In his 2011 article "Florida Reformers Got It Right," William Mattox uses his son Richard as an example of the benefits of hybrid education, or blended learning, which allows students to combine traditional classroom-based instruction with online schooling. Mattox only briefly praises the benefits of his son's opportunity for customized instruction, and he never tells his reader about the types of classes his son took, or how those classes helped his son reach greater achievements in co llege. Instead, he focuses his attention and (and about half his word count) on the network of acquaintances his son was able to develop by choosing a hybrid schooling option, in tum celebrating how those social relationships helped his son succeed in a voter-based talent contest, where the person with the most "likes" wins the award. Hybrid schooling might provide an excellent, customized education for its students, but its more significant feature, according to Mattox, seems to be the way it allows students to create a network where they can tap into a diverse group of markets to leverage the value of their personalities to become successful. While the hybrid schooling experience of Richard Maddox is not typical of most students, the importance of one's personal network and popularity as a form of social currency are typical of students in contemporary classrooms. Students in school today are learning much more than the standard reading, writing, and arithmetic, and they are learning it in different ways. Gone are the days of the distinct public and private spheres where school, work, and home were each given clearly defined spaces. Since the early 1990s, the home has been increasingly intruded upon as technological innovation and the continued growth of the internet have allowed employees and students to work from places other than the office or school (most notably, the home), redefining not only the location, but also the time of work. Work does not need to end at five o'clock, or school at 3:30, because employees and students can complete their work at whatever time is most appropriate to them. Now, more than twenty years after these mobile technologies began their assault on the home, the insulated and separate spheres of home, work, and school are almost completely obliterated. Gilles Deleuze predicted this breakdown in his 1995 "Postscript on Control Societies" in which he asserted that we would welcome the "ultrarapid forms of free-floating control" (178) that have developed to replace those clearly defined spaces. One-to-one programs and instructional models which put a computer or tablet in the hands of every child in a classroom are radically changing the fundamental structures of pedagogy and the roles of educators and students alike in twenty-first century classrooms. These classrooms not only reveal a shift in the way knowledge is transferred and acquired, they reveal a complete transformation in the society for which those pupils are being prepared. The specific closed spaces of Michel Foucault's disciplinary society, each with its individual rules and roles, have evolved into one of greater openness. The shift from the classroom as a closed space to an open, networked place replicates this shift in the larger society of global capitalism. These changes seem to indicate a freer environment that requires less work from the teacher and less concentration from the students, but it actually creates a more controlled environment where more is required of both teachers and students inside of the classroom and out. However, though these increased requirements are perhaps the most obvious outcome of this shift, they are not the only outcome. More significantly, this emerging system of education allows for the development of a new type of student--one who accepts that the creation of her subjectivity is not limited to the classroom, and who actually becomes involved in the formation of that subjectivity through her conflated roles as consumer and producer. Technology is not just opening the classroom. It is repurposing the classroom so that the students' personalities and subjectivities become subsumed in the process of education in preparation for their adult professional lives.

