Test1-16

From Political Economy to Political Ecology

In recent years, Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy has become a critical touchstone for new materialisms, new ontologies and (now) new ecologies.1 Though Deleuze almost never uses this word, not even in his collaborations with Félix Guattari,2 the intimations of ecology can be found at a great many points in his thought—in the insistence on the externality of all relations, in the expression of rhizomatic assemblages, and especially in the concept of ‘a life’ that exceeds the organic bodies. When it comes to devising a posthuman ecology and formulating a new eco-philosophy, one could do a lot worse than to consult Deleuze—but for all that, his work poses a genuine problem. The recourse to ecologism obligates us, I’d argue, to reckon with Deleuze’s misgivings about what we are becoming, about our collective existence and about the prospects for life.

In later years, when a note of pessimism crept into his writing, Deleuze sought to analyse, in admittedly broad strokes, the emergence of a new regime of power. With control, the collective assemblage of forces undergoes a radical—or, as Deleuze would say, diagrammatic—transformation. Catalysed by structural transformations of capitalism and operationalised by rapid advances in digital technology, control designates the social machine, at once subtle and vast, meticulous and overarching, within which we move, think, and live today. We constantly confront new techniques of social organisation and behavioural modification, though these are often sold to us (figuratively or literally) under the guise of convenience, security or ‘connectedness’. In any event, control societies subject us to surveillance, analysis, calculation, integration, prediction, valuation, engineering, and extraction. My point, then, is that if we’re to draw on Deleuze to develop something like the concept of 206a socioecology, we cannot ignore the political economy, or biopolitics, he diagnoses. This is especially important to remember if, following a number of recent thinkers (e.g., Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi),3 we regard ecology in expressly political terms.

In ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, a brief essay later collected in Negotiations (Pourparlers),4 Deleuze analyses the gestation of this new sociopolitical regime against the backdrop of an earlier episteme. The text is set amidst the crumbling and the dismantling of the welfare state. The great institutions of modernity—the school, the military, the factory, the hospital, the prison—are beleaguered; ‘everyone knows these institutions are in more or less terminal decline’.5 What’s at stake for Deleuze is nothing less than the slow collapse of ‘disciplinary society’, the regime of power, per Michel Foucault, that dominated the eighteenth, nineteenth, and much of the twentieth century. Having divested power from the centralising pretence of sovereignty, discipline describes the distribution and refraction of forces among new discourses, new species of knowledge, and new (or renewed) institutions. Foucault’s studies of discipline trace the features—the architectures of confinement, structures of segregation, and techniques of individuation—of a dispositif that traverses the school, the barracks, the factory, the hospital and the prison.6

Nevertheless, Deleuze insists that ‘Foucault knew how short-lived discipline was’7 and the ‘Postscript’ duly takes up the question—what’s next? Doubtless, discipline began to break down in the first half of the twentieth century, but only after the Second World War, when new forces, machines, and techniques ‘made rapid advances’, did control society take shape: ‘we were no longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind’.8 By the time the ‘Postscript’ was published, the new regime of power was discernible if not entirely comprehensible. Of course, the disintegration of disciplinary institutions, particularly those intended to promote the general welfare, has provoked understandable alarm and justified outrage. Having said that, Deleuze suggests that by ‘nursing’ these institutions ‘through their death throes’ we risk ignoring ‘the new forces knocking at the door’9—or, worse, embracing them under mistaken pretences. Hence, while some mourn the passing of discipline, others welcome control as if it promised emancipation, and this liberatory sentiment lies at the heart of my analysis. Unlike the segmentary ‘sites of confinement’10 concretised by disciplinary institutions, control societies are characterised by dispersive relations, modular designs, open floor plans, endless options, and almost unceasing movement—that is to say, by a world in which power becomes both imperceptible and ubiquitous.

