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July 21, 2010
Steven Shaviro in The ‘Bitter Necessity’ of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control refers to Gilles Deleuze argument that we are in process of moving away from Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society, and towards a new sort of social formation, which Deleuze calls the control society. The differences between these two social formations, we may say that, where the disciplinary society is closed and hierarchical, the control society is open, fluid, and rhizomatic.
He says that:
Deleuze carefully points out that “this technological development is more deeply rooted in a mutation of capitalism” .... He goes on to show how the transition from discpline to control is coordinated with the major changes in capitalism that other commentators have noted: the transition from the welfare state to the ne- oliberal state; from Taylorism to Toyotaism; from Fordism to post-Fordism and flexible accumulation...; from demands for obedience on the part of workers to demands that workers be adaptible, flexible, versatile and “entrepreneurial” ....; from industrial capital and “material expansion” to finance capital and “financial expansion” ....; and from the formal to the real subsumption of labor under capital....
This is the world of neo-liberalism and its idea of unfettered economic competition in which the traditional disciplinary regimes of schools, factories, and so on lose their power and are replaced by the so-called “discipline of the market and debt and so constrain human freedom.
Shaviro says:
No State apparatus, no “governmentality,” no measure of surveillance, and no form of education or propaganda has been able to constrain human freedom as comprehensively – or as invisibly – as the neoliberal market has done...capitalist debt as we know it today is a kind of double process. It ravages the present in the name of a future that will never actually arrive; and it depletes our hopes for, and imaginings of, the future by turning it into nothing but a projection and endless repetition of the present.
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You academics amaze me.
What's the secret?
How do some folk accomplish so much when the rest of us are just kicking dust?