophy can be claimed to be consummated in joy or jouissance, rather than perishing of nihilist inanition, as is the case for its adversaries, because it is stillborn, born-as-dead, a mere allusion to life…” (Laruelle 2012a, 72). 113 Laruelle’s invocation of ‘the Real’ recalls a similar notion in the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. While conceptually similar with respect to unthinkability, if not unrepresentability, Lacan’s Real is engaged from a philosophical position that attempts to capture the Real through Imaginary (e.g. visual) and Symbolic (e.g. linguistic) orders insofar as the philosophical position is legitimated (or re-legitimated). Žižek (2004a) teases out various iterations of the Lacanian Real by dint of Alain Badiou’s philosophy that are, for our purposes, politically closer to Laruelle’s non-philosophical project than Lacan’s philosophical project. 188

action (because of the philosophical decision); non-philosophy, however, neither starts nor ends at the unthought, since it has always been there, and has no desire to aim at the arena in which philosophy dramatizes its decisions that try to represent thought.

The third major move of non-philosophy is that it works to be incomprehensible, at least, philosophically speaking. Non-philosophy will never partake in the same discourse of philosophy.

Of course, the non-philosophical position entails certain risks, especially for any researchers who wants to make their work understandable to their readers. Relatedly, the non-philosophical perspective on language is provocative insofar that it does not accept normative conceptualizations, which might be taken for granted as ontological or epistemological givens within a discipline or field. For instance, Katerina Kolozova (2014), when elaborating on her use of non-philosophy to challenge the presuppositions of post-structuralist feminist theory arrayed against any idea of a universalist subjectivity, describes why one might have concerns about non- philosophy. She writes,

I am aware that the act of interrogating will itself be—to a certain consciously

established extent—irresponsible, insofar as it abandons the stance of scholastic

“responsibility” by striving to re-create a naïve state of wonder. The goal is not to

attain definitive and irrefutable solutions, but merely to propose a few stimulating

examples of questioning. (p. 15; added emphasis)

Kolozova’s remarks about non-philosophy might be taken as the presupposition of the reality of not having any presuppositions whatsoever—that it is not possible to think or know beforehand what it is and what it means ‘to think’ or ‘to know’ altogether (to affirm or deny a conceptual construction). As much as one can use post-structuralist philosophy to affirm heterogeneities, to multiply positions of enunciation, to de-essentialize identities, and to destabilize binary categories,

189

for example, one bumps into the fact that these positions become the new norm of a given mode of thinking, a problem which one cannot solve by adding more post-structuralism to the mix. As such, non-philosophy is not just philosophically incomprehensible, but engages in a ‘heresy’ of thinking (Laruelle, 2010a, pp. 35-36; Smith, 2014), like suggesting that there is, in fact, a universalist subject (or that thinking should begin again from such a supposition), given

Kolozova’s example, when the post-structuralist maneuver has historicized, deconstructed, and marginalized such an idea altogether.

To summarize, non-philosophy first withdraws from the philosophical decision, in which philosophy infinitely divides itself to try to represent its own processes of thought. Secondly, non- philosophy proceeds by trying not to produce the philosophical paradigm. It does this by assuming that it already is engaging in unthought (or the Real), whereas philosophy aspires to the Real but always fails to achieve it. As such, philosophy is but the material to be used by non-philosophy, and not non-philosophy’s outcome. Third, non-philosophy tries to be philosophically incomprehensible by refusing to engage with the discourse and language of philosophy. It purposefully does not ‘speak’ in the same way that philosophy does. This includes non-philosophy rejecting the idea that it has any ontological and epistemological assumptions (about Being,

Difference, Truth, etc.) whatsoever. Relatedly, non-philosophy often engages in acts of heresy because it does not participate in the common understandings of what constitutes philosophy (or any other avenue of academic inquiry).

As such, the conception of non-communication to be discussed below, which we have already introduced via Deleuzian post-structuralism, might seem entirely alien and otherworldly for two reasons. First, Laruelle’s critique of communication does not trade in correlationism, the relationship between thinking and being as understood in human terms, namely, a thinking which

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cannot be thought of independently of human existence, nor an existence that cannot be thought of independently of human thought (Meillassoux, 2009).114 Secondly, non-communication is articulated as being enunciated by and meant for no one. Both these factors appear antithetical to the circumstance of the control society that has been discussed throughout this dissertation, since power is entirely a human phenomenon, and it is furthermore practiced both by human agents and via human-created mechanisms. Of what use, then, would non-communication be to a control society, especially if it exists for no one and is not enunciated by anyone in particular? However, we turn to Laruelle’s critique of communication to underscore the fact that communication cannot be separated from the exigencies of power. So, if we were to bracket power, by conceiving of something entirely heterogeneous to communication, what would become of communication itself? In effect, we transition from Deleuzian post-structuralism to Laruellean non-philosophy to posit a ‘communication degree zero’, when we can construct of a formula of ‘communication minus power’, which within the parameters of the control society is otherwise impossible.

5. Communication & Non-Communication: On Hermes & the Idea of the Secret

In the short essay, “The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and

Communication” (2010c), we can see non-philosophy in action, although Laruelle himself does not go so far to suggest that he is conceiving of non-communication per se. In this essay, Laruelle claims that communication, as it is normatively understood, is a “generalized hermeneutics”

114 ‘Correlationism’ is a term coined by Quentin Meillassoux (2009), who explains that the relation of thinking qua being and being qua thinking, and the correlation between thinking without being and being without thinking (both of which are, in human terms, impossible), constitute a kind of ‘circle’. Though Meillassoux does not put his ideas of correlationism in these terms, despite his references to Martin Heidegger, what he describes is a kind of hermeneutics of Being. Even attempts to break this correlationist-hermeneutic circle, as he identifies with Deleuze’s turn towards the non-human or the objectile (as opposed to the objective, as apprehended from a subjective, i.e. human, perspective), fail, for their attempts at separation from correlationism by necessity posit its very existence to almost a transcendental principle (p. 37). In effect, in his withdrawal from philosophical decision-making, Laruelle also does not see the choice of ‘both’ as a viable enterprise since an inequality exists between the two terms of a philosophical dyad. 191

(2010c, p. 19) in the etymological sense of ‘Hermes’, the messenger of the Greek pantheon of gods who moves between the mythic and mortal realms. In this appearance of generalized hermeneutics,

Laruelle finds a repetition of the philosophical decision, in which truth is separated from its very communication (p. 19).115 Communication, in this sense, is but a representation of truth, philosophically speaking. However, for philosophy to grasp this decision, in which truth and communication are separated, Laruelle adds, more decisions are made, and consequently more binary relationships are produced. On one hand, truth requires meaning, but also postulates that there really exists a condition of truth altogether to which meaning is given. In short, truth divides into meaning and presence. On the other hand, communication is also split. Communication, too, requires meaning, but this meaning can only exist in relation to the interpretation that gives it shape. In sum, communication divides into meaning and interpretation.

