Burroughs, Deleuze, and the Limits of Control
If the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, and the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control.
—Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (38)
The old sovereign societies worked with simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks; but recent disciplinary societies were equipped with thermodynamic machines presenting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; control societies function with a third generation of machines with information technology and computers, where passive danger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination.
—Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies” (180)
Enemy have [sic] two notable weaknesses:
1. No sense of humor. They simply don't get it.
2. They totally lack understanding of magic, and being totally oriented towards control, what they don't understand is a menace, to be destroyed by any means—consequently they tip their hand. They don't seem to care anymore—but famous last words: “We've got it made.”
—William S. Burroughs, Last Words (15)
In the summer of 2002, Seattle news sources reported on an unusual business venture by two web entrepreneurs. From July 7 to 14, Scotty Weeks and Derrick Clark feigned homelessness in Victor Steinbrueck Park. Attired in “homeless clothes” (carefully selected from a thrift store) and bereft of all modern conveniences (save a digital camera and audio recorder), the duo slept on the streets, begged for spare change, and updated their website (homelessweek.com) daily from a nearby Internet café. Their objective, Clark explains, was to “learn a lesson and see the world with dif erent eyes” (qtd. in Jenniges). Feigning homelessness is not an altogether new occupation—for instance, in 1987 television anchorwoman Pat Harper famously spent six days pretending to be a homeless on the streets of New York to produce the sweeps week news special “There but for the Grace of God,” and diverse ministries have long offered this opportunity to their congregation in an effort to build sympathy for the homeless—but Weeks and Clark's venture is relatively unique for two reasons. One, there is an explicit element of self-promotion: although their press releases indicate a desire to gain “humility” and “empathy” through this experience, the clear emphasis on the pair's personalities and their other web-based ventures displayed on homelessweek.com severely undermines this professed altruism.1 This point is reinforced by the second item that makes homelessweek.com an odd enterprise: the seemingly contradictory exploitation of the homeless on Weeks' personal website, where one can view “hidden camera” images of the homeless having sex and defecating accompanied with amusing captions and little mention or demonstration of “empathy” or “humility.”2
Although the pair's interaction with the homeless may be rather unique due to the juxtaposition of their press releases' concern with humility and empathy and the explicit exploitation of the homeless through the hidden camera photos, their promotional ventures—selling the experience of “homelessness” and attempting to profit from media captures of “real,” material homeless individuals—are not incomparable; both find affinities with other, more explicitly profi t-driven undertakings. For instance, around the same time as the duo's experiment, a Dutch travel agency had been marketing the concept of “homelessness” through “homeless vacations” where work-weary Europeans can pay to beg for change on urban streets for a week. Also during the same time, the Las Vegas website Bumfights. com was enacting a more direct way of making a profit from actual homeless individuals by selling videotapes and Internet footage of homeless men and women fighting each other and engaging in dangerous stunts. Since it is not illegal to film brawls in Nevada, and the majority of their homeless “employees” gladly accept small amounts of food, clean clothes, or alcohol as payment, the producers of Bumfights.com had developed a low-risk and highly profi table business based on poverty. In response to those who critique the Bumfights enterprise, creator Ryan McPherson argued that their relationship with the homeless has been mutually beneficial and that the Bumfights producers are in fact some of the very few who paid attention to the homeless and tried to provide them an outlet: “We were the only ones there and we're the ones that are friends with a lot of these homeless people that we filmed” (qtd. in Kowsh).
I dwell briefly here on recent media and economic movements clustered around both material homeless individuals and the concept of homeless-ness itself because it seems to me a particularly exemplary site for analyzing the intersection of the parametric mode of contemporary culture that was detailed in Chapter 2 with what we have come to call, after Foucault, “social power” as the system of forces that in dif use and often implicit ways structure contemporary political economy. More precisely, we might say that this intersection largely begins where Foucault's concept of dis-ciplinary society leaves of and that the suturing of homelessness as both a spectacle and as “experiences” available for purchase is a particularly salient example of the ways in which contemporary media and technologies have shifted the locus of social power from the confined sites of identity formation and management that were key features of discipline, to those of larger media ecologies wherein human capacities of various types are shaped and circulated. While it might be said that the variety of arguments already made in this book have addressed significant aspects of such a tran-sition, in this chapter I pursue a more specific thematization of the impact of cybernetic technologies and concepts in shaping social power. More specifically, I am interested in asking how we can or should define categories of “domination” and “resistance”—those two great buzzwords of cultural theory of the past few decades—in such a changed environment.
But first, and by way of a refresher, we might begin by considering a few ways in which the events with which we began this chapter present particularly poignant or material examples of two phenomena we have already had occasion to analyze in this text. First, these instances certainly provide yet a further demonstration of the increasing flexible basis of economic production and consumption marking the present. As Fredric Jameson suggests, such processes are currently marked not so much by the simple switch from the dominance of a product-based economy to a service-based one, but rather by the introduction of an entirely “new ontological and free-floating state” of economic production, one in which
content, (to revert to Hegelian language) has definitively been suppressed in favour of the form, in which the inherent nature of the product becomes insignificant, a mere marketing pretext, while the goal of production no longer lies in any specific market, any specific sets of consumers or social and individual needs, but rather in its transformation into that element which by definition has no content or territory and indeed no use-value as such, namely money. (“Culture” 153)
In such a manifestation, economic production and profitability emerges not so much through the manufacture and marketing of particular products or even services in the traditional sense, but through a marketplace based on the creation and availability of new experiences and sensations— the thrills and risks of gambling and financial speculation, entry into the virtual adventures of video games and related media, the opportunity to “experience” homelessness.
