Discipline Societies vs. Control Societies
Foucault’s introduction to Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus, and Deleuze’s short review of Foucault’s work in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” in October serve as examples for how to conduct a reasonable review of a work that services readers by not only providing glowing evaluative terms, but also providing key overviews and add-ons that supplement the works to benefit the reader by framing those texts. For example, Foucault’s intro to Deleuze provides the context for the reader in which Deleuze was writing but also frames Anti-Oedipus into context as an “Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.” In calling it “an art” (in the sense of the term “erotic art”) Foucault sets up the readers’ expectations and methods for reading the book–i.e., as a how-to manual for not being fascist. According to Foucault, this means following Deleuze, who practices what he preaches through his writing that forces people to work to get at the meaning rather than serving it up. Foucault’s use of the words “tactical” and “strategic” prepare the reader for “battle” or “war” against fascism–Anti-Oedipus, for him, shows tactical as well as “strategic” concerns, or ground-level versus overarching fronts in the war on fascism.
This “battle” or “war” though, like Foucault states of Deleuze’s book, “often leads one to believe it is all fun and games, when something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness.” Foucault’s composition of this review reflects this playful surface tone and serious undertone. In a seemingly un-Foucaultian fashion, Foucault creates a bulleted list of action steps to “this art of living” into a “manual or guide to everyday life” with maxims like “free political action, develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation…, withdraw allegiance from the old categories…, do not think … , do not use …, do not demand …, do not become enamored of power.” These commands, like the book’s title, are all “anti” rather than “pro.” To that end, Foucault’s writing in this review seems brisk and upbeat compared to his other, more dense works/prose and, while mimicking (one assumes from not having read Anti-Oedipus itself) Anti-Oedipus it communicates the classic Foucaultian themes of power, domination and control that we know so well.
Deleuze’s “Postscript” on Foucault also shows an informed way to conduct a review of another scholar’s work that is favorable and also insightful and provides a framing service to the reader–in this case, framing Foucault in Deleuze’s perspective/light. He bookends the review, starting out with answers and declarative sentences/statements and ending with (troubling) questions: “Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries…” and sets us up to know that we are moving from a society of discipline to one of control; by the end there are many questions pertaining to the “resistance against societies of control,” our ability or inability to “grasp the rough outlines of these coming forms,” followed-up by the statement: “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.” Through reading this review, the reader can learn the ins and outs of Foucault’s theory on discipline versus control, as well as the implications and how to move through and resist (or not) both. This assists the reader with determining whether to read their colleague’s work while simultaneously providing a useful framework for if/when they do read.
I will end this review of reviews on this particularly thought-provoking statement that I think sums up the stakes of these arguments: “Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) [sic.] electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position–licit or illicit–and effects of a universal modulation.” Coiling serpent indeed.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59 (winter), pp. 3-7. MIT Press, 1992.
Foucault, Michel. Preface. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, pp. xi-xiil. University of Minnesota, 1983.