Ostensibly, control societies offer the pretence of infinite individual autonomy: unfolding networks of communication and information extended along a ‘continuous range of different orbits’,11 control induces a sense of 207frictionless mobility—whether in space or cyberspace. ‘Surfing has taken over from all the old sports’, Deleuze writes in ‘Postscript’, and it’s worth noting that within two years of its publication, ‘surfing the internet’ was coined. Nevertheless, the great theme of control, its abiding conceit, consists in making the smooth space of this regime, and the ostensible promise of freedom, the basis for a ‘new system of domination’.12 With control we leave behind the institutional architectures and normative categories of discipline for an increasingly insidious and illegible power. Control societies ‘no longer operate by confining people’, Deleuze says, ‘but through continuous control and instant communication’.13 We are no longer herded so much as we are tracked: virtually every transaction, decision, movement and choice is recorded, harvested, analysed and instrumentalised. ‘Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites’, Deleuze says, ‘we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past’.14 What can ecology mean under the auspices of control? How can we understand (much less affirm) Deleuze’s concept of ‘a life’? Control society constitutes the crucible and condition with which political ecology is faced.

For this reason, I’ll begin by returning to the ‘Postscript’ in order to develop the ‘varying geometry’15 of control and to indicate the collective and altogether technical assemblage that it comprises. Precisely because it’s so brief and so provocative, critics have often imagined themselves ‘resuming’ Deleuze’s analysis. The discussion to follow is by no means immune to this tendency, but if we are to look forward, and to consider the transformation of biopolitics and the challenge to political ecology, we ought to look (ex-postscript) backwards insofar as Deleuze explicitly casts his essay as the resumption of Foucault’s historical analyses (or, better still, as the resumption of Deleuze’s monograph, Foucault). My intervention, however, consists in arguing that the full scope of control ought to be understood by reading the ‘Postscript’ in relation to Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics. More to the point, I’d suggest that this is the very challenge which confronts us today, for only on this basis can we begin to articulate the objective of political ecology—namely, to grasp the society of control in view of an ‘other’ system to which the organic as well as the inorganic belongs.

The Geometry of Control

Far from concentrating power (in a sovereign) or distributing it (among institutions), control corresponds to a profound transformation of power-relations. Above all, control dispenses with institutional ‘moulds’ in order to precipitate what Deleuze, following Gilbert Simondon, calls ‘modulation’.16 In control societies, then, we move through the endless ‘modulations of a 208finely woven and infinitely flexible “sieve [tamis]” ’.17 Ubiquitous, intimate and yet elusive, the ‘mesh [les mailles]’ of control ‘varies at each moment from one point to another’.18 Thus, as Deleuze observes, control is a ‘system of varying geometry’, and we might begin here by redefining its basic elements—points and lines. We can imagine these elements of geometry as if they were different dimensions of control or, better still, different styles: the first is pointillist, pixilated, and molecular; the other is expressionist, delineated, and bifurcating. Thus, power is increasingly disseminated into swaths of ceaselessly varying singularities and splintered into a filigree of countless, constantly varying vectors.

The varying geometry of control has profoundly altered our sense of space and spatialisation. In the first place, and as a matter of biopolitics, control concerns the modern management of populations and the corresponding deployment of statistics. Take, for instance, a paradigmatic instrument of this new regime—the census. The nomenclature of the census derives from the Romans, who used it to record names of men of military age, and while the practice was revived in the Middle Ages and thereafter became common practice (for townships, cities, and of course colonial territories, and eventually for nation-states), it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the census fully became an instrument of governmental reason. The great age of demography, which underwrote the administrative state, has not waned—far from it. Rather, with new communications and computational technologies, the demographic instinct has been appropriated to other fields and other enterprises (actuarial tables, liability indexes, market research, advertising placements, target audiences). Despite the global scope of ‘big data’, we’d have to admit that the reach of control society—the capacity to swallow ever greater swaths of population and digest ever greater data sets—is complemented by a second faculty, the capacity to tailor control to individual tastes, fears, addictions, etc. for which there can be no other name than ‘micropolitics’.19 Thus, the collection and selling of one’s data (now openly condoned with abolishment of ‘net neutrality’) fuels the analytic machinery whereby our patterns, habits, predilections and desires are analysed. Each profile will be aggregated into the larger data set, but by the same token, that data set will be brought to bear on each profile so as to refine the endless series of carefully calibrated alerts, advertisements, sales, appeals, recommendations and reminders to which we are subject. The massification of control proceeds through the ‘nichification’ of power—once more, a dispersive regime.