Second, and with closer proximity to the subjects of our previous chapter, we might also suggest that such phenomena also emphasizes the ways in which affect or emotional empathy, as either an asocial or uncommon difiable space, or as a reliable source of collective empathy or sympathy as in what Honig calls “tragic” humanism, seems to have increasingly diminishing returns. Indeed, it would seem that, insofar as such affective ties were based at least in part in shared identities and relatively stable sites of collective experience, then the decline of disciplinary power implies a concomitant decline in affect as a strategy of resistance or of social amelioration. For instance, in assaying what she calls “sentimental politics,” Lauren Berlant has powerfully underscored the ways that shared capacities for affective feeling, particularly those of pain and suffering, have traditionally been mobilized to foment social change:
Sentimentality has long been the means by which the mass subaltern pain is advanced … to eradicate the pain those with power will do whatever is necessary to return the nation once more to its legitimately utopian odor. Identification with pain, a universal true feeling, then leads to structural social change. (“Subject” 53)
Berlant critiques this strategy on the basis that it problematically reaffirms institutional sites such as the law or nation-state, but we might additionally consider how the effectiveness of a politics premised on the possibility of a collective union based on shared affective “feeling” may itself be becoming moribund in a moment in which such sites and institutions are on the wane in general within a global economic system which often takes intense feelings and experiences as its fundamental “products.”
Brian Massumi, despite his more optimistic readings of affect discussed earlier in this text, has also thematized this movement in direct relation to the decline of disciplinary techniques of power and problem of identifying techniques of resistance:
It's no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety … The oddest of affective tendencies are okay—as long as they pay … [Capitalism] hijacks affect in order to intensify profi t potential. It literally valorizes affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. It's very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that there's been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamics of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance. (“Navigating” 24)
As Massumi suggests, strategies based on forming collectives around affective intensities or shared feeling appear to be no longer the domain of resistance to social power; rather they seem to define their very logic of operation.
Third and finally, all of this is of a piece with the vast progression of communication and exchange networks, the organizing non-space of economic production and cultural representation. As Manuel Castells writes, economic and social processes increasingly occur not in concrete locations, what he calls “the space of places,” but the more flexible “space of flows,” the intersection of “purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions” that structure contemporary “network” society (412).3 In many ways founding cyberneticist Norbert Wiener was perhaps the first to draw our attention to this shift. As underscored in our first epigraph above, Wiener hypothesized that the late twentieth century and beyond would be defined not so much by particular physical machines and their outputs, but rather by the discrete capacities and forces of “communication and control” foregrounded in cybernetic explorations of both machinic and organic entities. In distinction to the automata of other centuries that were defined best by their outputs, contemporary automata are constructed by maintaining flexible interconnections between human and mechanical systems. As Wiener writes, if there is a representative machine for the present age, it is the servomechanism, which allows one to exercise control “at a distance” and which mimics physiological process of feedback and equilibrium that take place in physiological bodies (Cybernetics 43). As numerous social and cultural theorists have since foregrounded, the domination of network logics has challenged not only our traditional notions of economic production, but also our common conception that forces of subjugation and subjectivity formation primarily take place within sites of confinement or around particular identity categories. As economic reliance on discrete products and services breakdown, institutional sites of disciplinary activity are also outsourced and distributed: marketplaces, factories, prisons, and schools give way to e-commerce, telecommuting, house arrest, and distance education.
Such a network logic helps explain the relatively novel constellations of marketing and profitability emerging through such a dislocation of spatial dimensions. To return one last time to the examples with which we began this chapter, we might consider that the impoverished and the homeless in particular have always occupied a rather problematic place in systems and theories of disciplinary power. As Zygmunt Bauman suggests, the poor are often conceived as the only individuals who fall outside of a seemingly axiomatic strain of capitalism, the non-producers/non-consumers that, on the one hand, give lie to celebrations of the “mobile workforce” or “nomadic subject” portrayed within analyses of capitalist labor and consumption, and, on the other, serve mainly as motivation for others to be “good” members of a capitalistic system (222).4 It would take the faster and more mutable technologies that develop in the wake of the breakdown of the sites of disciplinary power—and operate through communication and control practices in contrast to discipline's reliance on the body—to develop ways to directly profi t from the homeless and homelessness in such manifestations as the homeless vacation, homeless week, secret camera photos of the homeless, and Bumfights.com.5
Precisely for these reasons, the networked nature of contemporary political economy has made it increasingly dif cult to theorize how one might productively respond to structures of power based on the “spaces of flow” and flexibly mutating strategies of control, given that our typical hermeneutic and analytical techniques are based on the targeting of insti-tutional bases and specific forms of subjugation. If the fundamental dilemmas of early postmodernism were based on the breakdown of binaries between particular categories (Marxian base/superstructure in economics, high/low culture in aesthetics, and knowledge/narrative in epistemology), the contemporary dilemmas of what I have been calling the cybernetic age appear to be instead clustered around the binary logic found in computational technologies, where elements are continually transformed and linked in flexible ways.
In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to explore possible responses to these problems in reference to the writings of two figures who were perhaps the most prescient in anticipating these changes and the corollary question of “resistance”: Gilles Deleuze, who in two short but influential pieces suggested that “control societies” were taking over from Foucault's disciplinary models, and the American writer William S. Burroughs, from whom Deleuze borrows the concept of “control” as a sociotechnical system.6 Although I work through the similarities in their thinking, I am ultimately interested in what we might learn from their divergences, and specifically what Burroughs might have to teach us in regard to rethinking categories of “resistance” within contemporary “control systems” of social power. In this latter endeavor, my objective is not to suggest that Deleuze somehow did not read Burroughs “rightly,” but rather to follow what I take to be the Deleuzian line and see if this interaction can help us restate or reformulate the problems of control and resistance for the present.7
In his book on Foucault as well as several of his final essays, Deleuze would draw on Foucault's own interest in the increasing obsolescence of disciplinary systems and borrow Williams S. Burroughs' concept of “control systems” to assay the “widespread progressive introduction of a new system of domination” he would alternately refer to “control,” “communication,” or “cybernetic” societies. Although Deleuze makes no explicit reference to particular works by Burroughs in these writings, there a number of ways in which Deleuze's work on post-disciplinary social power overlaps with Burroughs similar considerations about the nature of “control” in the late twentieth century.
