Date:         Tue, 20 Aug 96 07:26:49 EDT
From: "Charles J. Stivale" <CSTIVAL-AT-cms.cc.wayne.edu>
Subject:      Control Societies


In response to Stephen Perrella, responding to Arnott's previous message:

excerpt from: "The Rhizomatics of Cyberspace"

_Caution, Not Wisdom_
In ATP, D&G suggest that "the failure of the _plan_ (plan/plane) is
part of the _plan_ itself: The _plan_ is infinite, you can start it
in a thousand different ways; you will always find something that
comes too late or too early, forcing you to recompose all of your
relations of speed and slowness, all of your affects, and to
rearrange the overall assemblage. An infinite undertaking" (ATP
259).
    This last citation might well serve as an yet another epigraph
to my own undertaking here, for in preparing this assemblage, I
find it continually intersected by new lines that kept the
"rhizome" open, in flux, but that produced "bifurcations," on-line
and off-line, making me wonder constantly how and if the BwO-Zone
could be (re)presented or (re)produced through such a linear
discourse. And I also wonder about the site of reception of this
discourse, and the utter frustration that might well within it, from
an array of sources (boredom, hunger, burnout) and desires, not the
least of which is the question well formulated on the Deleuze-List
by a participant identified only as a "chrestomathy of subconscious
yearnings" (from Carleton, Minnesota): "How do we decide with
Deleuze, or if we want, with rhizomes, what can and cannot be said
about them? Can we ask what might seem to be basic questions, such
as 'How do we think rhizomatically?' or even 'How _can_ - we think
rhizomatically?', - or do we just leap to the evident assumption
that we _do_ think in this way? (7 April 1994).
    Someone who seems to share these concerns is Deleuze himself,
particularly as concerns the "rhizomatics" of "cyberspace." For he
has taken pains to express his wariness, in an entirely
non-rhapsodic way, concerning the relationship between "control" and
"becomings." In a discussion _Negotiations_ (_Pourparlers _)with
Toni Negri entitled "Control and Becoming", Deleuze distinguishes
the "disciplinary societies" closely examined by Foucault, but that
"we have already left behind," from "control societies" to which
corresponds a particular machinic regime, "cybernetic machines and
computers": "But the machines don't explain anything," says Deleuze,
"you have to analyze the collective apparatuses <agencements> of
which the machines are just one component.  Compared with the
approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to
see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderfully happy past" (N
174-175/P 237). Furthermore, says Deleuze, "the quest for
'universals of communication' ought to make us shudder" (N 175/P
237), a facet of which he develops in "Postscript on Control
Societies" (as well as, briefly, in _What is Philosophy?_). In these
control societies, "the key thing is no longer a signature or a
number, but a code [_un chiffre_]," that is, "passwords" that
replace the "order-words" [_mot d'ordre_], i.e.  "precepts" of the
disciplinary societies (N 180/P 242). The digital language of
control, says Deleuze, "is made up of codes indicating whether
access to some information should be allowed or denied," and the
former dichotomy between individuals and masses is replaced by
"'_dividuals_'," on one hand, and on the other, by "samples, data,
markets or 'banks' . . . Control man [_l'homme du controle_]
undulates, moving among a continuous range of different orbits.
_Surfing_ has taken over for all the old _sports_" (N 180/P 244).
    While Deleuze recognizes that some forms of resistance, such as
pirating and spreading computer viruses, have already emerged, he
doubts that these and other forms of "transversal" resistance would
be available to minorities for their own expression: "Maybe speech
and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated
by money -- and not by accident, but by their very nature" (N /175P
238). And he insists quite starkly: "We don't have to stray into
science fiction to find a control mechanism that can fix the
position of any element at any given moment --an animal in a game
reserve, a man in a business (electronic tagging).  Fe'lix Guattari
has imagined a town where one can leave their flat, their street,
their neighborhood, using their (dividual) electronic card that
opens this or that barrier; but the card may also be rejected on a
particular day, or between certain times of day; it doesn't depend
on the barrier but on the computer that is making sure everyone is
in a permissible place, and effecting a universal modulation" (N
181-182/P 246).
    To this stern, apocalyptic or perhaps "only" pragmatic
assemblage, Deleuze offers equally grim alternatives: "we ought to
establish the basic sociotechnological principles of control
mechanisms as their age dawns, and describe what is already taking
the place of the disciplinary sites of confinement that everyone
says are breaking down: crisis is everywhere proclaimed": systems of
prisons, of education, of hospitals, of corporations, i.e. all
revealing "the widespread progressive introduction of a new system
of domination" (N 182/P 246-47). In terms of the system of
communication, says Deleuze, "We've got to hijack speech <la
parole>.  Creating has always been something different from
communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of
noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude escape control"
(N 175/P 238). Yet, he concludes the discussion with Negri on a
slightly less ponderous note: "If you believe in the world you
precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you
engender new space-times, however small theur surface or volume.
It's what you call _pietas_. Our ability to resist control, or our
submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move.
We need both creativity _and_ a people" (N 176/P 239).
    The inspiration of such "inconspicuous events" are indeed part
of "virtual futures"; do they consist in extending the rhizome? how
does one "high-jack speech" and create "circuit breakers" capable of
escaping control? To answer these questions with in the
Deleuze-Guattarian assemblages, I believe that we need to look
closely at their final work together, _What Is Philosophy?_, as well
as Guattari's proposal in _Chaosmosis_ of a generalized ecology, or
an "ecosophy" (cf. also Guattari 1989). Within this "ecosophy" would
be an "ecology of the virtual" that would have as goal "not simply
[an] attempt preserve the endangered species of cultural life but
equally to engender new conditions for the creation and developement
of unprecedented formations of subjectivity" (Guattari 1995,
91/1992, 127-128). These would be "machines of virtuality, . . .
blocks of mutant percepts and affects, half-object half-subject,"
characterized by "limitless interfaces which secrete interiority and
exteriority and constitute themselves at the root of every system of
discursivity" (1995, 92/1992, 128-129; cf. Verena Conley 1993 on
"terminal humans" related to this "ecosophy"). And referring to
Maturana and Varela, Guattari proposes the "autopoetic machine" and
their notion of "autopoeisis" as "the auto-reproductive capacity of
a structure or ecosystem . . . [that] could be usefully enlarged to
include social machines, economic machines and even the incorporal
machines of language, theory and aesthetic creation" (1995 93/1992,
130).  In any case, concludes Guattari, "all this implies the idea
of a necessary creative practice and even an ontological pragmatics.
It is being's new ways of being which are created rhythms, forms,
colors and the intensities of dance.  Nothing happens of itself.
Everything has to continually begin again from zero, at the point of
chaosmic emergence: the power of eternal return to the nascent
state" (1995, 94/1992, 131).
    Here and now, I self-impose an "circuit breaker" and leave where
I commenced, _dans le milieu, intermezzo_, with the
Deleuze-Guattarian caution, not wisdom, as translated by an
_intercesseur_/mediator named De Landa: "All you can do is approach
carefully because the last thing you want to do is get swallowed up
by a chaotic attractor that's too huge in phase space. As Deleuze
says, 'Always keep a piece of fresh land with you at all times.'
Always keep a little spot where you can go back to sleep after a day
of destratification. Always keep a small piece of territory,
otherwise you'll go nuts" (Davis, _Mondo 2000_ 8 <1992> 48).

Charles J. Stivale