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).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:72858 |
| Date | 20 November 2020 |
| Creators | Bignall, Simone |
| 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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