Hey Gilles, how are you?
I heard you recently had a glass of wine with
Michel?
One glass of wine…?
Hm, I think it was two or three
–– bottles…
So you had a nice evening together?
Yes, sort of.
I believe we totally lost control…
If I was nasty I would ask:
How can you lose control in a control society?
Ha Ha! Very funny.
And Michel wasn’t very disciplined either…!?
Actually it was you
who wrote that discipline has ceased to be
the dominant form of power.
In that sense you shouldn’t wonder about
Michel…
As I wrote in 1989 – and I quote – :
“It is sometimes thought that Foucault paints
a picture of modern societies
in terms of disciplinary social apparatuses,
in opposition to older social apparatuses
in which sovereignty is the key concept.
Yet this is by no means the case:
the disciplines which Foucault describes are
the history of
what we gradually cease to be,
and our present-day reality takes on the form
of dispositions of overt and continuous control
in a way which is very different from recent
closed disciplines.”
So, you think that control is a new form of
power?
Yes. Basically, all of this is about the correspondence
between societies and machines.
Disciplinary societies were equipped with
thermodynamic machines
presenting the passive danger of entropy
and the active danger of sabotage.
Control societies function with the next generation
of machines,
with information technology and computers,
where the passive danger is noise and the
active, piracy and viral contamination.
Now, I am convinced that this technological
development is deeply rooted in a mutation
of capitalism,
i.e. the shift from production to product
and from factory to market.
Michel would probably highlight other aspects,
in particular, the biomedical relation between
bodies and machines.
Or he would direct your attention to the fact
that every form of discourse is accompanied
by specific technologies of control.
The Internet is a wonderful example for this...
Young man, that sounds very interesting indeed.
I could bring a bottle of wine from my family’s
vineyard.
How about having a glass together…?
