The Limits of Control

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” 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...