As a result, truth, communication, meaning, presence, and interpretation, which together form the philosophical hermeneutic position, all call into question the very constitution of being vis-à-vis presence, especially when one asks, ‘what is communication?’ (if we assume that communication truly exists). How exactly? Laruelle writes, “The conflict between Being and

Dasein, between truth and the meaning of being is itself one of the modalities of a more general conflict, between the secret—the supposed secret—and logos” (2010c, p. 20; original emphasis).

115 On the concept of ‘truth’, Laruelle is concerned with the fact that truth cannot exist unto itself. Truth is inseparable from its representation ‘as truth’. As such, philosophy moves to a higher level of representation to conceive of ‘the truth of truth’, since the idea of ‘truth as truth’ is already suspect because it is representational (Gangle, 2013, p. 37). This higher-level move demonstrates the philosophical decision, in which the world and its numerous phenomena are divided into materials that exist solely for philosophical reflection. What is problematic for Laruelle, which his critique of communication draws out, is how truth vis-à-vis representation becomes conflated with philosophical concepts like ‘being’ and ‘presence’. As Ian James (2014) writes, “philosophy poses ‘being’ or existence on the one hand and its representation in concepts or categories on the other, and it then constructs, or legislates for, the equivalence, identity, or unity of these in the universality of philosophical truths and foundations. Philosophy thus positions itself as the unifying transcendent principle which governs the original division or opposition. In this way it also founds its own authority (in a very circular manner, Laruelle argues) at the very same moment that it founds the ‘truth’ of being and existence” (p. 130). 192

The secret, by which Laruelle means ‘the essence of truth’, and logos, which Laruelle understands in relation to the Derridean, deconstructionist critique of logocentrism (2014), form a relationship in which one perpetually begets the other when one communicates.116 In the language of Laruelle’s essay, we can say that if everyone knows a secret, then it no longer exists; there always must be a remainder, or someone ‘not in the know’, for a secret to be shared and, more importantly, to have power. In other words, one cannot escape the hermeneutic circle, or, one cannot effectively break the cycle of philosophy or communication. Being-as-presence is questioned because philosophy is unable to account for or solve the difference that is the moment of the enunciation of truth in words or speech.

It is from this situation where Laruelle attempts to conceive of a new Hermes predicated upon a different hermeneutics, which he calls a ‘hermeto-logy’, in which logos is no longer primary vis-à-vis truth. For Laruelle, hermeto-logy, as a kind of non-communication, does not require meaning or interpretation to exist and function. He writes, “Truth as secret exists autonomously prior to the horizontality of appearance. The secret enjoys an absolute precedence over interpretation; it is itself the Uninterpretable from which an interpretation emerges. It is the invisible that has never been visible because it is known from the outset to be invisible” (2010c, p. 20; second and third emphases added). Laruelle adds, “the secret is the strictly unreflected upon form of truth that, given to itself, gives nothing of itself and receives nothing of itself except the modality in which it is given” (2010c, p. 20; added emphases). Non-communication thus cannot

‘speak’ in properly communicative terms, nor is it ‘perceivable’ within the parameters of

116 Said another way, deconstructionist post-structuralism is limited to the undecidability of ‘either/or’ decision- making as a proposition of binarism within Western philosophy. As mentioned above, Deleuzian post-structuralism, by way of the rhizome, instead obliterates binarism by working on the level of the conjunctive—‘and, and, and’. Laruellean non-philosophy, however, responds to binarism by refusing undecidability and conjunction altogether, instead proclaiming its interest in ‘neither’. 193

communicative acts; it cannot be incorporated into nor synthesized within the communicative realm, but instead lives ‘outside’, circulating around it like an irritating gadfly. This second version of Hermes that Laruelle desires is one who does not, cannot, and will not disclose truth.

As it is posited here, non-communication is, then, quite literally, hermetically sealed in its existence ‘outside’ of communication. It is not tainted by the production of meanings and interpretations, but is instead closed off, or rather exchanges within itself—if it must be, at some level, communication, it is only such when it withdraws from making the philosophical decision of splitting truth from the world.117 If we connect Laruelle’s discussion of communication to the

Deleuzian version of non-communication that must be undertaken to resist control, we find a concern about production-as-exchange as the paradigm of contemporary existence, upon which both politics (in Deleuze’s critique) and thinking (in Laruelle’s complaint) rely. As Alexander R.

Galloway (2014) explains, “There is no philosophy that is not too a philosophy of exchange. There is no metaphysical arrangement that is not too a concourse of convertibility. There is no structure of thought that is not too a structure of relation. There is no phenomenology that is not too an orientation within a world” (p. 117). We can infer a similar concern within the Deleuzian idiom, in which very communicative statement made within the control society reproduces the overall rationale of power that messages are meant to be sent and shared with others.118

117 Mullarkey and Smith (2012) identify in Laruellean non-philosophy vis-à-vis philosophy the same gesture referenced here. They write, “Each method of philosophical thought, because it hopes to represent the whole exclusively, misses its target in part, because it is partial (just one method). Yet this is not to say that each and every philosophy misses it entirely. The Real is indifferent to, or resists, each attempt at representing it, because every thought (philosophical or non-philosophical) is already a part of it (and how can a part be, that is, re-present, the whole?)” (p. 4; original emphases). In communicative-linguistic terms, non-philosophy proceeds as if one can imagine synecdoche which is not related to metaphor and metonymy. It is paradoxical, para-doxa, insofar as it is not reducible to episteme. Paradox, in the Laruellean formulation, is preferable in the Deleuzian sense to that of doxa-as-orthodoxy, or Habermasian opinion. Cf. Gangle, 2013, p. 69 on the relevance of doxa over episteme in Laruellean terms. 118 Even though Deleuze and Guattari are guilty, in Laruellean terms, of participating in the same idea of exchange when the argue that non-philosophy is a ‘zone of exchange’, which would otherwise be improper to the non- philosophical project. 194

Like Deleuze, Laruelle in his “Hermes” essay expresses anxiety about communicative exchange, albeit when it functions in service of philosophical reproduction itself. The secret, the essence of truth, or specifically communication-as-hermeneutics, is replete with exchange, namely as a meta-communication; truth, then, is disclosed, as a secret, via communication, which discloses the secret of the secret, in which power is exerted. In other words, the process of communication exists to reproduce itself by capturing new truths within the realm of the representable. As much as the truth can never be wholly understood or thought, the secret is never, then, fully revealed, and as such truth and the secret are continuously communicated as much as communication occurs symptomatically ad infinitum.119 This form of communication, if not philosophy as well, has been hermeneutic from the start in its meta-production, which is to suggest that hermeneutics is always already also cybernetic, replete with feedback loops (Virilio, 2012, p. 82) that refine and reproduce the overall circuit of power and its various structures.

