Heft 6 der Zeitschrift Coils of the serpent.

Deleuze’s short essay on the societies of control has, one could say, infected thought on the present. Few serious reflections on today’s media society seem immune against the plausibility and evidence of Deleuze’s deliberations, not least because they use the force of abstraction to draw theoretical concepts from empirical facts, allowing for an anticipation of future developments without getting lost in details. Deleuze argues that a society whose media and technologies provide an apparatus of seamless connectivity and global scope has irreversible effects on the way we perceive, think, and create order. At the same time, the naturalization of these effects progresses via retroaction – making us forget it has ever been different. With his text, Deleuze stands in the midst of this naturalization and neutralization process: This may be why it is inevitably a “postscript” to the societies of control – it takes the artificial position of the “post” in order to be able to look at one’s own contemporary culture from an alienating distance, as Foucault once demanded for every description of the present (1999: 91). This “post,” then, by no means signals a retrospective look at a process already completed; instead, Deleuze gives an exaggerated account of the early digitization age from an artificial retrospective standpoint, which, ironically, will also have been one “after” writing.

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The occasion for this special issue of Coils of the Serpent is the 30-year anniversary of Gilles Deleuze’s essay “Postscript on Control Societies.”

In this article, I seek to discuss the principles of modulation and variation in Deleuze’s canonical essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (Deleuze 1992). Analyzing and testing what Deleuze recognizes as “inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry” and as a “self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other […], like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point” (1992: 4), I will focus on the digital image

In his short paper “Postscript on Control Societies” (Deleuze 1995: 177-82), Gilles Deleuze offered one of the most searing diagnoses of contemporary society critical theory has produced. Three decades later, this essay remains remarkable for its prescience, especially when one considers that the World Wide Web was not in existence at the time that Deleuze wrote his essay, let alone smart phones and social media. Now that we’re beginning to understand the impact of global corporations such as Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), it could be argued that the essay speaks to today’s technological reality even more incisively than it did thirty years ago. Deleuze identified some of the key principles and logics at work.