Culture, Control, Critique

History discloses numerous crises in representation and critique. Indeed, the problem of representation is situated at the heart of philosophical as well as religious discourses. It has given birth to various theories and practices relating to, for example, analogy, allegory, and iconography as well as to responses to sublimity and historical traumas. Critique, in the way it is understood here as relating to how to respond theoretically to political, cultural, and social developments, has also always constituted a problem. This problem has been intimately related to the question of representation as the possible space or position from which critique is possible. This question of position has in turn developed alongside conceptions of agency, subjectivity, rights, and the notion of the human itself. The very notion of the human as it derives from Aristotle rests on a distinction between life that just is — zoe — and life that is informed by a political community, and thus by a potential and a right to a critical voice — bios. As Aristotle puts it: 'It is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state' (Aristotle 1920, 29). Thus, the possibility to critically interrogate a state of affairs relies, from the perspective of Classical Greek thinkers, on a politics of inclusion and exclusion, an inside to the polis and an outside. The beginning of biopower in the seventeenth century and its development during the classical period as Michel Foucault delineates it is centrally a repositioning of this distinction between inside and outside in terms of life. Bare life is no longer excluded but is rather included in a politics built on controlling, regulating, and administrating life in all its dimensions. The 'threshold of modernity' as Foucault puts it, and thereby the break with the Greek separation of life into zoe and bios, 'has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies' (Foucault 1990, 143). Passing this threshold, political life ceases to be identified in relation to an outside and becomes, rather, pervasive of all spaces, actions, and bodies. From this point onward, critique cannot be performed without the simultaneous recognition that every position, including the one from which critique is expressed, is always already informed by the processes of administration that have monitored and regulated the very body and mind of this position. This, then, is the birth of a crisis in critique that has come to shape modernity and, in the wake of Foucault's seminal work on biopolitics, postmodernity.

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault outlines the gradual transitions of systems of power from sovereign power and disciplinary power to biopower. Sovereign power is, essentially, a hierarchal and clearly identifiable form of power that makes clear separation between the ruler and the ruled, between ordering and obeying. This power is built around the absolute right to kill — 'to take life or let live' (Foucault 2003, 241). Locating the emergence of disciplinary power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he notes how such power functions by means of the separation, alignment, serialisation, and surveillance of bodies. Bodies are organised in space according to principles of visibility, trained and rationalised in order to increase and ensure maximum productive force (Foucault 2003, 424). Disciplinary society works according to an 'individualising' mode maximising productivity and control by means of the organisation of bodies. Foucault observes that towards the second half of the eighteenth century, a new technology of power is on the increase that does not replace but modifies such disciplinary techniques. This new technology of power, while 'embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques', exists on a level that is less concerned with individual bodies and more with the human species as a whole. This 'biopolitics of the human race' is engaged with life itself, directly taking as its object the regulation of life in terms of biology and the environment. Instead of primarily monitoring individual bodies, biopower aims to intervene in a more immediate fashion into the various aspects of life — health, reproduction, the regularity of the population. Thus biopower is not concerned with disciplining bodies so much as with regularising life. As Foucault puts it more succinctly: 'The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures. And their purpose is not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined, to intervene at the level of their generality.' This way, the goal is establishing equilibrium and maintaining an average (Foucault 2003, 246). Foucault describes disciplinary — and biopower in terms of two series — 'the body-organism-discipline-institutions series, and the population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms State' (Foucault 2003, 250). These two series are not oppositional so much as complementary, as can be seen, for example, in the way in which some elements, like medicine, which can be applied to both, or the norm, which circulates between the two, bring the two series together (Foucault 2003, 252–53). These two series — the disciplinary and the biopolitical — coexist from the eighteenth century onward and in one of his 1976 lectures at Collège de France Foucault notes that they are still on the advance (Foucault 2003, 254).

In a conversation with Antonio Negri in 1990, published as 'Control and Becoming', as well as in a brief but seminal essay titled 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', Gilles Deleuze returns to how Foucault theorises this shift in the distribution of power. Deleuze's theories of control are inspired not only by Foucault but also by Paul Virilio and William S. Burroughs, and they have subsequently inspired major works such as Michael Hardt's and Negri's work on Empire. Centrally, Deleuze looks at how Foucault's theories may be advanced to correspond to more recent developments in such distribution. Briefly, while Foucault's disciplinary societies rely on the spatial distribution of control by means of institutions, molds, and identities, and the biopolitical mode relied on regulatory and statistical strategies, the control society that Deleuze identifies is based on a form of free-floating control by means of modulations and individual codes. Foucault, Deleuze points out, was one of the first to articulate this move away from the disciplinary model (Deleuze 1995, 174). The idea of control society thus does not break off from Foucault's analyses of biopower so much as it constitutes a continuation and elaboration of disciplinary and regulatory technologies that...