Ultimately, what Laruellean non-philosophy takes as its major problem with communication-as-hermeneutics, which is made up of the differences between meaning and interpretation (on the level of content) and truth and its very communication (on the level of form), is that the latter is unable to grasp its very differentiation at the moment of decision. Instead, communication-as-hermeneutics is only the reproduction of decisions-scissions-divisions, be it either truth or communication, meaning or presence, meaning or interpretation, and so on, unlike

119 Laruelle (2010c) writes, “One never discloses the secret, its inalienable essence: one only discloses its disclosure, a disclosure which gives itself up. This is the principle of a radical, dualist critique, of all thought that might present itself as phenomenology. There is no point in restoring hermeneutics or phenomenology to their conditions of possibility, to aletheia for example. These are but the surface effects of the system of hermeto-logical Difference. The essence of the secret knows nothing of the play of veiling and unveiling, of the structure of difference in general. It is the One [i.e. the Real], understood in an absolutely immanent and finite way; it excludes the play of Being and play in general” (p. 21). 195

the hermeto-logy of non-communication.120As such, communication-as-hermeneutics here bears a resemblance to other theories of communication as exchange and its reproduction as a process.

For example, Laruelle considers the philosophy of ur-concepts—like Being (after

Heideggerian ontology) or Difference (after Derridean deconstruction)—to be the discourse of transmission, such that they are no different than the postal delivery service. In his complaint about communication, which is less charitable than what is evidenced in Deleuzian post-structuralism, there is an echo of Shannon and Weaver’s sender-receiver model of communication. Laruelle chides, “Nearly all philosophers were the mailmen [sic] of truth, and they diverted the truth for reasons less to do with the secret [than] with authoritarian censure. Meaning, always more meaning! Information, always more information!” (2010c, p. 22).121 Contra communication,

Eugene Thacker finds in Laruelle’s work on communication an almost heretical, if not

‘excommunicated’, position. In the Laruellean formulation, then, the idea that everything can be communicated, to then be mediated, is even more of a problem, if not more offensive, than the idea that everything can (and should) be philosophized, against which Laruelle already rails

(Galloway, Thacker, & Wark, 2014, pp. 124-125).

120 Laruelle (2010c) continues, “The secret does not need communication in order to be what it is, to be known and to be an “object” of a rigorous science. But communication needs the secret in order to be what it is. Between the secret and communication there only exist determinative relationships that are unilateral, asymmetrical, or irreversible. The secret, being radically finite, has its own mode of communication: through another secret, on the one hand; on the other hand, insofar as the secret, in its radical finitude, determines the communicated games in the last instance. This determination is the only way in which the secret can be communicated to the World and act on the networks of communication without passing through them or borrowing their channels” (p. 21). 121 Even someone like Derrida is a target of Laruelle’s ire, since the concept of difference-as-différance in Derrida’s work, for example, commits the same philosophical errors of which Laruelle is critical, despite the deconstructive flavour of undecidability. Briankle Chang (1999) makes this kind of decision-scission-division explicit in Derrida’s work, though the Derridean philosophical position is conciliatory towards the very ideas against which Laruelle rallies, despite sharing the same idiom of transmission as Laruelle. Chang writes, “[T]he post, the envoi, represents the principle of (tele-)communication as the principle of positionality and identity of both the message and the addresser/addressee. Within any network of exchange, the addresser and the addressee must be prepositioned, and their respective prepositionings are then joined together by the dispatch that circulates teleologically within the network” (p. 215; original emphasis). 196

Near the end of his “Hermes” essay, Laruelle lays bare his interest in communication-as- hermeneutics. “If there is any urgency” to the non-philosophical project, hermeto-logy included, he writes, “it is not to try to enhance dialogue and the transparency of communication” (2010c, p. 22; emphasis added). Non-philosophy is essentially disinterested in the prospect of participation.

Instead, it refuses and withdraws from any engagement in any reproduction of the philosophical.

Analogously, we can say that non-communication, as Laruelle articulates it as another part of the overall mission statement of the non-philosophical position, is purposefully inoperative (Nancy,

1991; Agamben, 1993), unworkable (Galloway, 2010a), and a failure (Halberstam, 2011).

However, this should not be read as something undesirable or negative. Rather, non- communication does not work to produce communication, if, in philosophical-communicative terms, ‘communication’ is understood as a positive, i.e. existent, concept.122 It refuses and withdraws from the choice of participation, to participate or to not participate, altogether. This is perhaps the non-philosophical gesture par excellence, in which the success of communication is no longer deemed valuable to participation in socio-political life. Non-communication begins precisely because it moves way from the idea that of the corrections of miscommunications should be corrected and that failures of communication should be avoided. It is here in which we can locate the ‘vacuole of noncommunication’ for which Deleuze desires as an alternative to the communicative paradigm of the control society.