The third and final aspect of control further distorts the particularity of the site or milieu. We’ve effectively described control as both macrological and micrological, but the relation between the two cannot be brokered on the basis of the local, locality, or locus which would otherwise lead, partes extra partes, to the whole. More than ever before, control is characterised 209by delocalisation. This concept claims a critical, if underappreciated, place in twentieth-century continental philosophy, conjured as it by the German phenomenological tradition (a consequence of Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-Sein]) and then cashed out in a French tradition that includes (among others) Gaston Bachelard, Raymond Ruyer, Paul Virilio, as well as Deleuze and Guattari.20 Admittedly, the latter rarely deploy delocalisation as such, usually assimilating its sense to the nomenclature of ‘deterritorialisation’. But in their famous ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, later included in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge the significance of delocalisation by proxy. In the course of elaborating the ‘war-machine’, the authors refer to Paul Virilio’s analysis of modern sea power—‘the fleet in being’.21 In essence, Virilio argues that not only maritime strategy but our sense of space itself has been transformed by new, military technology. To wit: far from making a show of military strength, the modern navy deploys nuclear submarines, which are ‘content, while controlling the sea, to remain invisible’. Because it can launch its warheads from any navigable point on the globe, the submarine lacks a destination. As Deleuze and Guattari explain: ‘one no longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it with a vector of deterritorialization in perpetual motion’.22

Notably, in a critical footnote, the authors substantiate this contention with a series of passages from Virilio’s Speed and Politics. The montage of quotations concludes:

If, as Lenin claimed, ‘strategy means choosing which points we apply force to’, we must admit that these ‘points’, today, are no longer geostrategic strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it might be … geographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value, and, inversely, that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of a vector in permanent movement.23

The privileged ‘geostrategic’ point, on the basis of which force was stereotypically applied, has been dissolved into a smooth space within which the telemetry of a missile can precisely connect any given location to any other. Inasmuch as no point (of localisation) is more intrinsic than the rest, Virilio proposes to speak, instead, of the ‘delocalisation of the vector’, which is to say, the metamorphic modulations of the line.

If the traditional coordinates of space, to which the ‘geometric’ or ‘spatial’ vector first applied, was effectively delocalised by military technology, control concerns the commercialisation and dissemination of this technology (above all, the availability of accurate GPS for civilian use, which began in 2000). The advancements that made it possible to strike a site from 210‘any point whatever’ (queleque point quleconque) have enabled the global communications and information networks with which one can appear in a classroom, trade a derivative, view a drone strike, or corrupt another computer from thousands of miles away. Delocalisation means action at a distance. Whereas sovereign power had been violently direct, and disciplinary power was oblique, one might say that, with control, power is increasingly remote. In the ‘Postscript’, Deleuze explains that control society ‘functions with a third generation of machines’.24 The first generation, corresponding to sovereign power, refers to simple machines (levers, pulleys, etc.). The second generation, corresponding to disciplinary society, was mechanical, thermodynamic. But the emergence of control is inseparable from the roughly contemporaneous development of ‘cybernetic machines’: above all, ‘information technology and computers’.25

The Business of Control

Despite his acknowledgement of technological transformations, Deleuze insists that ‘machines don’t explain anything’ about control.26 In other words, machines cannot explain control society but, rather, stand in need of explanation. In this context, Deleuze writes, the revolution of digital technology is ‘more deeply rooted in a mutation of capitalism’.27 What is this mutation? Consider the preceding stage of industrial capitalism. The latter was ‘concentrative, directed toward production, and proprietorial’; it typically succeeded by means of ‘specialisation’, ‘colonisation’, or ‘reducing the costs of production’.28 By contrast, the ‘Postscript’ sketches three aspects of a transformed capitalism—(1) metaproduction, (2) business (marketing), and (3) debt—with which the emergence of control is immanent.