Perhaps most obviously, both foreground a logic of “intensity” in charting changes in the dominant structures of social control—the tendency for existing mechanisms to trend toward greater efficiency by producing the same results achieved by earlier forms of power but through less brutal or more “cost-ef ective” methods. Deleuze approaches this tendency in reference to Foucault's earlier portrayal of disciplinary societies as itself something like an intensification of previous systems of power; as Deleuze writes, although Foucault recognized the unparalleled efficiency of discipline, he also recognized “the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life)” (“Postscript” 177). While discipline worked bodies in relation to physical sites such as the factory or school, control societies emerge as forces of social control become increasingly mutable and can operate at greater distances through control and communication technologies. In other words, the forces at play in disciplinary power have not so much been replaced as they have been perfected—made more efficient and flexible. As Deleuze writes, discipline worked by casting individuals inside of particular “molds” that form a body's identity and potentiality, but control works more as a generic type of “modulation” that varies from one moment to the next (178–179). As Michael Hardt suggests, the important distinction here is between the disciplinary construction of a “fixed social identity” and a new form of control that operates on a body “as a whatever identity”: “Mobility, speed, and flexibility are the qualities that characterize this separate plane of rule. The infinitely programmable machine, the ideal of cybernetics, gives us at least an approximation of the diagram of the new paradigm of rule” (“Withering” 36). While the general breakdown of disciplinary sites initially seem to present new freedoms, they in fact lead to what Deleuze calls “mechanisms of control as rigorous as the harshest confinement” but with much greater flexibility and without the need for instances of actual physical confinement (“Postscript” 178).
Burroughs uses the term “control” exclusively in his analyses of social power, but likewise contrasts its current manifestations in contrast to harsher, more physical mechanisms of domination and persuasion. In a variety of his fictions these forces are embodied in particular characters, most notably a police team identified as Hauser and O'Brien in Naked Lunch but who circulate under the designations “the tough cop” and “the con cop” elsewhere in Burroughs' fiction and nonfiction. In Burroughs' narratives, Hauser is the tough cop, the one who immediately begins with intimidation or delivers a few punches to soften up the suspect. O'Brien, however, represents a method all the more effective for being less blatant, less prescriptive, and less painful. Yet, the two are indeed a “team”; lurking in the background of the con cop's pleasantries is the threat of violence implied by the tough cop. As Burroughs writes in “Academy 23,” “the con cop's arm around your shoulder, his soft persuasive voice in your ear, are indeed sweet nothings without the tough cop's blackjack” (91). However, the con cop's willingness to make a deal allows the opportunity to negotiate your way out of the violence of the tough cop, and even to escape both cops altogether, even if only temporarily. What Burroughs suggests fictionally in this routine is made more explicit in the essay “The Limits of Control” where he emphasizes that most contemporary forms of social control operate through communicative practices that make control systems more flexible but also more open to manipulation. For Bur-roughs, “all control systems try to make control as tight as possible” but, “if they succeed completely, there would be nothing left to control” (117). If a control system eliminates any chance of rebellion, it also necessarily eliminates all agency in the subjects of control. For this reason, what Burroughs calls “control” must always operate through the use of communicative acts that function as commands:
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 basic limits of control. (117)
Control systems in Burroughs' schema share the basic logic of the networks they are carried through; like both biological and computational networks, they meet their highest efficiency at the edge of chaos.
For both Deleuze and Burroughs, such network schemas foreground another key difference between disciplinary sites of confinement and control systems: whereas in a panoptic schema some center, even an absent or implied one, must act as a point of surveillance or domination, control systems are based on an infinite series of linkages—the important point being not that control systems lack centers, but that they operate through multiple connections. Deleuze assays this difference through the array of connections that develop as disciplinary sites of confinement break down. In disciplinary arrangements, movement occurred between discrete sites: “Individuals are always going from one closed site to another, each with its own laws: first of all the family, then school (‘you're not at home, you know’), then the barracks (‘you're not at school you know’), then the factory, hospitals from time to time, maybe prison” (“Postscript” 117). As such sites decline, forces of social control become more dif use and pervasive, increasingly “located” in transmissions of media of various types rather than within physical sites. Burroughs would organize such connections around the concept of “coordinate points,” the locations where a force of control intersects a subject (Nova 57). As his collaborator Brion Gysin writes, much of Burroughs' work was premised on “disconnecting and reconnecting” such intersections (Burroughs and Gysin 17). Burroughs experimental writing techniques such as the cut-up and the fold-in were designed to destabilize well-worn associations between phenomena and then forge new connections by plugging “normally dissociated zones into the same sector.” The specificity of such linkages as well as the multiplicity of their collective operations are crucial to both Burroughs and Deleuze insofar as they suggest a way to thematize social control as a distributed and continual process working through a network, as opposed to a discrete series of operations functioning in relation to particular sites and in the service of producing specific states of identify or subjectivity.
In the most basic terms, then, Deleuze and Burroughs help us to rethink the structure of social control as it appears in the wake of an ongoing breakdown of traditional institutional sites. However, substantial differences remain in the ways they will conceive their own style of engagement or intervention in relation to this shift, differences that are worth examining at some length insofar as they shed light on the possibilities for answering the question of “resistance” today or thinking through strategies for responding to dif use systems of social power. If, as mentioned near the start of this chapter, the network logic composing forces of subjection has posed many challenges to traditional strategies developed in response to disciplinary power, my argument will be that examining this difference may give us a new angle on rethinking such techniques as well as the category of “resistance” itself.
As I argue above, Deleuze and Burroughs of er us a way to understand the changing shape of social control as a network system produced by the coeval development of capitalist modes of production and information technologies. Though the diagnosis of this situation is fairly similar in both accounts, there is an important divergence in the methods that each suggest for responding to such a system, one that I will argue might be thematized most productively around vectors of persuasion historically associated with doxa, that ancient rhetorical concept that often circulated as a counterpoint to episteme in ancient Greek culture (the “mere opinion” that was often portrayed as double or shadow of the “true knowledge” being produced by early philosophical thought and the emergent natural sciences). Indeed, it seems to me that doxa, while not having necessarily experienced the kind of renaissance that other early Greek rhetorical concepts have in recent cultural and political theory (such as kairos or ethos), is perhaps the missing term in a large number of recent discussions about the increasingly decentralized, “post-ideological,” or post-disciplinary nature of contemporary social power.