Of course, in his takedown of communication-as-hermeneutics, Laruelle ends up making the very same philosophical decision for which he chastises others. Namely, communication, in

122 Cf. Ahmed, 2006, pp. 65-107 on how discourses about the orientation of subjects towards objects is queer or can be queered relates to discourses about the orientation of sexuality towards non-normative sexualities, like asexuality, which is also queer or can also be queered. Non-communication and non-philosophy thus resist a heterosexological explanation, i.e. re/production, insofar that communication is oriented towards the production of something (pragmatic action, subjectivation, cybernetic regulation, etc.) as much as philosophy is oriented towards something (in Deleuzian terms, concept creation). 197

which “the real is communicational, the communicational is real” (Laruelle 2010c, p. 22), at least in philosophical terms, cannot serve as the raw conceptual material for a non-communication, for

Laruelle himself never identifies a non-communication as such. Instead, hermeto-logy stands in for non-communication, albeit the ‘correct’ non-communication, which is, following the

Laruellean train of thought, communication without any positive value, or no ‘communication’ whatsoever. Laruellean non-communication instead signifies the foreclosure of communication, any and every version of it, altogether: no openness; no exchange; no humanity; no life; no dialogue; no transparency; for better or for worse, noli me tangere—'touch me not’.123 In short,

Laruelle’s non-philosophy, when used to experiment within communication, fails spectacularly, at least in philosophical, if not communicative, terms. Yet it is this non-philosophical experiment, by way of Deleuzian post-structuralism, that is the utmost limit into which we crash to conceive of avenues of escape from the control society. Nevertheless, it is necessary to provide an example to demonstrate the validity and viability of non-communication that does not reproduce the effects of power-communication that determine the permitted movements within control societies.

6. Conclusion: Excursus—On Non-Communication & Depression

To better illustrate the viability of non-communication as a response to the control society, we should turn to an example. Namely, a topic like depression allows us to consider how Deleuzian post-structuralism and Laruellean non-philosophy can be joined. In such a relation, depression can be treated most obviously as an actual state of being of one who lives in a control society, but also as a metaphor of how one resists the compulsory dimension of movement, which, as discussed in

Chapters III and IV, otherwise gives rise to the solidification of power-communication as a mechanism to regulate and modulate how one behaves, acts, thinks, and exists. In saying this, the

123 On the relationship between culture, cultivation, sterility-fertility, production, reproduction, contact, and the risks of contamination, cf. Nancy, 2008, p. 45. 198

persistence of depression as a phenomenon within the social world is not explained here by way of biology, neurology, or psychology. Certainly, the overlapping complexities of genetic preconditions, brain plasticity, and childhood development are all possible causations of the emergence of the depressive state of being, which are highly persuasive answers to the question

‘why, exactly, are people depressed?’ (Mitchell, 2009, pp. 4-10). Indeed, it is difficult to separate the existence of depressive states of being from their various medicalizations or pathologies.124

Additionally, we can interpret the phenomenon of depression analogously vis-à-vis the material, economic conditions of modern society. For example, the phenomenon of anomie has been interpreted in relation to the changing social conditions of modernity, be it along the lines of the dissolution of social-organizational solidarity that divided labour relations (Durkheim, 1997) or according to society’s inability to properly regulate the desires of the individual such that one suicides oneself (Durkheim, 1979). Similarly, in Marxist theory, alienation and reification are but two concepts in which the associations between people in the modern era begin to fray. In the case of the former, people are experientially removed or distanced from the objects they produce, the process of their labour in which they produce things, from themselves since they can only exist mechanistically to serve the capitalist schema of production, and from each other in ways that blunts the experience of being human and living in common ‘as humans’ (Marx, 1959). In the case of the latter, social relations between people are objectified, especially when they are determined vis-à-vis commodities and the overall commodification of labour processes (Lukács, 1971). These examples—anomie, alienation, and reification—point to how the logic of production, especially when tied to industrialization and capitalism, became the pulse and the motor of determining

124 Here we might try to dislocate depression from other phenomena that are etiologically adjacent, like self-harm or suicide, for example. This dislocation will be clarified below in terms of the political ramifications of our inquiry about depression mentioned here. 199

commonality within society, despite that the idea of community itself dissolved, and transformed into something else (biopolitical society, mass culture, etc.). In which case, we can read depression as a loosening of the social ties that bind, when one cannot feel that one belongs to oneself and vis-à-vis others.

Depression also has a relationship to a kind of sociological hygiene, in which one, presumably, should not want to be depressed. It is not enough to treat economic conditions as potential causal factors for depression; one must be made ‘responsible’ for one’s mental, emotional, physical, and even biological well-being (Rose, 2001). Today, the fetishization of ‘self- care’ (Kisner, 2017) obfuscates the underlying precarity of living, which itself has become normalized as ‘resilience’ (Evans & Reid, 2014). The popularity and mediation of self-care techniques are thus the individuations of the processes of power, which previously took on the character of the confessional.125 One confesses to being depressed—to a counsellor, a psychiatrist, a self-help guru—precisely to take flight from that feeling. Moreover, one displays or advertises one’s techniques of self-care to demonstrate how and why one would not want to be depressed— to live better, to eat healthier, to be more active, and so on. In other words, one cannot afford to be depressed, since this would entail not being a productive member of society (when the idea of

‘being-productive’ itself maps onto a rubric of having a partner, children, a career, a means of transportation, some sort of property, etc.). More directly, in relation to the control society, one

125 “[T]he confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have singularly become a confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relationships, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses—or is forced to confess. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body. […] Western man [sic] has become a confessing animal” (Foucault, 1990, p. 59). 200

cannot refuse to move, like when one is depressed, since being at rest means that one is unproductive. Furthermore, one cannot refuse to engage in communicative acts, let alone when one is depressed, because it is perceived to be abnormal—to not use the Internet, to not have a smartphone, or to not have some sort of social media account—in which one exists at a remove from the idea of ‘the social’. To be depressed, to refuse to move, and to not participate in communication, sometimes all at the same time, means that one is ‘disorderly’, which threatens the regularity of operations with which power flows and the open organization through which power moves throughout the control society.

However, what if we were to push against the very idea that depression needs to be thought of as a disorder? Instead, what if it were a valid expression of one’s reality vis-à-vis the world?

And, analogously, what if non-communication were conceived not as a miscommunication or a failure of properly working communication, but as something else entirely? As such, non- communication is also not invoked here in relation to depression as an inability of communication, which, for example, could be explained by neurodevelopmental phenomena like autism. Instead, we can begin to explore depression as a political response to the reach of the control society by first taking as axiomatic the idea that happiness is constitutive of productivity, whereas depression is indicative of unproductiveness. For purposes of the control society, this axiomatic means that power-communication cannot take hold when one exists in an ‘unbearable flatness of being’ because one does not move nor is moved by the concatenating effects of forces upon forces.126

126 Of course, as they are positioned in this explication, depression is diametrically opposed to happiness, which is an unintended formulation given non-communication vis-à-vis communication. Indeed, as much as Laruelle does not see a necessary relationship between non-philosophy and philosophy, we should take a complementary measure with non- communication. Any link between non-communication and depression articulated below is to demonstrate the fertile connections between withdrawal from communication via non-communication in relation to power-communication as the exemplary expression of the control society in action. 201