In the first place, Deleuze says, we have reached a phase of capitalism in which production is outsourced, such that a business seeks to purchase activity (labour power) and sell ‘products’.29 Needless to say, ‘metaproduction’ is driven by sales and markets. As Deleuze writes, rather loosely, ‘Markets are won by asserting control rather than by establishing discipline, by fixing rates rather than by reducing costs, by transforming products rather than by specializing production’.30 In this respect, Deleuze broadly describes a kind of post-fordist economy, one driven by marketing ethos and a managerial culture. ‘The sales department becomes a business center or “soul” ’, Deleuze writes, and where this was once ‘terrifying news’, we are now habituated to a world in which the rhetoric of corporate personhood is ubiquitous.31 Thus, in control societies, the factory gives way to the business (or, simply, to ‘business’). ‘Factories formed individuals into a body of men’ which management could monitor as a mass and unions could mobilise en masse. 211But with the shift to metaproduction, to markets and marketing, a different organism takes shape. When Deleuze says that ‘a business is a soul, a gas’,32 he underscores that it is also a dispersive enterprise. In contrast to the factory model, which was capable of conditioning camaraderie, ‘businesses are constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself’.33 The objective and result is that businesses introduce a principle of ‘modulation into all wages, bringing them into a state of constant metastability punctuated by ludicrous challenges, competitions, and seminars’.34

The third aspect of the ‘mutation of capitalism’ concerns debt. Needless to say, the question of debt is hardly new, and elsewhere Deleuze imagines the ‘adventure of debt’ as a kind of longue durée, the ‘prejudicative’ beginnings of which elude us.35 At any rate, the point here is that, from early on, debt and judgement are imbricated: ‘Man does not appeal to judgment, he judges and is judgable only to the extent that his existence is subject to an infinite debt: the infinity of the debt and the immortality of existence each depend on the other’.36 Inasmuch as existence never ceases to accrue debt, no amount of time will be sufficient to repay the debt. Pace Nietzsche, Deleuze follows debt from the domain of the gods to the triumph of Christianity, but in the ‘Postscript’ the concept of debt is squarely cast in terms of the aforementioned ‘mutation in capitalism’, which is to say, as a matter of control. Once we assume a debt, our freedoms are circumscribed by obligations that effectively territorialise us in relation to institutions, interest rates, finance laws and the like, not to mention all the collateral administrative expectations. Judgement today is delivered and emblematised by a credit score, the product of calculations that reflect the way we, in turn, manage our debts. As Deleuze writes in the ‘Postscript’: ‘A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt’.37

However provocative, Deleuze’s meditation on capitalism strikes me as a kind of compromise formation, at once gesturing to a future transformation and beholden to a number of older conceits. In the first place, although Deleuze’s concern with sales and advertising augurs a new age of market research and behaviour modification, his ‘business model’ retains vestiges of an older conception of capitalism. The ‘Postscript’ arguably preceded the apotheosis of finance capital, when the process of production was decidedly subordinated to the accumulation of profit. Ours is an age of investment banks, hedge funds, and derivatives, but for that reason, it is also an age in which stock markets are computerised and we pass, irrevocably, into a digital economy. In this respect, once more, Deleuze’s account of control needs to be updated: while digital technology ought to be grasped in view of a ‘mutation of capitalism’, we cannot fail to note that this ‘third generation of machines’ is 212also the condition and driving force of whatever capitalism is becoming—of market research, statistical modelling, risk analysis, cost/benefit calculation, etc. This leads to my last, and surely most provocative, point about Deleuze’s remarks, which reflect a divergence between Marxist language and concepts and the terms of what we might call ‘control-capitalism’. Notwithstanding the value of his conceptual instruments, Deleuze ignores the ‘grid of intelligibility’ (Foucault) that economists bring to bear—the insistence that well-nigh everything can be understood on the model of the marketplace.

Post-Disciplinarity

As an epistolary and legal conceit, a postscript refers not only to a prior instance of writing but to the suggestion that the preceding script suffered from omission, ambiguity, even error—in short, whatever circumstance demands writing post script. What, then, is the script to which Deleuze’s essay refers?

