As in, ’societies of control.’ I’m not sure. I find Deleuze rather offputting. That’s not an argument, but it is why I’ve not read more of him yet. I also don’t much like what Negri makes of/takes from him. He is, of course, on the infinite booklist, and several of his books are on my shelf irritatingly unread.
Anyway, in the Postcript on Societies of Control Deleuze writes,
“The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. 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. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.”
What strikes me here is the distinction between debt and enclosure. By enclosure I think Deleuze means primarily physical confinement, spatially. He uses enclosure and confinement more or less interchangeably in the postscript and in the interview with Negri. He writes, “[e]nclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.”
The role of confinement is certainly important. But to my mind there’s a more important sense of enclosure which renders the passage from discipline to control (if it happened/happens) as much a relation of continuity as of break. That is, simply, the enclosure upon which the capital relation is premised: the imposition of lack of access to means of subsistence and the destruction of problematic collectivities in order to create the conditions wherein the sale of labor power as a commodity is basically mandatory.
To my mind the confined space of the factory was also adjusted over time - the cast was modulated, in Deleuze’s terms - and was also supplemented from the beginning with appeal to the various powers that operate enclosure in the sense I like to use the term: flexible and reactive powers of surveillance and violence (Ford’s inquiries into and attempts to shape the morality of ‘his’ workers, for instance, as well as the functions of societies for the upbuilding of the working classes and entities like the Pinkerton Agency).
Deleuze makes a claim about the forms of subjectivity that relate to different production arrangements:
“The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance,” a model which Deleuze terms ‘the mole,’ following Marx’s animal metaphor. The problem is, though, that the factory didn’t constitute workers as a body except as a body productive of surplus value. Workers constituted themselves as bodies within and against the factory and the life that they were consigned to. And these bodies of aggregated workers didn’t always look the same.
“The old monetary mole is the animal of the space 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. (…) The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.”
What’s interesting here to me is the insistence upon a single figure which encompasses the entire working class for an era. It makes sense that Negri would turn to this, given the tendency within operaismo to look for (seek to produce) a hegemonic class figure to serve as unifying vanguard for a unified class movement. It’s also interesting that the worker in the era of the mole is held to be not in a ‘continuous network.’ The worker at the time was still in the continuous circuits of the production, consumption, and reproduction of labor power as a commodity. That worker was also involved in other circuits of production other than those of surplus value production (this is always the case - value production is smaller than the total set of human activities - unless one posits an absolute identity between capital and life) and presumably was continually productive in terms of desiring-production.
The important point for Deleuze seems to be the change in value production, and I don’t understand why. That would mean that the class-in-itself is what Deleuze’s snake vs mole distinction is trying to track onto. I’m not convinced that that change is the case, but even if it were one could still ask about the relationship of class-in-itself and class-for-itself. The latter should be the point of departure, not the former.
On this, however, Deleuze is absolutely correct:
“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
They don’t have to be new either. The point is not novelty but effectivity. Some old weapons might also function just as well, or even better, in new conditions.