What is being conceived here is, effectively, a political interpretation of depression, for which non-communication serves as a primary tactic to resist control by ‘short-circuiting’ any and every act of power-communication. This reading of depression hews closely to the idea that society, and specific capitalist operations therein, ‘manages’ how one is to emotionally ‘feel’

(Cederström & Spicer, 2015),127 which includes treating feelings that are socially defined as ‘bad’,

‘negative’, or ‘ill’, including depression, allergically (Illouz, 2007), in which power- communication is imbricated.128 If one is depressed and withdraws from communication, one risks

‘social death’ by avoiding the connections that suture people into the broader political field. But perhaps they also express an alternative form of being in the world, when one who is depressed chooses to turn inward so that they can deny the compulsion towards movement and activity that control societies, with their metaphors of surfing and hang-gliding, necessitate?129

In many respects, Deleuzian post-structuralism already points to instances of a political rendering of depression vis-à-vis an unwillingness to communicate, although he does not identify them as such. The literature of Samuel Beckett, for example, leads Deleuze to think about exhaustion. In the works of the author who writes, in The Unnameable (1954), “you must go on, I

127 “The attraction of illness lies in its capacity to redeem one of the greatest vices of our society: not doing anything. It is only when the body goes on strike that we are allowed to leave the workplace, not visit the gym or skip a session with our life coach. Sickness allows us to clock off, at least for a moment. What would otherwise appear as mere laziness now assumes the more acceptable form of respite. By surrendering to our illness, we are both following and reversing one of the central commands of biomorality—‘listen to your body’” (Cederström & Spicer, 2015, pp. 120; added emphasis). 128 “The linguistic model of communication [which Illouz understands by way of Habermasian communicative action and Foucauldian epistemes] is a cultural tool and repertoire used as a way to help coordinate actors between and within themselves—i.e., to coordinate relations between people presumed equals and entitled to the same rights—and to coordinate the complex cognitive and emotional apparatus required to do that. “Communication” is thus a technology of self-management relying extensively on language and on the proper management of emotions but with the aim of engineering inter- and intra-emotional coordination” (Illouz, 2007, p. 19; original emphasis). 129 One’s turn inward via non-communication should not be read as a mere privation of communication in which one both retreats from the world and domesticates political struggle. Instead, one who engages in non-communication challenges the thrust of power-communication by remaining obstinately present in the social field, directing the movement of others around them, while he or she stays still in their occupation of space and time. In this sense, non- communication is closer to Mark Fisher’s description of depression (2014), in which he writes, “The most productive way of reading the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying: the personal is impersonal. It’s miserable for anyone to at all to be themselves (still more, to be forced to sell themselves)” (p. 28; first emphasis added). 202

can’t go on, I'll go on,” Deleuze (1997) sees an exhaustion of the possible, which bears strong resemblance to communication. In the communicative realm, things are endlessly serialized, voices are dried up, spaces are extenuated, and images are dissipated when one is exhausted (p.

161). Non-communication, however, as it has been elaborated it throughout this chapter, is consonant with the remarks that Deleuze makes in his exegesis of Beckett’s stories, in which the communication of the control society is posited as an extra-communication, that perhaps there is too much communication today, or, too many of the same types of communication.130 About

Beckett’s prose Deleuze says, “It is not only that words lie; they are so burdened with calculations and significations, with intentions and personal memories, with old habits that cement them together, that one can scarcely bore into the surface [of language] before it closes up again. It sticks together. It imprisons and suffocates us” (1997, p. 173; added emphasis).

The figure of ‘the depressive’ can be conceived, then, as someone who recognizes this reality of power-communication that imprisons people in constant movement and suffocates them in endless enunciations and decides to no longer bother. The depressive points to a fact in the social field, which is predicated upon infinite communication that is girded by continuous applications of power, by virtue of his or her existence that is signified ‘as depressive’—one cannot be properly folded into the fabric of productivity of the control society as a contributing member. In other words, within the control society, depression is treated as an internal problem to be solved, since there is ‘no place’ within it for someone that is unproductive and inert. One must be made operative or risk being excised altogether. Additionally, once the depressive is positioned ‘outside’ of the control society, he or she can begin to see the external set of circumstances that have precipitated,

130 On the relationship between literal and figurative readings of economic surplus and saturation vis-à-vis depression, cf. Berardi, 2011, pp. 58-68. 203

if not outright caused, one’s current mental, emotional, and physical well-being.131 Within the control society configuration, then, we all have the potential to be depressed (and certainly there is no deficit of things today about which to be depressed).

Similarly, the literature of Herman Melville provides Deleuze another example of non- communication that functions as a rendering of the depressive state of being. Melville’s short story,

“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853), gives Deleuze (1997) a formula of withdrawal from the compulsion of communication, and even the choice of choosing ‘to communicate’. The more Bartleby is tasked with writing copy, the more he replies, ‘I would prefer not to’. Bartleby does not properly accept or refuse work; rather, he leaves ambivalent the choice of the matter of either accepting or refusing work. His formulaic phrase, ‘I would prefer not to’, suspends communication altogether, which cannot be supplanted with more communication.132

Bartleby here is not really depressed, but speaks to a depression of communication by flattening the distinction between communicating and not-communicating altogether. John Durham Peters

(1999), like Deleuze, sees a contrarian spirit at work in the character of Bartleby precisely because of the withdrawal from the choice of communication or not-communication that he represents. As

131 Even then, this perspective is circumspect, insofar that it risks positing being outside the influence of power and society that the depressive otherwise inhabits. Eugene Thacker (2015) cautions against assuming a position of ‘depressive realism’ in which one believes that one truly perceives the world for what it truly is (and is somehow happier and healthier for it). He chides, “The jury still seems to be out on whether [depressive realism] is a viable psychological theory or simply an attempt to view depression optimistically. Contemporary philosophers seem to have caught the bug, putting out pop-philosophy books that, in their almost absurd earnestness, begin to sound like self- help. However, at the broadest level—one that exceeds psychology—might we add that the pessimist holds no illusions, not just about one’s own individual being, but about the superiority or relevance of all human beings? Indeed, of all beings—of Being? If this is a realism, then it is a realism that extends into antihumanism—a sort of species- wide depression” (p. 157). 132 “A word always presupposes other words that can replace it, complete it, or form alternatives with it: it is on this condition that language is distributed in such a way as to designate things, states of things and actions, according to a set of objective, explicit conventions. But perhaps there are also other implicit and subjective conventions, other types of reference or presupposition. In speaking, I do not simply indicate things and actions; I also commit acts that assure a relation with the interlocutor, in keeping with our respective situations: I command, I interrogate, I promise, I ask, I emit “speech acts.” Speech acts are self-referential (I command by saying “I order you…”), while constative propositions refer to other things and other words. It is this double system of references that Bartleby [by saying ‘I would prefer not to’] ravages” (Deleuze, 1997b, p. 73). 204

Peters summarizes, “He refuses to refuse and will not will: he simply prefers not. He is beyond communication. […] Bartleby is less a pathological extremity than a rebellious integrity. There is no communication with such a self” (pp. 158-159; emphasis added).

