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Control Culture Is Control the Cultural Logic of the Twenty-First Century?

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Control Culture Is Control the Cultural Logic of the Twenty-First Century? Edited by Frida Beckman ‘Criticising and extending Deleuze’s notion of “control society”, these essays sharply investigate the philosophical, political, and artistic possibilities of resistance and transformation in a world of ever-shifting monitoring, nudging, and co-optation. From fit-bits to data mining, from wellness programs to echo chambers, the bio-informatics that inform daily practices are here interrogated with nuance and panache.’ John Protevi, Louisiana State University Control Culture Is control the cultural logic of the twenty-first century? With Deleuze’s brief but influential work on control as a starting point, the eleven essays in this book focus on the question of how contemporary control mechanisms influence, and are influenced by, cultural expression. They also collectively revaluate Foucault and Deleuze’s theories of discipline and control in light of the continued development of biopolitics. Written by an impressive line-up of contemporary scholars of philosophy, politics and culture, the essays cover the particularity of control in relation to various fields and modes of expression including literature, cinema, television, music and philosophy. Frida Beckman is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. Control Culture Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline Cover image: © shutterstock.com Cover design: Bekah Mackenzie ISBN 978-1-4744-3675-5 Edited by Frida Beckman 9781474 436755 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Frida Beckman, 2018 © the chapters their several authors, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3675 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3677 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3678 6 (epub) The right of Frida Beckman to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction. Control of What? 1 Frida Beckman 1 Notes from an Investigation of ‘Control Society’ 20 Gregg Lambert 2 Post-Mortem on Race and Control 34 Neel Ahuja 3 Periodising (with) Control 44 Seb Franklin 4 Subjects of Sovereign Control and the Art of Critique in the Early Modern Period 63 Carin Franzén 5 Posthumanism, Social Complexity and the Political: A Genealogy for Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics 82 Cary Wolfe 6 ‘That Path is for Your Steps Alone’: Popular Music, Neoliberalism and Biopolitics 101 Jeffrey T. Nealon 7 Cinema in the Age of Control 121 Gregory Flaxman vi contents 8 Towards a ‘Minor’ Fascism: Panoptic Control and Resistant Multiplicity in TV’s Spooks 141 Colin Gardner 9 Species States: Animal Control in Phil Klay’s ‘Redeployment’ 166 Colleen Glenney Boggs 10 Control and a Minor Literature 180 Frida Beckman 11 Philosophy and Control 193 Paul Patton Index 211 introduction 1 Introduction: Control of What? Frida Beckman ‘ he world’, Gilles Deleuze says in a conversation with Antonio Negri in Tthe spring of 1990, has ‘been taken from us’. It has been taken from us because we have lost our belief in it and without belief, we have closed down the potential to spawn ‘new space–times’, to make space for even the most modest events that evade control (Deleuze 1995: 176). Strikingly, but not unusually within the framework of Deleuze’s oeuvre and in particular within his more political writings, this statement is at once bleak and constructive. In the same breath as it states that we have lost belief and thus the world, it offers at least the beginning of a suggestion of how to regain it. Deleuze notes the loss of belief but also reminds us that if we could only summon up the tiniest bit of it, this would enable us to ‘precipitate events’ and engender ‘new space–times, however small their surface or volume’ (Deleuze 1995: 176). Art plays a crucial part in such claims to hope. As he writes in his second cinema book; exactly because the world has turned into ‘a bad cinema, in which we no longer believe’, true cinema may be able to help us restore ‘our belief in the world’ (Deleuze 2013: 187). It is now three decades since Deleuze started flagging questions of control – in presentations such as ‘Having an Idea in Cinema/What is a Creative Act?’ in 1987 and ‘What is a Dispositif?’ in 1988, the conversation between Deleuze and Antonio Negri entitled ‘Control and Becoming’, published in Futur Antérieur in 1990, which is also the same year in which Deleuze’s short but seminal article ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ was first published in L’Autre Journal. During the decades that have passed since then, the shifts away from disciplinary society that Michel Foucault had already predicted and that Deleuze articulated in these brief engagements have escalated in ways and on a scale that neither of them could have possibly imagined. So what is the status of our belief today? And what is the role of artistic and cultural expression in relation to it? 2 frida beckman When Foucault stated in one of his lectures at Collège de France in 1979 that ‘control is no longer just the counterweight to freedom, as in the case of panopticism: it becomes its mainspring’ (Foucault 2008: 67) and Deleuze pointed to ‘the widespread progressive introduction of a new system of domi- nation’ based on continuous modulations and codes in 1990 (Deleuze 1995: 182), few would have imagined that it would be possible, and, indeed, common practice to trace people’s movements with the help of their smartphones, or that people would voluntarily wear watches that monitor the nature of their physical activities during the day and every minute of their sleep during the night, or that social media would use algorithms to individualise not only advertisements but also information and political messages. Perhaps few would also have been able to imagine a speed of technological development which makes you realise that even as you write down the most recent examples in a book manuscript, they will most likely already seem out of date once the book is published. But even if they could not, of course, foresee the details or speed of this development, Foucault and Deleuze, did, it seems, in some sense pre-empt the conditions that would enable such technologies to flourish, the transformative effects this would have on disciplinary modes of power, the accelerating consequences on the continued development of biopolitics, and the ensuing emergence of the complexities of control society. There will be reason, in this introduction as well as in the various chapters of this book, to revisit and revaluate Foucault’s and Deleuze’s theories of discipline and control in the light of these more recent developments. Indeed, and while Deleuze’s conception of control constitutes a key starting point for this volume, this conception should be considered as a necessarily specific and historical attempt to map an emerging dispositif. A dispositif, in brief, and as Deleuze traces it via Foucault, is ‘a tangle’, a composition of lines of different nature, lines that ‘do not just make up the social apparatus but run through it and pull at it’ (Deleuze 1992b: 159). A dispositif shapes visibility, enun- ciation, knowledge, subjects, a dispositif is made up of concrete, if always potentially transformable components, a dispositif constitutes a machine ‘which make[s] one see and speak’ (Deleuze 1992b: 160). Working with the notion of the dispositif is a way of acknowledging the specific components and coordinates of power at any one time while simultaneously recognising how such components and coordinates are variable and also invariably under transformation. ‘In each apparatus [dispositif]’, as Deleuze puts it, ‘it is neces- sary to distinguish what we are (what we are already no longer), and what we are in the process of becoming’ (Deleuze 1992b: 164). Underlined here, and this takes us back to the ‘new space–times’ that Deleuze hopes we will summon up in the face of control, each dispositif should be assessed also in its ability to ‘break down’ and make way for ‘a future apparatus’. It may be possible to trace ‘paths of creation, which are continually aborting, but then introduction 3 restarting, in a modified way, until the former apparatus is broken’ (Deleuze 1992b: 163–4). However, and while a dispositif necessarily builds on variable lines and coordinates, these lines and coordinates may be hard, rigid and solid and thus difficult to break (Deleuze 1992b: 164). And at the moment, control, in all its suppleness, seems increasingly hard, rigid and solid. Perhaps it is because of its all-encompassing tendencies that we are struggling to envision its breaking point, perhaps it is because neither Foucault nor Deleuze lived long enough to develop their theories or to respond to the conditions they pre-empted, but it may also be because we are too close to it – because we are as yet unable to ‘distinguish what we are (what we are already no longer), and what we are in the process of becoming’. But exactly because of these concerns, is seems important to map and interrogate some of those lines and paths.
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