The Limits of Control

311 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2011 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 7, ISSUE 2 PP 311–320 CULTURAL POLITICS DOI: 10.2752/175174311X12861940861941 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY THE LIMITS OF CONTROL SEB FRANKLIN Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control, Raiford Guins, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8166-4815-3 The Spam Book: on Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, ed. Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-57273-916-1 There is little doubt that Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the control society has played a substantial role in shaping scholarly discourse on new media and politics over the past twenty years. This nascent periodizing project, outlined in Deleuze’s late works “Having an Idea in Cinema,” “Postscript on Control Societies,” and the conversation with Antonio Negri published as “Control and Becoming,” is well documented: Deleuze takes Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of the transition from sovereign to disciplinary societies, made in Discipline and Punish, as its starting point and details a continued “spreading out” SEB FRANKLIN IS A WRITER AND TEACHER BASED IN BRIGHTON. HE IS A RESEARCH FELLOW IN THE CULTURES OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY INSTITUTE AT ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY, AND IS CURRENTLY PREPARING A MONOGRAPH ON THE HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CYBERNETICS, PLAY AND CINEMA. > CULTURAL POLITICS 312 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY of power into a third historical stage. Through the concept of control Deleuze argues for the emergence of a type of society characterized not by individual sovereigns, nor itemized and hierarchical disciplinary institutions, but by atomized, free-floating control – primarily executed though computers and other self-organizing cybernetic systems – and an associated logic of social organization that is isomorphic with the mode now widely known as neoliberalism (a logic that is “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” (Deleuze 1995: 179)). Far less well-discussed than the material and conceptual implications of the notion of control itself is the way in which the specific historical-technical shift proposed by Deleuze has given rise to a significant conundrum in the theoretical work that seeks to expand upon it. This problem is foregrounded by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s introduction to her excellent Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), where she states that: Deleuze’s reading of control societies is persuasive, although arguably paranoid, because it accepts propaganda as technological reality, and conflates possibility with probability. Just as panopticism overestimated the power of publicity, so too does control-freedom overestimate the power of control systems. This is not to say that Deleuze’s analysis is not correct, but rather that it – like so many other analyses of technology – unintentionally fulfils the aims of control by imaginatively ascribing to control power that it does not yet have and by erasing its failures. Thus, in order to understand control-freedom, we need to insist on the failures and the actual operations of technology. (Chun 2006: 9) What the significant impediment to political analyses of new media amounts to is a difficulty in grasping the specifically technical modes of control that are definitive of the new types of society while also locating these new forms of control among the elements of pre-existing disciplinary and sovereign formations that remain from previous eras. This is summed up at the start of Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s The Exploit (2007), with a rejoinder to the authors from the critic Geert Lovink that, contrary to the Deleuzian notion of control the authors examine, “Internet protocols are not ruling the world ... [i]n the end, G.W. Bush is” (1). It is integrating the notion of technically executed control with the actions of people – governments and corporations, to take the two most prominent targets of “traditional” political critique today – without returning a simple extension of the old forms with some trivial, surface-level additions that poses a crucial problem to theorists of control societies. As Chun...