We can see in the depressive an analogous performance of being ‘beyond communication’.

One does not, nor should not, have to justify why he or she is depressed; one simply ‘is’. Or, if there must be a reason for someone’s depression, it could be political in nature, tied to the historical context of the present, in which inequality, injustice, violence, oppression, and domination impact people’s physical, mental, and emotional well-beings. If the depressive points to a position of being

‘beyond communication’, then we should begin to take seriously the idea that we can, eventually, also live ‘beyond power’ as well, which is a process that the depressive initiates. A political explanation of depression is just as valid, then, as any biogenetic, neurological, and psychological causal factors. Indeed, the labour of having to communicate how and why one is depressed inverts the thrust of Laruellean non-philosophy. Whereas the Real of non-philosophy is produced or self- actualized ex nihilo, since it is not necessitated by any precondition of philosophical thought, the depressive is otherwise made to reproduce his or her flat state of being because they are made to communicate. Depressed people are made to move into the spheres of communication, often despite their wishes to the contrary. In which case, Bartleby-types who are depressed avoid this situation altogether by not participating in the very choice of participation vis-à-vis communication.

Furthermore, we can link depression to non-communication, then, to suggest an alternative to power-communication that Deleuze only implies when he invokes the creation of ‘vacuoles of non-communication’. Instead of treating depression as a state of being from which people want to escape, depression itself is posited here as a vehicle of retreat from the control society, in which

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communication is arrested and power rendered impotent. These two withdrawals thematize a need for a new state of being within the control society, specifically when movement is figuratively stopped, if only momentarily, so that one can exist within a specific space at a given time in order to allow oneself to feel depressed.133 Yet, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) point to the fact that one should not inhabit a pathway of escape, or ‘a line of flight’, for too long or too intensely, for it can always be incorporated into systems of domination to the point of real death (pp. 229, 231). By way of a political interpretation of depression in relation to non-communication, however, we can bracket the control society by using different conceptual, linguistic sets to act, think, and live. This should be all-the-more pertinent to people, especially when there are many who are still moving, communicating, and labouring as much as the control society demands of them, and yet are no happier or fulfilled in life despite their best efforts.

We can hope that a serious consideration of non-communication—namely, a withdrawal from communication and a refusal of power in which both are articulated by the rationale and expression of control—allows for people, formerly rendered as dividuals per control logics, to question whether the status quo of reality and imagination can be something else entirely different and heterogeneous. It is not enough to be critical of the phenomenon of movement-as-control, but we must also interrogate how and why one moves, moreover which moves should one make. This is the case when we consider that there are more acts of communication now more than ever, more means of generating communication, and that power itself takes root by substituting the imagination of reality for the reality of the world itself. In this vein, Deleuze and Laruelle are agreed, despite their radically disparate approaches to the same problem of communication.

133 Effectively, this is a negation of ‘the care of the self’ (Foucault, 1988a) that otherwise assumes that the ideology of control begins with the control over oneself—his or her mind, body, feelings, desires, needs, etc.—that consumer culture facilitates by responsibilizing one’s health and well-being (Thompson & Hirschman, 1995). 206

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Chapter VI:

Conclusion:

What Comes After the Societies of Control?

1. Positioning the Dissertation Towards the Future

Throughout this dissertation, the main problematic that we have examined is the idea that power and communication are intimately related. Our conclusion about this relationship is that power and communication are, in effect, exerted everywhere. Using Deleuzian post-structuralism, we have mapped out how power works in the twenty-first century within the confines of the concept of the control society. Specifically, we must think of power and communication as an interlacing of diverse processes, rationales, expressions, and representations. For instance, the societal shift towards control, as Deleuze has diagnosed it, has not completely jettisoned ideas of sovereignty and discipline, but intensified and transformed them in such a way that power is, effectively, a liberated and liberating phenomenon—it is decentralized, non-hierarchical, dispersed, distributed, and highly adaptive to new scenarios that challenge its influence over our actions and thoughts, if not our very lives. As such, it is difficult to imagine alternatives to power altogether when it is ever-present and highly modulative to contain and incorporate challenges, resistances, and counter-hegemonies of the status quo of the neoliberal democratic paradigm, in which ‘There Is No Alternative’. This phenomenon, which we called ‘control’, we have unpacked with some Deleuzian concepts, which necessitated a turn to Foucauldian philosophy (to understand the history of control qua the politics of space) and Laruellean non-philosophy (to conceive of the program of control as something heterogeneous or other than communication). In between this theoretical ‘heavy lifting’, we exhausted a few avenues as to how control is practiced today in

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terms of mapping its relationship to the capitalist present (in which the logic of control contains a conceptual basis that is technological, labour-materialist, and economic in nature). Finally, we defined the Deleuzian representation of power as a phenomenon that is felt as various forces that act upon forces (or relations acting upon relations), wherein we are coerced in both the public and private spheres, in all elements of our social, political, psychological, and economic existences, by being propelled towards communicating.

Similarly, in our translation of some of the concepts from Deleuzian post-structuralism into terms that would be resonant with Communication Studies scholars, we located the success in power via complementary developments in communication. We argued that the concept of communication vis-à-vis control retains the ideological assumptions of transmission, but has abandoned the simplicity of the model that Shannon and Weaver proposed in the 1940s. Like power, the contents and means of communication have become numerous. We should not think of e-mails, texts, discussion comments, tweets, posts, think-pieces, and editorials as various deployments of communication, for example, without also thinking about the complementary computers, smart phones, social media websites, networks, news organizations, and online blogs that situate how, where, when, and why communication occurs altogether. And yet, while today we might have difficulty imagining alternatives to neoliberal democracy, with communication, however, we realize that it is all too easy to conceive of new forms for one to be seen and heard— to be a part of a larger, more populous, and never-ending conversation about the very act of conversing (in which Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all necessary actors in the communicative process).

