The story so far. Hardt and Negri have been rifling through Foucault's tool bag to develop the mode of governance exercised by Hegel's concept of public authority. What they found useful in the toolkit were the concepts of a disciplinary society and biopower that are assembled into a particular mode of governance.

However, as we are on the cusp of modernity and postmodernity, Foucault's disciplinary society gives way to a society of control. Hardt and Negri say that they understand the society of control to be "that society which develops at the far edge of modernity and opens toward the postmodern."

So what has changed in this transformation? In what way can we map the changes? What drops away? What comes into the foreground?

Hardt and Negri say that in such a society:

"the mechanisms of Command become ever more "democratic," ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviors of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves. Power is now exercised through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, monitored activities, etc.) toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity."

"...the society of control is characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices. But in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks."

True, the concept of networks of power working internally to to shape, affect, or change the conduct of a person or persons so that our subjectivities is constituted by others, by official discourses, and by power/knowledge is retained. But sovereignty in the form of public authority has become vague and slipped into the background.

Hardt and Negri then go onto address the intensification process of the reshaping of culture and social relations. They say:

"In this passage from disciplinary society to the society of control, then, one could say that the increasingly intense relationship of mutual implication of all social forces that capitalism has pursued throughout its development has now been fully realized. Marx recognized something similar in what he called the passage from the formal subsumption to the real subsumption of labor under capital and later the Frankfurt School philosophers analyzed a closely related passage of the subsumption of culture (and social relations) under the totalitarian figure of the state, or really within the perverse dialectic of Enlightenment. The passage we are referring to, however, is fundamentally different in that instead of focusing on the unidimensionality of the process described by Marx and reformulated and extended by the Frankfurt School, the Foucauldian passage deals fundamentally with the paradox of plurality and multiplicity-and Deleuze and Guattari develop this perspective even more clearly."

Has capitalism been fully realized? Bio-power, which was directed at and through the body at the health and sexuality of individuals, and through individual bodies at populations, is at odds with porn culture now entering everyday life and directed at the subjectivity of the person. The images of the porn industry circulatign through the netwotrks on the internet activates the resitance of a conservative culture.

Has not global capitalism set up its own political reactions? In Australia the integration of the Australian economy with the global one, and the attempt to subsume society and culture to the free market market economy has resulted in the assertion of the power of the nation state vis-a-vis other nation states.

The Australian nation state has become a fortress. This fortress looks defensively at the world outside its borders and sees threats everywhere. The nation state has become increasingly insecure, is deeply opposed to the free movement of labour, and engaged in a war of civilizations against the Islamic world.

The world of nation states is not the world of liberal internationalism build around the global market. It is a Hobbesian world of anarchy in which power counts and is used ruthlessly.

Within the nation state the politics of governance has been concerned with managing the negative political reaction to economic reforms in favour of the free market. Within the nation state there is increasing regionalization happening that counters the unitary subsumption of culture and social relations under the totalitarian figure of the market orientated state.

Shoudl we not be thinking mulitplicity and difference?

Is Hardt and Negri's reduction here a re-introducing of Weber's instrumental rationality that is tied to increase in coherence, systematic order, calculability, control and systematic planning?

Maybe it doesn't matter that much, since they shift away from the unidimensionality of the Frankfurt's School's idea of a totally administered society. They suggest the best way to do this is to raid the toolbox of Deleuze and Guattari.