First, it seems like the notion of doxa—as a general or surface contention shared across the social field—can do some heavy lifting around the dilemma posed by the last of the three shifts in social power as described by Foucault and Deleuze: from social power centered on the application or threat of direct physical force as managed by a central authority (sovereign power), to its application via a subject's training in particular epistemologies and performance of particular behaviors at multiple institutional sites (discipline), to its contemporary formation as the decentralized and feedback-based interactions between individuals and diverse forms of institutions, media, and technologies (control). Doxa, I take it, would be one of our best extant concepts to describe the peculiar structure of the last of these systems, one in which more superficial and action-oriented motivations and dispositions are managed, as opposed to in the more brutal regime of sovereign power and the conflation of identity with epistemologies in disciplinary regimes (as described by Foucault's famous “power/ knowledge” configuration).
In this regard, we might consider how doxa, insofar as it connotes shared and fluctuating contentions rather than more traditionally veridical standards of knowledge or belief, has long been an implicit component of our analyses of social power, even if playing only a largely negative or ancillary role. In the Platonic critique of doxa, or at least in the version of it that was often invoked as a contrasting figure in poststructuralist thought, the problem with doxa is that it shows the negative influence of social factors on an individual's knowledge. Since doxa is by definition associated with the popular beliefs of “the crowd,” it remains the corrupt version of, or constant threat to, true knowledge as understood and proposed by those within the relatively singular or elitist class of the philosopher. However, in the poststructuralist critique of the legacy of this formation, one in which the role of power in legitimating what counts as knowledge or truth, doxa takes on a somewhat more productive role. Or, perhaps more precisely, we might say that doxa becomes the negative force through which all epistemic structures—all of those formations that would claim to be true knowledge and thus delegitimize opposing structures as “just” doxa—are interrogated for the degree to which they themselves are merely forms of doxa that have risen to the category of knowledge at different historical moments and under different frameworks of legitimacy or veridicity. On the one hand, then, doxa has long provided the alternative category against which dominant forms of knowledge and belief can be compared. On the other, the association of doxa with “common” or popular opinion, often disguised as knowledge, lives on in a variety of efforts in twentieth-century critical and cultural theory that drew our attention to the ways in which socially sanctified or pervasive beliefs were both those that seemed to occupy the role of knowledge and episteme, but were also those that, precisely because of their ubiquity or “common sense” nature, should be the targets of critical powers of contestation and demystification. At least since the time of Adorno and Horkheimer's famous (re)definition of “Enlightenment” as “mass deception,” as merely the moment in which a large enough group of individuals have been deceived in the same way, one of the shared contentions of subsequent critical theory—one is tempted to say, its own doxa— was of the necessary, and at least potentially revolutionary, task of showing the doxological structure of all dominant forms of knowledge.
Indeed, one could even expand this comparison to argue that the entire history of both philosophy as the study of constitution of knowledge and politics as the study of how power functions within social systems—even before the two become so explicitly entwined in mid-twentieth-century intellectual thought—shows them to be mediated by recurrent accusations of, and a fundamental reliance on, doxa as category. The historian of intellectual thought David R. Kelley has suggested something of the same in an essay that precedes through the brilliant conceit of visiting a number of topics associated with doxa—“mere opinion,” “prejudice,” “the role of history”—twice: once from the perspective of the mainstream, post-Platonic, anti-doxa strain of Western intellectual thought, and again in reference to a possible parallel “philodoxy” composed around thinkers who insisted on the necessity of opinion as a part of the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. Through such a rereading, doxa emerges as a crucial category in both cases, whether as a necessary target for philosophy or as the unstable center of a “philodoxy” that still strives to measure the possibilities of consensus knowledge and its social effects. However, I take it that the question of doxa is different today than when considered as part of either the above “short view” of the role of doxa in ancient Greek culture and its return in poststructuralist thought, or even in any “long view” that would capture its consistent, if implicit, position in Western intellectual culture up to the late twentieth century. Both of these cases tend to emphasize the importance of knowledge or some kind of ideological formation of presupposed beliefs as central, even if they are the same ones waiting to be revealed as merely doxa that was created or sustained by the particular structures of social power of a given time. The challenge in the present case is perhaps to think through the consequences that occur when doxa becomes the central category of contemporary sociality and public persuasion.
Second, doxa would seem to be a concept tailor-made for the otherwise difficult to describe ways in which contemporary social power works through a series of dynamic and feedback-based connections between individuals and broader social forces. Perhaps the most challenging (and therefore controversial) component of Foucault's theorization of social power around the concept of discipline was the way in which it multiplied the sources and methods through which the framework of commonplace beliefs or values circulated within societies. For one, it did not offer the relative comfort, at least from the point of view of the critical theorist or activist who might wish to operate starting from this conception, provided by a more traditional notion of ideology as a ruling concept; as opposed to earlier forms of ideology critique, one could not posit that an individual is conscious of only a distorted view of their material reality, and one that might be recovered in some way by retracing the path through which ideational frameworks of a particular culture emerge from and cover up their material conditions.8 Nor, for that matter, and despite the associations often made between Foucault's thought and “social constructionist” perspectives in cultural theory popular around the same time, does disciplinary power seem to provide us any of the benefits of that view of how social power is formed and maintained. In identifying social power as an inherently positive force structuring social relations the contemporary forms of subjectivity, Foucault cuts off any easy conclusion that such categories are merely the result of a kind or reasoned consensus of contemporary individuals (which we might “reason” against or rationally think our ways out of) or simply the dead weight of history deploying its residual effects on the present (in which case we could posthumously condemn past actors for creating the negative effects of social power that we experience in the present).
Although it was this kind of highly complex and capillary version of social power that was the major target of critiques of Foucault's mid-career work—the realization that power is felt as a pervasive quotidian experience bundled with the contention that this realization itself will in no way negate its functioning and effects—we might say that the updating of social power as “control” in the works of Burroughs and Deleuze is, if anything, even more capillary and less suggestive of effective strategies of resistance or redress. Even if disciplinary power's focus on the construction of varied, but particular, subjectivities made it appear immune to older forms of analysis and critique, it still suggested at least one option: working through and against such forms of identity as a way to expand the boundaries of, or multiply the possibilities within, what seemed like fairly rigid and endlessly reaffirmed options for individuals within disciplinary formations.9 In what Deleuze and Burroughs refer to as societies organized around “control,” however, this kind of flexibility is already an inherent part of the system; indeed, such work of expansion and multiplication seems to be in many ways what, for lack of a better word, social power “wants” from individuals, rather than the best way to disrupt its smooth functioning. Simply put, since in control societies, individuals are not merely “made subject to” forms of power, but in many ways provide the content and direction of more generic forces arranged around discrete activities or outputs, there does not seem to be much purchase on attempting to shore up either the “objective” or “subjective” nature or status of any particular ideology, discourse, or thematic of any type, as a way to get purchase on an outside or oppositional perspective or practice on control.
