Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic by Seb Franklin (review)

In Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic, Seb Franklin argues that computer technologies not only saturate our daily lives, but that "digitality" fundamentally shapes the ways that we see ourselves and conceptualize the world. Computer technologies provide a whole host of metaphors that we now use to conceptualize cognition, self-management, labor, and other socioeconomic formations: steering, feedback, and discreteness. The digital—which tends to be colloquially synonymous with the computer—sets forth a logic of atomization that comes to shape how we see the material world, labor, and social formations as disparate parts rather than as interconnected elements. Franklin's project offers digitality as a heuristic for making the logic of control visible in the fabric of the ordinary.

In order to fully flesh out a genealogy of the control epistêmê that we urgently should learn to read for, Franklin synthesizes a range of writings in cultural theory, media studies, and Marxism across five chapters. In chapter 1, Franklin begins with Gilles Deleuze's famously brief "Postscript on Societies of Control" (1992), noting how Deleuze's "dividual" helps conceptualize this mode of subjectivity as one that "has been divided within itself, broken down into discrete parts that are each representable as symbolic tokens and capturable as labor" (p. 9). Franklin extends Deleuze's theorization of control as a set of technically mediated relations by more fully describing its relation to the domain of the social. "Digitality," writes Franklin, "promises to render the world legible, recordable, and knowable via particular numeric and linguistic constructs" (p. xix). In other words, control is not only about distributed power within a material infrastructure, as Alex Galloway has written in Protocol,¹ but is also an epistêmê that emerges from the formulation of everything, including the social, in digital/discrete terms.

The logic of control as episteme describes a wholesale reconceptualization of the human and of social interaction under the assumption . . . that information storage, processing, and transmission (as well as associated concepts such as "steering" and "programming") not only constitute the fundamental processes of biological and social life but can be instrumentalized to both model and direct the functional entirety of such forms of life.

(p. xviii)

What we need to learn to read for, Franklin argues, is how "cybernetics itself" disappeared and how its methods for instrumentalizing human labor came to "constitute a seemingly objective component of political economy and management theory" (p. 42), which he traces in the works of Warren McCullough, Norbert Weiner, Gregory Bateson, John von Neumann, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others (chapter 2). Departing from earlier studies of the "signature technologies and projected futures" of cybernetics such as Katherine Hayles's seminal text How We Became Posthuman, Franklin focuses on the "less spectacular ways in which cybernetic principles came to expand from specialist knowledge into forms of doxa [common belief]" (p. 33), or how cybernetic thought came to seem intuitive in the first place. It is within the mundane and the everyday that digitality, as the logic of control, is most subtly naturalized.

Although Franklin professes to focus on the "less spectacular" dissemination of digitality as a cultural logic, the last three chapters tackle the challenges of representing digitality (chapter 3), reading for a logic of digitality across literature and culture (chapter 4), and in formulations of the "programmable subject" (chapter 5). Yet the cases where Franklin reads literary texts and cultural objects could more explicitly engage with feminist and queer theories, indicating where the logic of control coincides with the logic of heteronormativity. For example, Franklin's case studies of literature are limited to Joyce, Beckett, Faust, and Kafka (chapter 4). His analysis of how Urban Outfitters' demographic modeling ("the upscale homeless person") compares with Anthropologie ("she tends to be a homeowner . . . in a relationship") and The Free People ("She runs and practices yoga to stay fit and balanced . . . target age 26") focuses on the general discreteness of categories, without discussing gender normativity as a contributing factor. Although a focus on male authors...