Passage from Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control"

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 the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number of administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest – the flock and each of its animals – but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay “priest.”). In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold in as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Introduction: Codes, Lenses, and Starring Deleuze's "Postscript"

In reading Barthes’ methodology for ‘starring’ a text, I was immediately drawn to the footnote. Footnotes are typically seen as explanatory or referencing notes included by the author at the bottom or the end of a text. They are simultaneously part of the text and subservient to the text, often viewed as outside of or apart from the formal text itself. In this way, footnotes can be read as digressions from the text, which Barthes notes as being ‘a form ill-accomodated by the discourse of knowledge’ (13). While footnotes are a form of digression, they’re an authoritarian form of digression. Footnotes expand and disperse meaning in a text, but this expansion is still carefully controlled by the text’s author. Since starring a text is akin to a “systematic use of digression”, I will be playing with footnoting as a method of textual analysis in starring Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”

Footnotes have an interesting relationship to hypertext. The use of links and images in hypertext is somewhat analogous to the use of footnotes in print. Links and images can give voice to dissenting opinions, document or reference supporting material, and provide additional explanation beyond the master text. In this way, links and images provide a space for expanding or digressing from the single narrative or the coherent textual unit. My footnotes, then, will be in the form of hypertextual links and I will be experimenting with what happens to footnotes when they go online. Look out for links within links, ‘broken’ links, incomprehensible links, and other forms of digression or decomposition of the text. In this way, I will be exploring Barthes’ notion that “the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances.” (12)

Barthes’ codes are more akin to ‘lenses’ (Barthes prefers the term ‘voices’) available for viewing a text than the kind of formal or rule-based method of analysis the term implies. In fact, Barthes refers to his codes as a convergence of interweaving voices (21) and not “the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconstituted.” (20) In my analysis of “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, I will draw from a number of ‘lenses’ for analysis, each of which has a relationship to the footnote. These lenses include:

- Hermeneutic (e.g.) – This lens is identical to Barthes' Hermeneutic code. It references unexplained or mysterious information in the text and leads to the articulation of a question and search for an answer. Such a lens corresponds to the traditional purpose of a footnote in providing answers to unexplained information.
- Connotation/Denotation (e.g.,e.g.) – This lens is related to Barthes' Semantic code. Here I will explore the relationship between connoted and denoted meanings throughout the text. Footnotes traditionally provide insight into the denotation and etymology of words, but not their connotations.
- Memory/Forgetting (e.g.) – Barthes contends that there is a close relationship between reading and forgetting. He describes, "forgetting meanings is not a matter for excuses, an unfortunate defect in performance; it is an affirmative value, a way of asserting the irresponsibility of the text, the pluralism of systems" (11). The footnote is often traditionally employed to overcome the transgression of forgetting and ensure the reader ascribes to the author's intended meaning. Here, I assess what the reader might be expected to remember/forget in a given part of the text and how that affects the meaning he/she might ascribe.
- Truth/Opinion (e.g.) – This lens is a spin on Barthes' Cultural code. Here I look at what’s presented as ‘true’ and assess whether, in what ways, and to what extent the assertion is supportable. This is a play on the footnote's referencing function, in which the author provides additional support or documentation for what he/she posits as 'true'.