The “Postscript on Control Societies” is considered one of the most accessible texts by Gilles Deleuze, contemporary, yet untimely, ahead of its time, perhaps even ahead of our time. In just a few pages, Deleuze here touches on the specifics of discipline and control and subjects them to three perspectives: history, logic, program. On closer reading, however, one comes across some stumbling blocks, where thinking falters. The paragraph in which the word ‘dividual’ appears for the first time in the text is such an instance. Of course, the individuals of control become dividuals, and the masses become banks. But what does ‘code’ mean here, and what is the difference between the ‘precept’ of disciplinary society and the ‘password’ of control society? As is so often the case, the key lies in questions of context and translation.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T14:55:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Leandro Alberto de Paiva Siqueira.pdf: 11537130 bytes, checksum: a8323afe02aa8163c883de8083f56f2e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-10-16 / Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo / Beginning with the second half of the twentieth century, rockets, satellites, probes, spacecraft, and space stations have allowed for the occupation of Earth's orbit and achievement of space travel to nearby locations to Earth. Driven by the arms race, space technology projected war and politics into orbit, establishing the first planetary monitoring systems, initially used to spy on missiles. Interested in contemporaneity, this thesis aims to contribute to the study of societies of control showing their outer space proveniences and stressing the importance of the space event for the configuration of exposed power relations belonging to such societies. Besides being taken from its ascendant perspective, in the sense of abandoning the planet, the outer space event should also be analyzed according to its downward movement, in other words, taking into account its drifts, especially the spin-offs that it produces and that can not be reduced to products or socio-economic benefits, but also imply political resizing of the governing of the planet and life. Among the political spin-offs arising from the outer space event we focus on the emergence of the planet-body, which becomes the aim of ecopolitics investment for control societies. The outer space event was decisive to the point that societies of control configured an intelligibility of Earth which understands it as a planet that is fragile when managed. From the administration of state violence to the management of climate change, we present the functioning of a planetary governmentality which seeks to guarantee the safety of transterritorial flows established with the expansion of neoliberalism also on a global scale / A partir da segunda metade do século XX, foguetes, satélites, sondas, espaçonaves e estações espaciais permitiram a ocupação da órbita terrestre e a realização de viagens espaciais a localidades próximas da Terra. Impulsionadas pela corrida armamentista, as tecnologias espaciais projetaram a guerra e a política para a órbita, instaurando os primeiros sistemas planetários de monitoramento, incialmente utilizados para se espionar mísseis. Interessada na contemporaneidade, esta tese pretende contribuir para os estudos sobre as sociedades de controle evidenciando suas procedências siderais e ressaltando a importância do acontecimento espacial para a configuração das relações de poder a céu aberto próprias a estas sociedades. Além de ser tomado em sua perspectiva ascendente, no sentido de abandonar o planeta, o acontecimento espaço sideral também deve ser analisado segundo o seu movimento descendente, ou seja, levando em consideração suas derivas, principalmente os spin-offs (derivações) que produz e que não se reduzem a produtos ou a benefícios socioeconômicos, mas também implicam em redimensionamentos políticos do governo do planeta e da vida. Dentre os spin-offs políticos que derivam do acontecimento sideral destacamos nesta tese a emergência do corpo-planeta, que se torna o alvo de investimentos da ecopolítica das sociedades de controle. O acontecimento sideral foi decisivo para que as sociedades de controle configurassem uma inteligibilidade da Terra que a toma como um frágil planeta a ser gerenciado. Da administração dos estados de violência à gestão das mudanças climáticas, apresentamos neste trabalho o funcionamento de uma governamentalidade planetária que procura garantir a segurança dos fluxos transterritoriais instaurados com a expansão do neoliberalismo também em escala planetária

In what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze labelled Control Societies, mechanisms reminiscent of censorship – that is, restriction of information that administrators of power wish to regulate the spreading of – are present in the concept of copyright. This kind of censorship has theadvantage of not being scrutinized by public eyes in the way that the work of institutionalized censorship agencies such as the Swedish Statens Biografbyrå was. It is not unlikely that expanded possibilities for punishing anyone who spreads copyrighted material will result in larger and larger areas that may not be accessed, as the avoiding of conflict and repressive actions will emphasize the behaviour to take detours around information that is deemed taboo and therefore suspicious and dangerous. The ACTA trade agreement is one proposed tool for such extended possibilities for punishment. This essay does not however claim that copyright and censorship are the same – but rather that the institutional execution of power that was previously a matter of state censorship has a lot of similarities with current and prognosticated application of copyright laws by corporations. While claiming to protect the individual, the disciplinary power executed actually aims to protect the one executing it; the purpose of the power structure is to replicate itself.

In what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze labelled Control Societies, mechanisms reminiscent of censorship – that is, restriction of information that administrators of power wish to regulate the spreading of – are present in the concept of copyright. This kind of censorship has the advantage of not being scrutinized by public eyes in the way that the work of institutionalized censorship agencies such as the Swedish Statens Biografbyrå was. It is not unlikely that expanded possibilities for punishing anyone who spreads copyrighted material will result in larger and larger areas that may not be accessed, as the avoiding of conflict and repressive actions will emphasize the behaviour to take detours around information that is deemed taboo and therefore suspicious and dangerous. The ACTA trade agreement is one proposed tool for such extended possibilities for punishment. This essay does not however claim that copyright and censorship are the same – but rather that the institutional execution of power that was previously a matter of state censorship has a lot of similarities with current and prognosticated application of copyright laws by corporations. While claiming to protect the individual, the disciplinary power executed actually aims to protect the one executing it; the purpose of the power structure is to replicate itself.

