In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school
to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies
of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the
educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting
in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In
The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point
between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of
juridical forms/ the apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies
(between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the
societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different
modes of juridical life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis,
it’s because we are leaving one in order to enter into the other. The
disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the
individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his
or her position within a mass.
…
This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of
capitalism, … But, in the present situation, capitalism is no longer
involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, …
It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw
materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished
products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services and what it
wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but
for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus it is
essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation.
The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct
analogical spaces that converge towards an owner—state or private
power—but coded figures—deformable and transformable—of a single
corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces
of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. …
Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the centre or
the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a
soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. … Control is
short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without
limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous.
Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.
…
The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at
their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is
already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of
enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. … What counts is that we
are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to
find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes, and the use
of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home
during certain hours. … One of the most important questions will concern
the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of
struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will
they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of
resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the
rough outlines of these coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of
marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they
re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to
discover what they’re being made to save, just as their elders discovered,
not without difficulty, the telos of the discipline. The coils of a
serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.