And it is in precisely this kind of situation that a focus on a kind of “opinion” as the modulation of common and surface-level shared affectations named by doxa can do a large amount of work around figuring out both the nature of power and “resistance” in the present. In particular, doxa has long designated the kind of co-constitutional domains of subjective/objective or individual/social experiences and motivations in a way that is difficult to thematize in recent theories of power. The classicist Eric Havelock traces this history from its point of origin:
Both the noun [doxa] and the verb doko, are truly baffling to modern logic In their coverage of both the subjective and objective relationship. The verb denotes both the “seeming” that going on in myself, the “subject,” namely my “personal impressions,” and the “seeming” that links me as an “object” to other people looking at me—the “impression” I make on them. The noun correspondingly is both the “impression” that may be in my mind and the “impression” held by others of me. It would appear therefore to be the ideal term to describe that fusion or confusion of the subject with the object. (250–251)
As I have been arguing throughout this chapter as well as various earlier points in this book, a very large share of phenomena shaping contemporary forms of social power—from media networks, to niche marketing, to populist discourse—seem to function through this kind of feedback-driven blurring of such categories and the particular forms of attraction and influence, ones best captured by persuasion as a motivating force and rhetoric as a disciplinary domain, that seem inherent to such an arrangement.
In the remainder of this chapter, I want to take up such a doxa -centered approach in thinking through the second segment of our itinerary here, the- matizing the possible presentations of “resistance” suggested by Deleuze's and Burroughs' respective thought as the counterpoint to the description of power described above. To provide a bit narrower of a focus, I will be concentrating on marketing as a particularly exemplary phenomena of control societies. In a broad sense, this might seem like a fairly obvious focus; much as advertising often played the role, in the work of such thinkers from Roland Barthes to Raymond Williams, of an earlier mode of power based on making associations between its audiences and socially pervasive categories of desired status or behavior, marketing, that more feedback-driven and aleatory form of promotion via media, is perhaps most representative of the logic of control in its most quotidian and pervasive forms.10 More specifically, as I will suggest below, marketing is perhaps the best point of entry into determining the contrast between Deleuze and Burroughs on the question of “resistance” in control societies, one that I will further argue might be particularly important for modeling our own responses or interventions around control in the present.
We might begin unpacking Deleuze's engagement with these vectors around his strategies for what would constitute “liberation” or “resistance” to both the negative effects of capitalism and contemporary social control, strategies that have themselves shifted through a number of works. If, as discussed above, contemporary discussions about the definition, or possibility, of “resistance” in contemporary cultural theory often end up invoking in one way or another the late works of Foucault—and, more specifically, the question of whether his late works seem to suggest a certain complicity with the forces of power that were the targets of earlier texts—something of the same critique has appeared in reference to Deleuze's writings on politics and social power. Slajov Zizek has provided perhaps the most pointed version of this critique; referencing a book review of Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? that imagines the puzzled look appearing on the face of “enlightenment-seeking yuppie” that has purchased the bestselling book expecting a pop-philosophy text and is now confronted with “page after page of vintage Deleuze,” Zizek imagines the opposite reaction:
What, however, if there is no puzzled look but enthusiasm, when the yuppie reads about impersonal imitation of affects, about the communication of affective intensities beneath the level of meaning (”Yes, this is how I design my publicities!”), or when he reads about exploding the limits of self-contained subjectivity and directly coupling man to machine (”This reminds me of my son's favorite toy, the action-man that can turn into a car!”), or about the need to reinvent oneself permanently, opening oneself up to a multitude of desires the push us to the limit (”Is this not the aim of the virtual sex video game I am working on now? It is no longer a question of reproducing sexual bodily contact but of exploding the confines of established reality and imagining new, unheard-of intensive modes of sexual pleasures!”). (Organs 183)
Such enthusiasm, Zizek argues, suggests that a variety of the critical modes and practices Deleuze had developed as methods of resistance to the negative effects of capitalist production are in fact “features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism” (183–184). Such a contention is an overstatement, of course, particularly insofar as it ignores Deleuze's well-known disaffection for both ideology as a critical concept and his rather complex engagement with capitalism as a system (of which, more in a moment); however, I am not so much interested in this particular reading as I am in exactly what might constitute methods of “complicity” or “resistance” in reference to the shifting grounds of contemporary capitalism and social control, methods Deleuze has reformulated several times in the space between the volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia and his later writings on control systems, and one that might be read as microcosm for the problematics of rethinking “resistance” in the contemporary moment.
As numerous critics have mentioned, the years in between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus seem to indicate not only stylistic but also strategic changes in Deleuze and Guattari's thinking. The first volume progressed toward a “schizoanalytic” methodology that would seek to liberate desire by consistently deterritorializing the social coding of capitalist subjection; though capitalism is depicted as itself an immense system for releasing unpredictable forms of desire, it continually reterritorializes in the creation of increasingly exploitive systems. However, the schizoanalytic method of consistent deterritorialization risks being outpaced, as in the interventional strategies mentioned above, as it appears geared toward an understanding of social control that produces discrete normative states rather than the flexible modulations of contemporary capitalism. As Eugene W. Holland argues, Deleuze and Guattari's own attention to this change appears to emerge between the volumes and helps explain the absence of schizoanalysis in A Thousand Plateaus. As Holland writes, “as long as the relative fixity of social codes—codes of labor discipline, codes of collective fashion preference, and so on—was crucial to axioms of mass production, schizophrenic decoding had a point (a point d'appui) and a disruptive effect,” but as codes of social control became more modular rather than modal, a new strategy was needed to rethink how it might be possible to reorganize lines of flight and modes of resistance in more productive ways and in more specific circumstances (72).