Heft 6 der Zeitschrift Coils of the serpent.

What if we read Gilles Deleuze’s late essay on control societies not as a contribution to Foucault’s map ?

Just prior to his untimely death in 1961 in a hospital in the United States of America, Franz Fanon taught a series of lectures at the University of Tunis. His lecture notes include a section titled “Le contrôl et la surveillance”, in which he makes “social diagnoses, on the embodied effects and outcomes of surveillance practices on different categories of laborers when attempts are made by way of workforce supervision to reduce their labor to an automation: factory assembly line workers subjected to time-management by punch clocks and time sheets, the eavesdropping done by telephone switchboard supervisors as they secretly listened in on calls”, and other forms of management by surveillance (Browne 2015: 5-6). Here, Fanon produces an original account of control as an alienating and dehumanizing force of social production. Importantly for Fanon, technologies of control also generate and reinforce subjective experiences of racialization as an aspect of dehumanization in capitalist modernity. Yet, despite Fanon’s close intellectual friendship with Sartre and his involvement with Parisian philosophical circles during the postwar period, the emerging generation of French poststructuralist thinkers who became Sartre’s heirs do not seem to have regarded Fanon’s work on control as influential upon their groundbreaking theorizations of contemporary power and social production. As Simone Browne notes (2015: 165), Foucault does not reference Fanon in his early lectures on discipline and affective embodiment in “Madness and Civilization”, delivered during his own residency from 1966-68 at the University of Tunis; nor does he cite Fanon’s work in his later lecture series on biopolitics and security delivered at the Collège de France from 1977 to 1979. Similarly, although Fanon’s critical approach to psychoanalysis is mentioned in passing by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1983), Fanon is not cited by Deleuze (1988) as a precursor to his subsequent thinking about Foucault’s account of “disciplinary society” as a paradigm of modernity. Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, which Gregory Flaxman (2019) argues should be read as an afterword to Deleuze’s earlier book on Foucault, again fails to consider Fanon a relevant source of knowledge regarding the nature of those power formations Deleuze believes are characteristic of a more contemporary shift towards “societies of control” (Deleuze 1992).

In his “Postscript on Control Societies,” Deleuze notably refers to a “mutation of capitalism” as one of the key characteristics of the post-disciplinary regime he terms control society. “The operation of markets,” he writes, “is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters” (1992: 6). In the following essay, I will focus on a section of the economy in which this mutation is especially visible: the realm of finance, which in recent years has assumed an increasingly political and governmental function.

The following essay takes the topic of this special issue as an opportunity to not just investigate Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies,” but to look more generally at the text’s place within his work as a whole. Indeed, as various authors have observed, there are a number of aspects that clearly distinguish the essay from the bulk of Deleuze’s other writings. First, what the Postscript aims at is a very direct and immediate “diagnosis of the present” (Foucault 1999: 91). Despite its brevity, the essay therefore entails a wide-ranging account of the (social, economic, cultural, and technological) ‘system’ which was about to take hold when Deleuze wrote the essay (1990) – and which still seems pervasive today. Second, the Postscript represents one of the few instances where Deleuze addresses new media, the digital, cyberspace, and computers: technologies, that is, which in the last few decades have thoroughly transformed the world we live in (cf. Galloway 2012). Third, while Deleuze is usually considered to be a thinker of affirmative creation and a joyous politics of difference and becoming, the Postscript may be the text that most evidently lends itself to discovering not only a more contemporary, but also a somewhat ‘darker’ Deleuze (cf. Culp 2016). For although it underlines the necessity of “finding new weapons” and developing “new forms of resistance” – pointing out that the question is not “whether the old or new system is harsher or more bearable” (Deleuze 1995: 178) – one can argue that the Postscript’s general perspective and tone is in fact more bleak and pessimistic than most of Deleuze’s other writings.