Postscript On The Societies Of Control Quotes

We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.

There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.

The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies. ‘Control’ is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future.

The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.

The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.

There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it's within each that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another . . . There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continually change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point. This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at a level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas.