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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:72860 |
| Date | 20 November 2020 |
| Creators | Schleusener, Simon |
| 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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