In speaking of the society of control, new qualities of current social conditions are usually addressed in a diffuse rather than precise manner. Quite often, e.g. within surveillance studies, it is associated with technologies modelled after the fiction of god-like omnipotence of visual surveillance (cf. Gehring 2017). The relevance of a power of cybernetics – according to Wiener, the science of systemic control – which resonates in the concept of control, refers to normally invisible operations of technical systems that permanently evaluate data streams according to discursively determined parameters and in connection with commercial interests (cf. Wiener 1948).

Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” functions as an index of epochal change. It opens with an invocation of the past, situating Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power in the nineteenth century, and has been read as theorization of the present, of the shifts in power in the late twentieth century. What, however, of its legacy? Or its future? It seems that now, close to thirty years after its publication, it is possible to ask two series of questions of this notion of control. First, where are we with control now?

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