Krzysztof Skonieczny
(Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw)
Abstract:
The last chapter — or the “Post-Scrpit” — of Gilles Deleuze’s Negotiations introduces “control societies” as a new form of government which supplants disciplinary societies described by Foucault. While he borrows the term “control” from Burroughs, Deleuze claims that the notion is already present not only in Foucault’s own work, but also in that of Paul Virilio. Scholars such as Philippe Mengue and Julian Ferreyra have underscored the importance of the short “Post-Script” as a crucial point in Deleuze’s political philosophy, although it remains unclear whether it is a continuation of the analysis of capitalism present in Anti-Oedipus (Ferreyra) or a new point in Deleuze’s theory signaling his distancing himself from the collaborations with Guattari (Mengue). The Deleuzian notion of control societies is important for the analysis of work in the digital age for two reasons. (1) While disciplinary societies were linked to “thermodynamic machines”, in control societies it is the “information technology and computers” that take central stage, moving from production and accumulation to the “metaproduction” of services and activities; (2) This shift also brings a change in the practices of education and work, which in disciplinary societies were restricted to their respective spheres of confinement (the school and the factory). In control societies the spheres of education and work are closely intertwined and take the floating form of continuous assessments and new modes of (auto)motivation in- and outside the school and the company, so that, as Deleuze says, “in control societies you never finish anything”. The talk will proceed by (1) analyzing and defining the notion of “control societies” based on Foucault’s and Virilio’s work as well as Deleuze’s; (2) examining if this notion — introduced in 1990 — is still a valid tool for the analysis of work and education in the present incarnation of the “digital age”; (3) asking if today, 29 years after the “Post-Script on Control Societies”, we can envision any “forms of resistance against control societies” Deleuze called for.
Krzysztof Skonieczny is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw. In 2011/2012 he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY at Buffalo, and in 2012/2013 he spent six months as a researcher at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours. In 2014, he received his PhD in Philosophy from the Polish Academy of Sciences, having completed the International PhD Program “The Traditions of Mediterranean Humanism and the Challenges of Our Times: the Frontiers of Humanity” at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales.” He co-edited (with prof. Szymon Wróbel) the volume Ateizm. Próba dokończenia projektu (Atheism. Attempting to finish the project), Warsaw: DiG 2018, in press [in Polish]. His interests include political philosophy, psychoanalysis, posthumanities, animal studies and contemporary American literature, which he occasionally translates. He is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled The Immanent Animal. An Essay in Philosophical Zoology.