Control Society and Signification

[Uh... OK, here's my first take on this. It seems really inadequate to me now, so I'll probably revise it, or at the least, write an apology/clarification/improvement at some future time. As always, I'm interested to hear thoughts. If anyone reads this blog, which of course isn't something I take for granted. Heh.]

Deleuze's "Society of Control" essay has influenced me enormously. It's my favorite of the many (paradoxical) attempts to create a meta-narrative of the transition from modern to post-modern society. It's very short, so I strongly encourage you to read it. Basically, he argues that implicit in Foucault's work is a movement beyond discipline into control, which (postmodern) society increasingly realizes. Whereas discipline operates through enclosure and discontinuous transitions between heterogeneous spaces, control connects those spaces. It replaces the completion of segmented disciplinary elements (school, factory, barracks) with ongoing processes (education geared towards commercial success, business as education, computers tracking individuals with information that follows them wherever they go).

I want to focus on the particular idea that discipline is analog, whereas control is digital (or "coded." That is, disciplinary spaces resemble each other in that they use similar methods
for creating order and molding subjects, but they do so to different ends. In control society, spaces imposes codes that can be used or transformed for use elsewhere; individuals accumulate, e.g., educational capital through continuing education and through participation in "real life" capitalist, militaristic, or medical practice. In particular, I want to think about how processes of signification ("coding" in a more abstract sense) change when the exercise of power relies on a single, interchangeable code.

Deleuze explicitly says that control societies employ a numerical language. Presumably, we can contrast this numerical language with the more tightly contained and ideological languages of disciplinary spaces. To take the example of the school, discourses about refinement, virtue, personal development, wisdom, etc., give way to quantitative evaluations framed in terms of a continuum of achievement. This shift flattens the field of educational outcomes by proclaiming the possibility of ordinally ranking (or at least somehow quantifiably ordering) students on the basis of grade level, test scores, GPA, etc. In doing so, it lowers the barriers of the school to other spaces within society; it generates an objective basis for selection in corporations or other educational institutions.

I mean "objective" in a broader sense than might be obvious from that last sentence. Not only does quantifiability improve the efficiency of selection by enabling standardizing criteria; it also may increasingly correspond to the demands corporations make on employees. The type of skills required to successfully crush a culturally contingent and intellectually shallow standardized test might prove more useful in a modern company than would some ephemeral "deeper" wisdom. Regardless of whether this strategy is smart, it reflects a general change in the relationship of individuals to their codes:

Whereas discipline targets the self-contained mental universes of individuals, control increasingly bypasses individual meaning-making in favor of coding which can be completely processed externally (and thus, in the above sense, more "objectively.") If your school-numbers fluidly determine your spot in the corporate hierarchy (only to be altered by the improvement of your numbers through the accumulation of additional educational or corporate capital), there is no need to "socialize" you or force upon you the contrived ideology which used to uniquely characterize individual disciplines.

Thus we face the capitalism of Weber's worst nightmares; one in which all meaning has been drained from individual thought and reintroduced as not only instrumental but exterior. The bureaucratic-capitalist apparatus can sort you and move you around on the basis of your numbers regardless of your feelings on the matter. But in fact, you don't have feelings on the matter. The culmination of the process of disenchantment and destruction of meta-narratives is your shit hitting the material fan. You participate in capitalism because it's there and it's how things are done and you need it to supply your body. But scarier still is the increasingly materialist slant of knowledge about you.

Instead of psychoanalysis fixing your mind but drugs fix your brain. Architectures of control continually influence your behavior at a level outside your conscious power. As in the case of discipline, power organizes bodies in space in order to achieve certain ends; but now these ends are not psychological. Instead of using space to assist the inculcation of particular behaviors and values, space continually "modulates" human behavior, with no additional disciplinary control necessary.

Punchline: the shift from discipline to control entails a new relationship between knowledge, power, and individual. Whereas discipline exerts power over individuals by ensnaring them in a matrix of knowledge producing certain actions, control obviates the necessity for individual reproduction of knowledge. In fact, individual awareness of the knowledge employed by control may be counterproductive. Thus, in an challenging turn for those who object to ideologically influences on epistemology, control reduces knowledge to market-tested instrumental facts, predictive and statistically significant.