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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:72852 |
| Date | 20 November 2020 |
| Creators | Avanessian, Armen, Hennig, Anke |
| Publisher | Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-728155, qucosa:72815 |
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