Indeed, when Deleuze later begins diagnosing new forms of capitalism and the control society model of power explicitly, the enemy shifts from the metageneric process of rigid reterritorialization to a very specific technique: marketing. Though Deleuze leaves the question of what role opposition may take in control societies, he concludes “Postscript” by stating that “future forms of resistance” will be those “capable of standing up to marketing's blandishments” (182). Earlier, he positions marketing as the key vector of contemporary control and the source of its negative effects: “Corruption here takes on a new power. The sales department becomes a business' center or ‘soul.’ We're told business have souls which is surely the most terrifying news in the world. Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the arrogant breed who are our masters” (181). This focus on marketing as primary content provider for social control of course makes a certain amount of sense; if flexible control and finance capitalism operate not through the imposition of discrete normalizing states and modes of subjection, but rather through a consistently varying response to potential new markets and supple subjectivities, then it is certainly reasonable to foreground marketing as the primary vector for these control systems. However, my concern here is with the degree to which one should, or can, hypostasize marketing as a technique or mode of engagement that must be resisted.
Deleuze and Guattari thematize marketing in much the same way throughout What Is Philosphy?, published around the same time as Deleuze's writings on control. Here marketing is positioned precisely as an opposition to the productive force of philosophy:
Finally, the most shameful moment [for philosophy] came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: “This is our concern we are the creative ones; we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers” (10)
It, of course, makes sense to distinguish between philosophy and marketing in a primer that is primarily geared to define philosophy for a general audience. However, it is again the oppositional nature of this distinction that I want to question. As Deleuze and Guattari formulate it, philosophy “has not remained unaffected by the general movement that replaced Critique with sales promotion” but the crowding out of philosophy is a call for the reinstallation of philosophical critique: “Certainly, it is painful to learn that Concept indicates a society of information services and engineering. But the more philosophy comes up against shameless and inane rivals and encounters them at its very core, the more it feels driven to fulfill the task of creating concepts that are aerolites rather than commercial products” (11).
Deleuze and Guattari's disaffection for marketing is related to their treatment of opinion in What Is Philosophy?, a category that is similarly the target of much acrimony. As Deleuze and Guattari detail, the philosopher is confronted from all sides by the forming and circulation of opinions; the challenge for the philosopher is to extract “knowledge” from them without either submitting opinions to a higher standard of valuation such as Platonic or Hegelian dialectic, which, they write, leads only to “interminable discussion,” or applying “universals of communication” such as Aristotle's topics to the study of them (79). The problem with opinions, they write, is that they formulate thought around processes of “recognition” that seem to divide individuals into groups based on commonality or rivalry. In its worst manifestations, working with opinions can lead to the creation of monolithic or homogenous collectives through the establishment of orthodoxy. However, this “is still only the fist step of opinion's reigns: opinion triumphs when the quality chosen ceases to be the condition of a group's constitution but is now only the image or ‘badge’ of the constituted group … Then marketing appears as the concept itself” (145). For Deleuze, then, it seems marketing is not only the engine of capitalism and the locus of its negative effects, but also the technique that must be distinguished and resisted, particularly insofar as it continually brings us into engagements structured largely on the grounds of opinion.
I dwell on Deleuze's treatment of marketing above because I believe it helps underscore the contemporary problematics of articulating “resistance” in response to control societies. If, as argued at various points in this book, traditional critical strategies—interventions based on foregrounding difference, situating knowledge claims within their ideological and social contexts, and exploring the possibilities of leveraging affective forces against capitalist exploitation—appear to lose their effectivity in response to the increased flexibility of parametric modes of social power, then “resistance” seems to be stuck being positioned within some logic outside of this ostensibly all-consuming flexibility, or it can only find its identity in being the force that blocks the persuasive power of such a system.
I find such a move troubling insofar as it seems to suggest that as flows of social control become increasingly flexibly, modes of resistance must become themselves more flexibly oppositional. However, as social control becomes increasingly networked and less reliant on rigid sites and discrete states, there becomes literally nothing or at least “no one thing” to resist, which suggest we may have to rethink the category of “resistance” altogether. We might begin such an itinerary by returning again to the domain that seems to largely factored out or made abject in Deleuze's analysis: rhetoric. It seems to me, as suggested by Deleuze and Guattari's disaffection for engagements with opinion, their strategy equally opposes the application of rhetoric as an ecology of strategies and techniques. Most generically, it seems to undermine the force of rhetoric in its productive rather than interpretive form, as, in its canonical definition, to identify and mobilize all possible means of persuasion in a given situation. More specifically, but in a similar manner, it equally discounts the force of rhetoric as a strategy that enacts persuasion by working through the established opinions of a given audience or the given forces circulating in an environment. Of course, if as Deleuze and Guattari suggests, the “best” elements of philosophy have been appropriated by marketing, this is certainly at least as true of its cooption of rhetorical techniques.11 I take it, however, the fundamental rhetorical move would be to develop methods for working through the logic of marketing insofar as it seems to be the dominant force and ecology of the persuasion in the present moment.
This is, I think, where Burroughs' intervention is crucial. As detailed above, Deleuze and Burroughs present largely similar diagnoses of social control; however, Burroughs' prescriptions would be consistently organized around strategies of inversion or reversal that attempt to work through the mechanisms of control to produce certain effects. As he writes in “The Revised Boy Scout Manual,” “the extent to which revolutionary theory and tactics is disadvantageously shaped by opposition is something few revolutionaries like to think about,” and we might take up Burroughs' contrary appropriation of control mechanisms in a variety of registers as inspiration here (5; emphasis added). For instance, stylistically, though Burroughs' early writings made extensive use of cut-ups, random assemblages of words and texts that would block typical associational patterns of reading, he would later express “complete dissatisfaction” with this work and its tendency to leave him in “complete isolation” away from dominant narrative styles (qtd. in Ansen 55). Instead he would create strategies for producing the same effects through more common modes of writing, for instance, not only using “fragments of [Joseph] Conrad” in cut-ups but also adapting “the Conrad Style” (qtd. in Harris, 259). In the control economies of his fictions, he would introduce Clem Snide, Private Asshole, who uses the methods of the “tough cop” and “con cop” for his own purposes. Appropriately, when assigned to rescue an abducted client, he seeks demographic research: “I want to know preferences in food, clothes, colors, reading, entertainment, use of drugs and alcohol, what cigarette brand he smokes, medical history” (Cities 37).