We can join these two threads and locate them within the parameters of Deleuzian post- structuralism, in which we can think of the relationship between power and communication as an

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‘open architecture’. Not unlike a window, a door, and a hallway, or, effectively, apertures within otherwise closed off spatial configurations (a room, a house, etc.), power and communication function because of how forces, relations, bodies, messages, technologies, and capital, for example, are unmoored from any one specific location from which they rise. Moreover, forces, relations, bodies, messages, technologies, and capital are made to move, specifically through things, be they media or infrastructures. In other words, these items are all made to be transversal, such that we are made prisoner by our very agency and capacity towards freedom (of one’s body, mind, actions, and so on) and the necessity to participate within social and political life by having to communicate (with oneself, with another, with others, with institutions, etc.). The choice of having no choice at all, paradoxically, but to engage within structures of power and patterns of communication, thematizes how technological materials, labour practices, and economic perspectives today all converge. For example, an electronic card or a smartphone combine one’s need to constantly stay ‘tethered’ to friends, family, co-workers, employers, and the larger public world. To not ‘open’ oneself to the purview of the communicative field in which one can be both seen and heard communicating is suspect; to not have an electronic card or a smartphone which would otherwise reinforce the mise-en-abyme of communication is even more damning, since the figurative and literal movements of the control society, in which one must engage to survive, are that much more hindered. What we have drawn out from our interpretation of Deleuze’s

“Postscript” essay are various examples of how this condition of power and communication becomes normalized, when we cannot ‘not communicate’, but we cannot ‘not be effected by power’ as well.

However, we say all this precisely because we positioned Deleuzian post-structuralism vis-

à-vis the field of Communication Studies precisely to ask, ‘what if we could withdraw from having

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to communicate and being coerced by the forces of power?’ Moreover, following the Deleuzian line of thought, we also asked, ‘what would that look like?’ From the primary Deleuzian philosophical literature we extracted some potential avenues that could answer these questions.

While we entertained some examples, like stammering, crying, and silence, we ultimately concluded that the world of the control society that Deleuze himself describes has already usurped the structures of his thought. Apropos Foucault, the twenty-first century is, in fact, ‘Deleuzian’

(Foucault, 1977b), albeit not for the better. As such, we took leave of Deleuze by way of his own suggestion that we abandon philosophy altogether. Additionally, by turning to the ‘non- philosophy’ of Laruelle, we concocted a scenario in which we would not longer have to communicate, nor, more importantly, to be subject to power. The withdrawal from communication, which we started with Deleuzian post-structuralism and ended with Laruellean non-philosophy, led us to conclude that we can, in fact, refuse power. In kind, this withdrawal and refusal from power-communication gave us a respite from movement, in which we could occupy a given space and time to exist and subsist freely, outside of the control society altogether within being defined by the parameters of control. But in the twenty-first century, how long can we engage in non- communication, especially when there are new problems of power and communication that need to be solved?

2. Contradiction? Communications, Communities, & Campuses in Control Societies

Given the various tensions, conflicts, and dilemmas of 2017, we can evaluate the future possibilities of using a Deleuzian philosophy of communication to diagnose and interpret mechanisms of control by considering a couple of examples. First, in terms of broader social trends, we can consider how control works by looking at the relationship between forms of communications and formations of communities. And secondly, in more localized terms, we can

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speculate about the intersection of Deleuzian post-structuralism and Communication Studies can help us address how communications occur and why communities emerge, especially when we consider the role of philosophical and social sciences research within the university system. What is common across these two examples is how contradiction is central to the operation of power.

In the first case, we can find in popular discourse commentaries about how our communicative frameworks reinforce our political beliefs and associations (Bakshy, Messing, &

Adamic, 2015; Keegan, 2016). The polarized and partisan political sphere, it is alleged, is so intensely segmented, as if people inhabit ‘information bubbles’ (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2016) that isolate them from different perspectives other than their own. As a result, the algorithmics of social networking websites that give rise to these informational siloes have been questioned in terms of whether one’s ideological beliefs are the by-products of informational processes that take place

‘behind’ the digital screens one uses daily (Lazer, 2015), which are themselves human-created, but also subject to human manipulation. This is especially troubling when it comes to the contents and interpretations of communications, in which one today is beset by ‘fake news’ (Borden &

Tew, 2007) and ‘alternative facts’ (Blake, 2017), which serve as the newest articulations of agenda setting (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007).

But in terms of control, exactly what agenda is being set? Precisely, a disorientation of the social and a disintegration of the political, in which valid news and meaningful, actionable information cannot rise above the din of 24/7 communication production (Crary, 2013). It should come as no surprise, then, that communication within civic-political life has become toxic, wherein fake news and alternative facts are ‘the new normal’ (Nagle, 2017). The reasons for this are twofold. First, skepticism towards political institutions has eroded a trust in politicians and other state actors, who work to secure private interests of businesses and corporations instead of

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fostering a collective spirit that champions the public sphere, egalitarianism, and social welfare for all (Habermas, 2012, 2015). Secondly, the political left of the past fifty years (May 1968 to the present) no longer has domain over the techniques of resistance, counter-hegemony, culture jamming, and pluralism. These tactics have been used against the left, governments, and democracy in the same measure, in which strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1996), standpoint theory

(Harding, 2004), incredulity towards meta-narratives (Lyotard, 1984), and collectivist-coalitionist politics of identity (Fraser, 1995), for example, have all become inverted by reactionary movements, while maintaining their overall conceptual shape.134

As such, the control society is the house of contradiction, within which the concept of

‘communication’ has become dislocated from the idea of ‘community’. On one hand, there are more communications—be they contents, means, models, or technologies—than ever, but very few communities (in terms of a common good, a collective consciousness, a sense of species- being, etc.). On the other hand, however, there are more and more communities than ever, which implies a deficit of communication, a lack of engagement with other people, especially those with opinions, backgrounds, and perspectives that are different than our own. Seemingly, the notion of

‘community’ itself has fragmented, such that one can choose to identify with whichever group, class, or association of people that best represents oneself or one’s beliefs.

