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As Alexander Galloway observes in an essay called “Computers and the Superfold,” Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 “Postscript on the Societies of Control” is a highly unusual text, when compared to the philosopher’s larger oeuvre: “Such a strange little text” (Galloway 2012: 513), it is indeed very different from the earlier Deleuze of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, or the Deleuze who wrote the two-volume magnum opus Capitalism and Schizophrenia in tandem with Félix Guattari. How to read not only its peculiarity within Deleuze’s work as a whole, but also its particularity as a text that belongs to a certain genre?

The following remarks are intended as philosophical comments on Gilles Deleuze’s groundbreaking reflections on a control society emerging at the end of the 20th century (cf. Deleuze 1992). Following Foucault, Deleuze’s interpretations of the ‘contemporary’ socio-technological transformations are mostly of a spatio-technical nature; the aim of this article is to complement his diagnosis with a time-philosophical analysis. Here, the guiding question is how to best characterize the time-political dimension of the new forms of social (“apprenticeships and permanent training”) and economic control, which has only further increased with the financialization of the 21st century (“Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt”) (1992: 6-7). Deleuze’s text already contains a number of clues that are relevant in this context, for example his references to the work of the dromonihilist Paul Virilio, specifically to the “ultrarapid forms of free-floating control” (1992: 4) that the latter outlined. Behind the acceleration paradigm sketched out by Virilio, however, we recognize an explanatory model of a different temporality, that is, both a different model of explanation and a different model of time. According to our working hypothesis, complex societies or societies that, under the influence of algorithms and computer-based infrastructures, are temporally complex can no longer be understood from the perspective of the present. The type of economy that Deleuze subsumed under the concept of ‘control society’ corresponds to a logic that is no longer centered on the present or the contemporary. Rather, under the digital technological conditions of the 21st century, control turns out to be time control and control of (as well as from) the future.

In his discussion of the transition from the cinema of the movement-image to the cinema of the time-image, Deleuze famously makes way for the traumatic intrusion of history. This transition, he writes, is not purely internal to cinema, but the result of the emergence of '‘any spaces whatever’, deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaceswhatever a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers. (1989: xi) ' These spaces are the result of the destruction caused by the Second World War, creating new forms of anonymous or empty space: bombed cities, abandoned villages, the chaos of what Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, called “the zone” (1975: 281-616).1 It is these spaces, especially in Italian neo-realism, which will break up the movement-image and release “a little time in a pure state” (Deleuze 1989: xi). Due to the stark emptiness of these spaces and their anonymity, characters or images will no longer be embedded in movement but instead become detached into time.

At the beginning of 1930, Theodor W. Adorno, who was only 28 years old, was awarded the venia legendi (teaching permission) for philosophy and the academic title “Privatdozent”, after his Habilitationsschrift (on Kierkegaard) had been accepted by the faculty of philosophy on the basis of two positive reviews, by Adorno’s older friend and mentor Max Horkheimer and the prominent theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich. This title traditionally comes without academic position or pay, but is the precondition for applications for the position of professor. In early May, he was obliged to give his inaugural lecture to the academic public, and he chose a rather programmatic subject, “The Actuality of Philosophy”, using the occasion for a rigorous critique of the major trends in current German academic philosophy and a bold statement concerning the possible future of a certain kind of materialist philosophy which he was just about to develop.

In his “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, which was written 30 years ago in 2020, Gilles Deleuze leaves us with the diagnosis that a profound transformation of society and capitalism has taken place: having left behind the disciplinary societies, which Foucault analysed (cf. Foucault 1975), after World War II, we are now living in societies of control that are inseparably connected to a new form of capitalism (cf. Deleuze 1992: 3-4, 6). This transformation of society has led to a “generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure” (Deleuze 1992: 3-4) which were being reshaped through various reforms, resulting in “the installation of the new forces” (1992: 4), that is, the “progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination” (1992: 7). Apparently, Deleuze’s clairvoyant idea of the society of control seems to have come true: we no longer need to imagine science fiction, since contemporary reality is already structured by digitised control mechanisms of multiple sorts and characters. Many of our social, economic, and political actions in both public and private everyday life are at least influenced or even caused by algorithms. Several of these algorithms may make our lives more convenient, especially in terms of the possibilities of the Internet, such as deterritorialised connection, access to information, and shared technological knowledge. However, in the “age of algorithm” (Sunstein 2017: 3), most areas of digitised reality based on ‘big data’, like social media, financial markets, smart technologies, or artificial intelligence systems are characterised by anonymity, non-transparency, and undemocratic structures which appear like asymmetrical mechanisms for controlling individuals. The function of algorithms enables all kinds of political and private organisations, like companies and governments, to evaluate patterns of individual behaviour and actions and to handle them as impersonal, general, and – in the Deleuzean idiom – dividualised facets of reality (cf. Baranzoni 2016: 45-46): a reality that is rather to be calculated in capitalistic terms than to be created and to be designed by human beings themselves (e.g. as political actors).

Deleuze launches his description/prediction of the emergence and imminent consolidation of the society of control as a postscript. The text thus announces itself as an afterthought, a supplement appended to some complete larger textual body, from which it is, however, unmoored as it is launched as an independent self-standing text that, moreover, does not indicate to what it is an addendum but instead, on what it speaks. By this token, the Postscript unhinges the conventional notion according to which a supplement signals “the addition of something to an already complete entity” (Attridge 1992: 77). By marking his text as the adjunct to an absent main body, Deleuze appears to concede and at the same time emphatically embrace the necessary incompleteness of this short précis on the post-disciplinary regime. My argument in the following will be that the supplementary status of the Postscript does not so much signal some subversive or dissident gesture in the name of the minor or the molecular (even though it does that, too); instead, it primarily serves to keep at bay and contain an exteriority that it aims to ‘confine by exclusion’1; and that exteriority, I will argue, is the Third World.

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.