Control Societies Augmented (original) (raw)
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Uncoiling the Serpent: Towards an Anthropology of Control Society
University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Science, 2022
Since the early 1980s, Foucauldian conceptions of power have largely dominated the field of political anthropology. Although this theoretical scope has been analytically effective, its continued applicability in the highly dynamic, global context of digitized neoliberal capitalism has been called into question. To address this concern, I will argue for a shift in attention to Gilles Deleuze's notion of "control society" as a more appropriate framework for an anthropological dissection of power relations within the present context of neoliberalism. This suggested turn toward a Deleuzian paradigm has been previously proposed across several disciplines, including studies of globalized capitalism, surveillance, the internet, data, algorithms, and more. However, despite Deleuze's considerable impact on anthropology, relatively little direct overlap exists between theories of control society and contemporary ethnography. I aim to bridge this gap between anthropology and interdisciplinary theories of control society, examining how ethnographic research corroborates, complicates, and challenges this paradigm, with the ultimate goal of mapping out potential fragments of an anthropology of control and resistance thereof.
Algorithms of Control and Societies of Oppression
2022
In the present time, almost everything we are consuming, producing, or even performing is dependent on the ecosystem of digital networks we, willingly or, unwillingly have become a part of. From the consumption of music, films, television on internet to producing new businesses in fields ranging from tech, fashion, culinary, and décor to performing any act like dance, theatrical show, or even public speaking in the form of a motivational speaker – all of this is structured around how the computational technologies are trying to create and, in a way, hack into the thinking and instinctual abilities of the human mind. The newer trends, virality, and taste homology of different groups are getting heavily influenced by the algorithms and coding languages developed by computer programmers. I am interested in looking at the working of algorithms and how they are trying to shape a new ‘aesthetics of docility’ where computational power has the upper hand in defining the kind of product and eventually, politics that will be available in the public domain. In this paper, I will review the literature on algorithm studies and platform studies and will try to collate the arguments together to funnel them down into a single document. I am hoping that after performing thorough research I’d get a sense of the politics emerging out of this algorithmic framework, therefore, facilitating newer ways of shaping acts of resistance.
Levers of Control: Accept or Flee
Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, 2024
This article focuses on the pertinence of Gilles Deleuze's prescient article, 'Postscript on the societies of control', of the 1990s, for the present exacerbation of (technological) control throughout the world. Deleuze contrasted such societies of control with what Michel Foucault had analysed as 'carceral' societies of discipline, and pointed out that even at the time of writing his essay, societies had already moved into the phase of 'societies of control'. Deleuze also remarked on the relative ease with which people can be controlled through debt, as opposed to the disciplinary modes of control noted by Foucault. The uncanny way in which Deleuze (and his colleague, Guattari) anticipated the kinds of control imposed on citizens today, is elaborated upon, before concluding with a reference to Jacques Lacan's distinction between 'the mugger's choice' and 'the revolutionary's choice', and noting its extraordinary relevance for the difficult choice people face today.
2014
The information age has been marked by complex advancements in the technologies of social management. Many of these advancements have been discussed in recent political theory. However, a thorough engagement with their mechanism and historical resonance remains necessary in order to substantiate such discussion. In this dissertation, I situate and analyze the increasingly informatic, molecular, and distributed technologies of power characteristic of "control societies" on a thoroughly substantive level. My research substantiates a number of claims made in recent political theory regarding control societies, and indicates that only a politics of positive feedback is adequate to the mechanisms of such societies.
The Technology of Control : The Role of Technical Development in Exercising Social Control
2013
The ‘risk society’ is characterized by the search for the external (i.e. reassuring) forms of security, and to handle the citizens’ crime-related fears became a high-priority criminal policy issue. The intention to moderate crimerelated fears the criminal policy has crossed its competence borders both “upwards” and “downwards” and blurs the responsibilities of police forces, national defense and social services. The field of crime control (e.g. war on terrorism, execution of sanctions) proved to be an excellent site for the development of high technologies, as well as in the security industry and property protection. The crime prevention scene with several players generates conflicts as well, as it also blurs the borders of “public” and “private”. New means of control yields higher-level production, brings up a number of information, but heightens producing the dangers concerning the competences of criminal law and human rights. *** In David Garland’s opinion, it would not be possib...
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."