We can trace the ‘Postscript’ back to three occasions, all revolving around Foucault, that carry us from a concrete and referential case, to an implicit and evidentiary example, and finally to a pure fiction. The first and most obvious occasion is Deleuze’s 1989 interview with Toni Negri, ‘Control Societies’, which provides the ostensible pretext for the ‘Postscript’. It’s difficult to say whether the forum was simply generative or whether its frustrating sense of misalignment generated the need for the subsequent essay. In relation to philosophy and ‘revolutionary politics’, Negri pushes a number of Marxist assumptions that Deleuze gently resists. The dynamic culminates with the introduction of the concept of control. Negri admits that, on the one hand, ‘the control of “communication” ’ introduces ‘the most perfect form of domination, extending even to speech and imagination’, but on the other hand, he suggests that

any man, any minority, any singularity, is more than ever before potentially able to speak out and thereby fully recover a greater degree of freedom. In the Marxist utopia of the Grundrisse, communism takes precisely the form of a transversal organization of free individuals built on a technology that makes it possible. Is communism still a viable option? Maybe in a communication society it’s less utopian than it used to be?38

At this point, more than anywhere else in the interview, Deleuze draws a distinction between his position and Negri’s (i.e., Marxism)—and he does so by recourse to Foucault. ‘We’re definitely moving toward “control” societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary’, he responds. ‘Foucault’s often taken 213as the theorist of disciplinary societies and of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was actually one of the first to say that we’re moving away from disciplinary societies, we’ve already left them behind’. Thus, whereas Negri’s question tries to frame politics in the terms of a renewed ‘Marxist utopia’, Deleuze lays waste to this sunny version of ‘communication society’: ‘The quest for “universals of communication” ought to make us shudder’.39

This interview was originally published in Futur Antérieur under the title ‘Revolutionary Becoming and Political Creation’; only when it was republished (along with the ‘Postscript’ in Negotiations [Pourparlers]), was it retitled. While the new title draws an explicit link between the two pieces, ‘Control and Becoming’ is almost too slender to have inspired an addendum, correction or continuation (the subject of control society occupies little more than a page of text). In a sense, we’d do better to understand the ‘Postscript’ in reference to Deleuze’s earlier book on Foucault. Not only does the essay immediately plunge us back into Foucault’s thought as if, despite the four intervening years, we had never left it; but Deleuze returns, in a sense, to the very point at which Foucault left off—with the end of disciplinary power. Foucault ‘knew how short-lived this model was’,40 and it’s worth noting that here, as elsewhere, Deleuze credits Foucault with having anticipated the emergence of ‘something new’—a new regime of power.

For this reason, Deleuze doesn’t write the ‘Postscript’ in response to what was left unsaid by Foucault but, rather, in relation to what he’d left unsaid in Foucault. To wit: where one would expect the monograph to presage the age of control, Foucault concludes with a genealogy of the ‘man-form’, extended into the future, that rings with Nietzschean optimism. ‘Man tends to free life, labor, and language within himself’, Deleuze writes, only to ask: ‘with what new forms do [humans] now risk entering into a relation, and what new form will emerge that is neither God or Man?’41 The reference to the ‘superman’ (Ubermensch) in the next sentence underwrites a power of vital metamorphosis to which the ‘Postscript’ looks back with scepticism and perhaps even regret. Gone is the brave posthumanism of the earlier text: here, instead, the ‘Postscript’ ventures a speculative stab at the mutation of capitalism. The irony of this situation is that Deleuze’s impulse—to turn to Foucault for a theory of control—never led him to Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism. Given at the Collège de France from 1978 to 1979 and collected in The Birth of Biopolitics, these lectures would have confirmed and transformed Deleuze’s theory of control.

214 Neoliberalism and Control

The Birth of Biopolitics is a kind of misnomer. ‘I thought I could do a course on biopolitics this year’, Foucault writes at the outset of these lectures, but we quickly discover that this topic (which Foucault was compelled to give a year in advance) has been recast. ‘It seems to me that the analysis of biopolitics can only get under way when we have understood the general regime of this governmental reason’.42 In other words, one cannot grasp biopolitics as such without having understood the development of what the eighteenth century came to call ‘political economy’. Thus, in the opening lecture, Foucault explains that the question of biopolitics demands a prior reckoning with the way that populations came under the purview of governmental reason:

I will try to show how the central core of all the problems that I am presently trying to identify is what is called population. Consequently, this is the basis on which something like biopolitics could be formed. But it seems to me that the analysis of biopolitics can only get under way when we have understood the general regime of this governmental reason I have talked about, this general regime that we can call the question of truth, of economic truth in the first place, within governmental reason.43