Again, though marketing is taken up here only as an example of this strategy of working through control, it is perhaps a particularly important one given the concerns of this chapter. We might begin unpacking Burroughs' relation to marketing tactics in reference to Thomas Frank's response to Burroughs' 1995 appearance in a Nike commercial, one that is at least partially comparable to Zizek's critique of Deleuze's complicity with capitalist modalities. In “Why Johnny Can't Dissent,” Frank similarly argues that Burroughs' commercial appearance is an indicator of larger changes in contemporary capitalism:
The most startling revelation to emerge from the Burroughs/Nike partnership is not that corporate America has overwhelmed its cultural foes or that Burroughs can somehow be “subversive” through it all, but the complete lack of dissonance between the two sides. Of course Burroughs is not “subversive,” but neither has he “sold out”: His ravings are no longer appreciably different from the official folklore of American capitalism. What's changed is not Burroughs, but business itself. As expertly as Burroughs once bayoneted American proprieties, as stridently as he once proclaimed himself beyond the laws of man and God, he is today a respected ideologue of the Information Age, occupying roughly the position in the pantheon of corporate-cultural thought once reserved strictly for Notre Dame football coaches and positive-thinking Methodist ministers. His inspirational writings are boardroom favorites, his dark nihilistic burpings the happy homilies of the new corporate faith. (36–37)
Frank goes on to compare Burroughs' work to management guru Tom Peter's 1987 primer Thriving on Chaos, which he takes to anticipate the flexible logic of contemporary capitalism. Although Frank may be exaggerating Burroughs' importance to corporate culture—it is hard to imagine a circle of business man pounding thousand dollar watches off the board table chanting “You thing rike jellyfish pretty soon now” or “slow masturbation used to be me mister”—his comments illustrate an important point and one that I take to be somewhat different than Zizek's critique of Deleuze, or at least one that casts this kind of finger-pointing criticism in general in a different light. Whereas Zizek may be at least partially correct in stating that Deleuze's strategies of resistance are counterproductive insofar as they become, as compared against Deleuze's own analysis, similar to strategies of capitalist production, it seems to me that Burroughs' similarity in the same respects is precisely what makes his work productive. This is not to say that Burroughs was simply a canny manipulator of ways to generate profit, though—from his various chinchilla-, corn-, and marijuana- growing schemes early in his career (detailed in Junky and fictionalized in several of Kerouac's books), until the time his writing and celebrity became profitable—Burroughs was certainly never opposed to making a quick buck. More importantly, marketing would be one of many structures he would appropriate as a means of navigating the “control mechanisms” of contemporary media and dominant forms of social persuasion. For Burroughs, the problem was never these systems themselves, but rather finding a way manipulate the logic by which they work.
Appropriately, Burroughs' first paid position was in marketing. By his own account, after completing graduate work in anthropology and finding academic life to involve “too much faculty intrigue” Burroughs worked as copywriting in an advertising agency (qtd. in Knickerbocker 76). As he states later, he has “thought a great deal about advertising. After all, they're doing the same sort of thing. They are concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image”; but Burroughs is not interested in getting readers to “go out and buy Coca-Cola,” but in creating “an alteration in the reader's consciousness” (81). In the same interview he argues that there is “no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue” (69). Again, Burroughs' interest in marketing tactics is one particular example of Burroughs' strategy for hacking control, but it is perhaps the most prescient one if marketing is becoming both the dominant and most flexible instrument of social control. The crucial question, as I have been arguing throughout this chapter, is not so much how these forces can be resisted, but to develop the possibilities for their manipulation. As Burroughs will suggest throughout his work, as counterintuitive as it may initially seem, the fact that the forces of social power have become increasingly ingrained into a vast variety of quotidian techniques that pervade contemporary culture, is also precisely what makes modes of effectively responding to them increasingly available and apparent. Or, as Burroughs writes in Nova Express, “The counter move is very simple—This is machine strategy and the machine can be redirected” (74).
All of the above, of course, leads us with many unanswered questions regarding how such a strategy of inversion or reversal might be mobilized. Though I take it this is perhaps the question of thinking through the complexities of social power in the present and one that is unlikely to be resolved all that quickly, in an homage to Burroughs' penchant for the programmatic register—“ Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-to Book” (182)—I offer below three possible instructions for working through forces of social control.
Certainly one of the more difficult dilemmas posed by both Deleuze and Burroughs in their survey of control societies is the ways in which contemporary social power seems to feed on the very tools of critique—the challenging of essentialist binaries, the exposure of the bias or contradictions within dominant modes of thought and belief, the multiplication of categories of acceptable identity or behavior—that drove much politically oriented cultural theory of the previous decades. Here too we might read this dilemma as the repetition, at another level, of the same problems posed by Foucault's disciplinary power; one of the major critiques of Foucault's theorization of social power was that its capillary conception of power as a force that made subjects by working on bodies seemed to leave very little room for any kind of political intervention that relied on somehow “returning” people to some kind of originary or natural identity existing underneath the constructions of social power, or, as in the identity politics popular at the time of Foucault's writing, trust that critical analyses of the various ways that particular social groups have been disadvantageously defined by such constructions could pave the way toward more egalitarian forms of representation and community. Though, as mentioned above, the shift from analyzing the category of (ideological) identity to (social) subjectivity and a more free-floating and diverse style of critique in general—one in which communication and representation “themselves” rather than more rigidly defined systems of economic or imperialist exploitation became targets—was salutary, even these avenues of intervention seem to be cut off in the transition from discipline to control. In a time wherein the criticism of traditional scientific rationality is more likely to be voiced by conservative political strategists than it is by left-oriented humanities and social science scholars, and while moving through your radio dial you are just as likely to hear about the latest governmental or social oppression of wealthy white American males as you are of any other group, both critique as a method of epistemological exposure and “the subject” as a focus for tracking social power seem to have lost much of their effect.