Together, this contradiction between too much communication and too many communities is at the centre of the political arena, which just so happens, perversely, to fulfill the Deleuzian critique of communication as elaborated in Chapter II. Consensus about any given issue is nigh impossible to achieve, agreement is eschewed when diametrically opposed perspectives are considered anathema, and the very articulation of what constitutes ‘reality’ can no longer be

134 Relatedly, on the specific militarization of Deleuzian thinking to coordinate warfare tactics, cf. Weizman, 2006. 213

expressed in terms of a common vernacular. When ‘communication’ and ‘community’ lose the basis of their identities in terms of ‘the common’, which is slowly being destroyed, then an unbridled heterogeneity of messages and associations reign, such that discourses and political groups that seeks to atrophy the civic bonds of the public sphere are welcomed into its very domain.

As such, people are made to tolerate ideas and opinions that were previously at the margins of society. Orientations like ‘left’ and ‘right’ thus no longer presuppose how one thinks about communication and community; rather, orientations like ‘inside and ‘outside’ and ‘belongs’ and

‘excluded’ determine with whom we communicate and share our lives. As it were, people have indeed found the ‘new weapons’ that Deleuze (1992) says we need, which are the very concepts of ‘communication’ and ‘community’ themselves. Yet, people have put a lot of thought into what they mean, for which Deleuze and Guattari (1994) desire when they speak of concept-creation contra communication in What Is Philosophy? However, people mobilize these terms to hurt, silence, and deny others the chance to participate in communicative acts and the sharing of the common itself. Any future work in pushing the boundaries of a Deleuzian philosophy of communication, especially with respect to concepts of control and movement, will thus have to identify this disjunction between communication and community within which applications of power are secured and concentrated, specifically along the lines of identifying, authenticating, and legitimating ‘inside/outside’-‘friend/enemy’ relationships.

While this first case sets the overall conditions of the future of the control society on the level of the societal and the global, the problems it presents can be answered on the level of institutional and the local, for which we can think about the role and the purpose that the university has in ‘speaking truth to power’. This focus should be of benefit to anyone who works within

Communication Studies (or social sciences and humanities more broadly), especially if one deals

214

with the relevance that theoretical work has both within and outside of the confines of the academy.

On one hand, it makes a great deal of sense to focus on the university as a site of communication engagement vis-à-vis the control society, since Deleuzian post-structuralism and Communication

Studies are themselves situated within the intellectual framework of higher learning. As such, in one’s research and teaching, it is possible to ask questions about the contradiction between communication and community in the twenty-first century since the realities of power relations are central to both. One would think, then, that the university is one of the frontlines in the battle of the merits of critical thinking. However, on the other hand, because we have seen in the primary

Deleuzian literature both a skepticism towards the university as a social institution, which he likens to a corporation, and towards pedagogy as the practice of power, we should not be so quick to embrace an academic challenge to power as it exists in the here and now. Just like the dislocation of conceptions of communication from community, the apparatuses of the university, too, are also enmeshed in complex, compounded, and, like the first case, contradictory sets of power relations that function at the behest of power configurations.

More directly, we can suggest that the university, as an ideal and actual space of pedagogy, functions as but one site of the neoliberalization of the lifeworld put into practice (Harvey, 2007;

Brown, 2015), which impinges upon one’s ability in future to act, think, and live.135 There are several ways in which this occurs. For instance, the fact that so many universities take the shape of corporate administration means that the ‘spirit of competition’ pervades the entire institution,

135 Brown sees four impacts of neoliberalism upon how we think about higher education (2015, 176-177). One, education is no longer viewed a public good, nor exists for public use, but is subject to the same kinds of rationalizations of value, worth, and cost-effectiveness typical of private sector activity. Two, education functions to train people to be better, more productive workers and not better, more engaged citizens, which negatively affects democracy. Three, subjects no longer exist in common as citizens engaged in a community, but are free to market themselves as flexible individuals to fill the needs of future employers. And four, knowledge, thought, and training do not exist to better the individual as a moral, political agent of the world (as an end of education unto itself), but are only the by-products of a pedagogical process that makes the monetization of education its guiding principle. 215

instead of having researchers and teachers work within the academy as producers of public goods, like knowledge (Halffman & Radder, 2015). Tuition costs and other ancillary university fees increase incrementally (Statistics Canada, 2016), and students end up accumulating massive amounts of debt to pay for their degrees (and the four-to-five years of tuition that the degree symbolizes) (Sagan, 2016). However, if more students are priced out of attending university because of tuition costs, presumably undergraduate class sizes would shrink, yet class sizes continue to grow (Chiose, 2014), which adversely impacts the quality of learning when measured by student-to-faculty ratios (Minsky, 2016). But just how sustainable is this arrangement? We might consider that post-secondary learning will eventually become that much more of a privilege, precisely because so many young people will be priced out of the decision whether one should attend college or university altogether.

But it is not just undergraduate students who will bear the brunt of contradictory economic rationalizations. Namely, the quality of education one finds at university is also hindered because most teaching (Basen, 2014) is done by members of a precarious labour class who struggle to pay bills, let alone run courses (Birmingham, 2017), and who furthermore are subject to a predatory

‘publish or perish’ mentality (Chiose, 2015) that legitimates the micro-operation of the twenty- first century ethos of capitalism: the production of the idea of production itself, in which research is ‘valuable’ only if it is ‘usable’. It follows, then, that both instructors and students are united, if not in their class identifications, then in their work practices, as the university relies on the production of intellectual labour in the forms of information and knowledge—proposals, essays, presentations, reports, theses, articles, research projects, etc. (Raunig, 2013). Finally, a post- secondary education, after these difficulties that one encounters at university are compounded, is not a guarantee of future employment and happiness outside the confines of the post-secondary

216

space, and, even if such opportunity is secured, this does not mean that one will find job prospects that will adequately remunerate them (Pettigrew, 2013).

However, we should be careful not to think that Communication Studies simply needs

‘more Deleuzian post-structuralism’ or that the university itself needs ‘more communication’, as much as we have tried to avoid the suggestion that society needs more movement in action and thinking to dissolve the constraints of the control society (Mackay & Avanessian, 2014; Noys,

2014). Precisely because of both these research paradigms feed into the same system, the university consecrates Deleuzian post-structuralism and Communication Studies as contents to be studied, in which the overall pedagogy of power is legitimated. A Deleuzian philosophy of communication thus tries to work through this tension by negotiating the relationship that post- structuralism has with Communication Studies, if not academia more broadly (Grossberg, 2014).

Yet, even though both Deleuzian post-structuralism and Communication Studies have the conceptual and linguistic tools to speak to the desire for power that is at play in 2017, we must also speak to the same desire of power within the university system, which, as Deleuze himself has noted, also affects the design of the control society, albeit in miniature.

217

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