Notably, Foucault had developed the concept of governmental reason in his prior lectures at the Collège de France (Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population etc.). If The Birth of Biopolitics continues in this vein, the lectures also mark a decisive shift, both historically and epistemically, by taking up neoliberalism. In the first place, The Birth of Biopolitics represents its author’s only extended foray into the present. While every history is, in Foucault’s own words, a history of the present, nowhere else does he devote so concerted an analysis to the contemporary moment. In the second place, Foucault conceives of neoliberalism in distinctly American terms that he traces back to the peculiarity of the nation’s origins. Unlike seventeenth century England or France, which appealed to liberalism—the marketplace, the sphere of competition, capitalism—as a hedge against the despotic tendencies of the state, the United States makes economic liberalism its ‘founding and legitimizing principle’.44 In other words, liberalism was not conceived of as a limit to state power, or raison d’état, but as the raison d’être of the state itself. Thus, compared to the ‘ambiguity’ of German ordoliberalism, which retains a moral impulse to humanise an uninhibited market economy, ‘American neo-liberalism evidently appears much more radical or much more complete and exhaustive’.45 More to the point, Foucault’s elaboration of neoliberalism ought to be read as the overture to control society.

215 For Foucault, neoliberalism can be defined in a number of discrete, if intimately related, ways. It is ‘a sort of utopian focus’ that always responds to the question ‘how much government?’ the same way—‘as little as possible’. As an expression of ‘state phobia’, neoliberalism consists in the endless attenuation of the state and the transfer of authority and autonomy to enterprises themselves. More concretely, then, this predilection guides a ‘method of thought’, such that neoliberalism comprises a faculty of ‘permanent criticism’ and a corresponding ‘type of programming’.46 Thus, under the eyes of efficiency experts and technocrats, even (or especially) public institutions are subject to ‘market criticism’, which is to say, criticism that opposes the ‘cynicism of a market criticism’ to the ‘action of public authorities’. Above all else, though, neoliberalism represents a regime of power that, though born of economics, can be brought to bear on virtually any social questions by discovering the ‘internal rationality’ at the heart of ‘human behavior’.47 This rationality, often beginning with simple questions, turns to a large degree on the concept of ‘human capital’. Ventriloquising neoliberalism, Foucault says that capital is whatever can be made a source of future income; but apart from material capital (property, investments, savings), the individual also claims a share of human capital—simply put, the ‘physical and psychological factors’ which make one able to earn a given wage.

While some portion of human capital is ‘innate’, neoliberal economists have devoted much of their most well-known work to ‘acquired’ human capital, especially as it pertains to child care and education. Far from being reducible to an abstraction, a worker ‘comprises a capital’ that is inalienable: ‘the worker’s skill really is a machine, but a machine which cannot be separated from the worker himself’ and the correlative production of ‘an earnings stream’.48 The worker in possession of variable levels of skill, knowledge, training, education, pedigree or accreditation can expect a commensurate income-wage, and however simple this may seem, Foucault’s point goes to a fundamental neoliberal conceit: ‘the worker himself appears as a sort of enterprise for himself’. In taking on the worker’s perspective, and abandoning abstract labour, neoliberalism understands the individual as both an investor and an investment. Homo œconomicus is no longer simply a ‘partner of exchange’ but, rather, ‘an entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings’.49

Though human capital is one of a number of innovations belonging to neoliberalism it is, for Foucault, the one that enables its logical drive—not simply to subsume everything to the marketplace but, more profoundly, to grasp even ostensibly noneconomic questions in view of an economic ‘grid of intelligibility’.50 In other words, ‘the reintroduction of labor or work into the field of economic analysis will make it possible, through a sort of acceleration 216or extension, to move on to the economic analysis of elements which had previously totally escaped it’.51 American Neoliberalism undertakes the ‘absolute generalization of the economic form of the market, which is henceforth extended throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges’.52 As a result, the market becomes a ‘principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behavior’, such that questions of supply and demand can be brought to bear on virtually any domain whatever. Foucault calls this neoliberal framework a ‘grid of intelligibility’ inasmuch as even ‘non-economic processes, relations, and behavior’ can be subjected to a schema and thereby made legible.53

For our purposes, however, the significance of Foucault’s analysis lies in having presaged control society:

what appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by, let’s say, normative mechanisms. Nor is it a society in which a mechanism of general normalization and the exclusion of those who cannot be normalized is needed. On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.54