For these reasons, perhaps one way to begin responding to these shifts is to reimagine the role of critical and cultural theory as performing a function and a focus other than that of these well-worn vectors. Perhaps it is not even so much that critique has been hijacked by the factions it was typically wielded against in critical theory that is the problem here, inasmuch as it is critique as a mode that presumes to show the mistaken epistemological assumptions of a particular group has always been a pretty fraught undertaking, becoming in large part, as Jeff Nealon suggests, merely “a version of the condescending convention wisdom that most people don't know what they're doing” (Foucault 108). This is not to say that “critique” of this type does not do a large amount of work—that is precisely why we might presume it has been appropriated by such diverse parties—but perhaps the real problem here is coming to terms with how even it has always functioned as a motivational force, a form or persuasion rather than of enlightenment.
Concomitantly, we might do well to spend more time thinking about how it works on that kind of surface level, as a way of directing and refining certain existing dispositions and common conceptions already extant in particular social fields. This is, I take it, the lesson we might read in Burroughs' nonfiction writings on social control as well as the shift in his aesthetic work from experimental writing based on the appropriation and rearrangement of particular words and images to his appropriation of whole “styles” of expression and persuasion. This too, I take it, was an important focus of an earlier vintage of Deleuze. Consider, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari's description, in A Thousand Plateaus, of how to experiment with existing forces of social power by “making yourself a Body without Organs (BwO)”:
This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight… It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, subjugate, continue: a whole “diagram,” as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. (161)
What we might learn from both Deleuze and Burroughs, then, is to “diagram” such forces as forces, as the effects of particular techniques and strategies, rather than the creation or destruction of epistemological frames or of the possible identities and subjectivities of individuals.
We might draw a related strategy from Burroughs' work in and around the ways in which he tends to present techniques for intervening in contemporary control systems as themselves largely appropriations of the dominant logic of that system—a kind or “reappropriation” or act of reverse-expropriation performed in response to how he sees control systems as themselves acting parasitically on human capacities for imagination and invention. In Burroughs' work, such subversive or inversive acts are typically performed through various “cons” or confidence games; the techniques of social power that Burroughs personifies in the “con cop” character that appears in his fiction is frequently met by a number of “con men” and related figures whose deploy the same techniques in pursuit of different or opposite ends. Though we have seen some examples of the above in Burroughs' work already, in regard to relating this technique to the larger question of “domination” and ”resistance” in social power today, we might shift to two characters from the fiction of another author much beloved by both Burroughs and Deleuze, one of which has already taken on a certain symbolic value as a symbol of resistance in contemporary cultural and political theory.
I refer specifically here to the rather strange revival of the titular character of Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” as a heroic figure in writings of such thinkers as Agamben, Blanchot, Derrida, Hardt and Negri, and Zizek.12 In all these appropriations, Bartleby's famously cryptic deferral—”I would prefer not to”—is taken as an example of absolute refusal or pure negativity, either as the clearing point for a new social arrangement to come, as some type of escape from the reciprocity of domination and resistance, or as a refusal to play the game of capital or of power. Bartleby's “absolute refusal” becomes the only authentic act available to an individual when every available action seems automatically compromised by its complicity with ever more flexible systems of social and economic interpellation or expropriation.
However, we might find a better or more appropriate figure for the present in another of Melville's characters, the polymorphic creation of his final novel The Confidence-Man. If “Bartleby” was a tale of how charity fails in an instance—the narrator relates how his charitable actions toward Bartleby are unsuccessful—The Confidence-Man indexes the impossibility of wholly “resistant” or “authentic” action in a time wherein all behaviors seem to already be complicit within the dominant power structures of their own environment. Through the series of vignettes that compose the novel, charitable actions are mixed with cruelty or revealed to emanate from necessarily ulterior motives: a proto-socialist “man in gray” launches trenchant critiques of capitalism while simultaneously dreaming of a “benevolence tax” that would be dedicated to easing poverty (later seeking donations for an orphan asylum that does not exist); a panhandler is ignored by a crowd clustered around the wanted poster of a criminal poster and buying lurid crime pamphlets; a disabled “New Guinea beggar” is only able to solicit charitable donations by degrading himself by catching thrown coins in his mouth and then is almost seized and beaten by a crowd of travelers after another panhandler alleges that his disability is feigned, and that he may be a white man in disguise. Anytime any charitable action takes place, it is revealed to be cathected to some notion of profit on behalf of the giver: a public display of their moral values, the storing of credit in heaven, or the chance to feel better about oneself as an ethical individual.
Though written long before the various changes in technoscience and political economy that have been the focus of this book, and most often approached through the various ways it reflects tensions (over identity, race, and social justice) of his own time, Melville's work in this text may be one of our best depictions of the challenges posed by the overwhelming technicity of the present: one in which persuasive techniques and strategies of all types seem to have become unmoored from their ideological backgrounds and made available for purposes quite contrary from their original purpose, one in which authenticity and acts of critique or judgment can obtain value only within the same economy of flexible power and persuasion they were once positioned against.
Taken together, these strategies at best offer not “resistance” to the powers of control and communication, but rather a certain toolbox for manipulating these flows, an application of them through a logic of inversion and appropriation. We might borrow Deleuze's analogy for the modulation of social power— ”Surfing has taken over from all the old sports” — and develop practices not in the direction of resistance but toward the creative ”surfing” of these flows (”Postscript” 180). Here again, it is important to recall from the introduction of this book the coining of cybernetics as a discipline from the Greek term for “steering” or “navigation.” Insofar as cybernetics seems to occupy both the form and function of control societies, the flexible strategies of feedback might be our best conceptual resource in rethinking what it would mean to “resist” such systems. Additionally we might emphasize the coincidence of this term with rhetoric in Wiener's source, Plato's Gorgias. The strategies of both cybernetics and rhetoric, it seems to me, imply not a resistance to or renunciation of the forces in which one is immersed, but instead techniques for their practiced redirection and the opening of occasions to respond to them differently. It is at this vector, I'd like to suggest, that we must begin searching for our ethical and rhetorical responses to the networked logic of control societies and of life in the cybernetic age. As Burroughs reminds us at the end of The Ticket That Exploded, the forces of control are open to “any number” of manipulations and appropriations: “The techniques and experiments described here have been used and are being used by agencies official and non official without your awareness and very much to your disadvantage … any number can play” (215).