In this description Foucault outlines the economic constituents of a society given over to neoliberalism. This society can no longer be defined by virtue of the disciplinary logic of a legal and juridical network, nor of ‘scientific’ discourses and standards, nor finally of normalising procedures. Rather, The Birth of Biopolitics lays out a vision of a society that devises and amplifies a new, postdisciplinary dispositif. In the smooth space of ‘fluctuating processes’, where normativity merely provides a baseline, idiosyncrasies furnish the very data points with which to optimise difference. In other words, minoritarianism and even resistance are not simply ‘tolerated’ but embraced, since the exercise of individuality and the expression of freedom ironically make the subject more legible.

Ecology at the End of Control?

In the ‘Postscript’, Deleuze invokes a fictional city, envisioned by Félix Guattari, to describe what technology has in store for us. In this metropolis, 217each person possesses a card that permits entrance to certain precincts on some days, and at some times, but not on others, all depending on ‘a computer that is making sure everyone is in a permissible place, and effecting a universal modulation’.55 By the standards of what control has become, this metropolis seems vulgar, if not tame. Whereas Guattari’s city relies on the premise of an overarching machine, a centralised supercomputer, to which the ‘universal modulation’ is entrusted, control is increasingly dispersed and disseminated among a variety of users, nodes, towers, satellites and servers. The cellphones that link us to the network and internet, the credit/debit cards which record our purchases, the entry cards and EZ-Pass systems that track our commutes and travels: rather than radiate from a centre, or even from several centres, power is delocalised by the endless skein of overlapping networks. This is not to dismiss the significance of the security state, but to insist that this state relies on the commercialisation, privatisation, consumerisation and consumption of control.

Control society has no need for the older modes of mass confinement because it consists in the offer of unimpeded movement and the unceasing exercise of free choice: our countless decisions (the route home, what we buy for dinner, stray transactions, browsing history, phone calls) produce the reservoir of data whereby, along so many different axes, we are subject to calculation. Take a long-running campaign by Progressive Insurance: the company promises to adjust automobile rates based on one’s actual driving habits, and so it offers a device that, placed in a car, records one’s driving data and communicates it to a server. The brilliance of the offer consists in incentivising what amounts to mobile surveillance and thereby capitalising data—and this is only one such source of the information companies harvest, analyse and subject to the algorithms of our digital economy. With each decision, each new data point, the grid of intelligibility is refined and difference is optimised. The National Security Agency locates possible threats in vast sweeps of telephone communications on the same basis that Target accurately predicts customers’ pregnancies and due dates based on shopping history, or that political organisations micro-target messages for particular donors, or that Cambridge Analytica selected subjects for Russian misinformation campaigns.

In this respect, fittingly, the ‘Postscript’ concludes by addressing the (subject of) ‘young people’—those whose lives are already shaped by the regime of control and, indeed, those future generations for whom new and improved versions of control await. ‘Many young people have a strange craving to be “motivated,” they’re always asking for special courses and continuing education’, Deleuze remarks, only to add, abruptly, ‘it’s their job to discover the ends they’re made to serve’. The prospect of resistance doesn’t inspire a cri de coeur but an acknowledgement of our complicity in the perpetuation 218of control and perhaps a sense of resignation. The ‘Postscript’ evokes ‘new forms of resistance against control societies’, but in reading Deleuze’s essay alongside Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics, I’ve tried to suggest the constituents of this new regime of power in which we become not only trackable but, also, legible, calculable, pliable, and finally programmable. Under the circumstances, what do we mean by ecology? Apart from the rhetorical appropriation of ecology (e.g., the ‘ecology of global capitalism’), what place can we claim today for the concept of ecology?

Perhaps we can envision ecology, with respect to control, inasmuch as both concepts actually reflect the invention of cybernetics. On the one hand, as we’ve seen, Deleuze refers to the cybernetic machines that underwrite control societies, and even Foucault’s notion of neoliberal (or control) capitalism proposes a regulative and effectively homeostatic model of pain management as the basis for the entrepreneurial ‘subject of interest’.56 On the other hand, the concept of ecology was, historically, recast along the lines of cybernetics by (among others) Gregory Bateson; in Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind and elsewhere, Bateson argues that systems theory qua cybernetics represents a significant contribution to the ‘ecology of ideas’57 inasmuch as it provided the means to think about ecosystems—communal milieus comprised of interdependent components, both organic and inorganic, networked and communicating though a complex web of feedback loops. Given the ambit that Bateson gives the term, then, is control a political ecology? He suggests that we’re forced to concede the point: ‘There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself’, Bateson writes.58 The problem with this conceptual system, he adds, is that when you ‘narrow down your epistemology’—when you determine everything on the basis of interest or, let us say, enterprise—‘you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure’. Indeed, the singular sense of ecology is always based on an arbitrary cut, beyond which ecologies proliferate, often at different scales or according to different temporalities, but nevertheless linked and looped back into the self-deluded ecology, that is, the ecology that imagines itself as a closed system. If it is to mount a real resistance, ecology can mean nothing less than an open system—a politics formulated on the basis of the earth.

Notes

1. My own sense of ecology draws in large part from my collaboration with Anne Sauvagnargues. In our current work (tentatively titled Under Control), the recourse to ecology represents a means of philosophical resistance to control society and neoliberalism.

219 2. Not incidentally, Guattari eventually published The Three Ecologies.

3. See, for instance, Jane Bennett 2010; Rosi Braidotti 2013; and Erin Manning and Brian Massumi 2014. Needless to say, the question of political ecology can be traced back to earlier texts, such as Latour 1998 and Escobar 1996. Still, an earlier (and more strictly social-scientific) history of political ecology can be traced back to anthropological and environmental literature of the 1970s.

4. The ‘Postscript on Control Society’ and its ostensible precursor, ‘Control and Becoming’, were both included in Deleuze 1995.

5. Deleuze 1995, 178.

6. Above all, see Foucault 1995.

7. Deleuze 1995, 177.

8. Ibid., 178.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 182.

11. Ibid., 180.

12. Ibid., 182.

13. Ibid., 178.

14. Ibid., 175.

15. Ibid., 178.

16. Deleuze lifts the distinction between modulation and the mould (or moulding) from Simondon, for whom it lies at the heart of individuation and technical mentality. See Simondon 2007. Also see Sauvagnargues 2012.

17. Deleuze 1995, 178–79.

18. Ibid., 178–79.

19. This concept is most fully developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. See the book’s ninth chapter (or plateau) on ‘Micropolitics and Segmentarity’.

20. On delocalisation, see Bachelard 1937.

21. See Virilio 2006, 62.

22. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 386.

23. Ibid, 559, n. 65; italics mine. See Virilio 2006, 150–51.

24. Deleuze 1995, 180.

25. Ibid., 175 and 180.

26. Ibid., 177.

27. Ibid., 180.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., 181.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 179.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Deleuze 1997, 126, 127.

36. Ibid., 126.

37. Deleuze 1995, 181.

220 38. Deleuze 1995, 174.

39. Ibid., 175.

40. Ibid., 177.

41. Deleuze 1988, 132.

42. Foucault 2008, 21–22.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 217.

45. Ibid., 243.

46. Ibid., 219.

47. Ibid., 233.

48. The conjunction of machine and earnings stream ‘is not a conception of labor power; it is a conception of capital-ability’ (Foucault 2008, 225). Foucault adds: ‘An earnings stream and not an income, precisely because the machine constituted by the worker’s ability is not, as it were, sold from time to time on the labor market against a certain wage’ (224). This transformation has only grown more profound in subsequent decades (we rarely speak of wages except to indicate a minimum wage).

49. Ibid., 226.

50. Ibid., 243.

51. Ibid., 226.

52. Ibid., 243.

53. Ibid. Of course, the examples on which Foucault dwells—the penal system, the school system—are increasingly privatized and run for-profit today, but Foucault’s point is that, even when this isn’t the case, the logic brought to bear upon questions of criminality and education are no less submitted to cost/benefit analyses.

54. Ibid., 259, italics mine.

55. Deleuze 1995, 182.

56. Foucault 2008, 272.

57. Bateson 2000, 467.

58. Ibid., 492.

References

Bachelard, G. (1937). L’expérience de l’espace dans la physique contemporaine. F. Alcan.

Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. Translated by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. (1997). Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by A. Gerco and D. W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.