Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control

Liquid Theory TV is a collaboration between Clare Birchall, Gary Hall and Peter Woodbridge designed to develop a series of IPTV programmes. (IPTV, in its broadest sense, stands for all those technologies which use computer networks to deliver audio-visual programming.) The idea behind the Liquid Theory TV project is to experiment with IPTVs potential for providing new ways of communicating intellectual ideas, easily and cheaply, both inside and outside of the university. We want to do so not so much in an effort to have an impact outside of the academy, be it economic, social or cultural; nor to connect with an increasingly media-literate audience that books supposedly cannot, or can no longer, reach. Rather we want to experiment with IPTV in order to explore the potential for different effectivities that different forms of communication have - to the extent of perhaps even leading us to conceive of what we do as academics, writers, artists, media theorists and philosophers differently (see Wise, 2006: 241).

The second episode in the series takes as its focus Gilles Deleuzes short essay Postscript on the Societies of Control. While this episode is being made available for the first time in an issue of Culture Machine which has the theme of creative media; and while Liquid Theory TV could be described as a creative project, to the extent it is concerned with producing alternative, rival, or counter-desires to those currently dominant within much of society (at its simplest, a desire for philosophy or more broadly theory, rather than for the creations of Richard Branson, Simon Cowell or Rupert Murdoch, say), this does not mean that either the series, or this particular episode, should be regarded simply as an attempt to perform Deleuzes philosophy. The critical and interpretive aspects of scholarly work remain important to us here, even if they are being undertaken in a medium very different to the traditional academic journal article or book.

Further episodes can be found at http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/New-Cultural-Studies:-The-Liquid-Theory-Reader or at http://www.petewoodbridge.info/

Category:

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• society
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• deleuze
• foucault
• michelle
• theory
• cultural
• studies
• culture
• media
• gilles
• guattari
• network
• disciplinary
• societies
• philosophy
• philosopher
• humanities

[discoapocalypse]

something that is quite unfortunate about this video rendition is it's loss (probably through it's imagery, soundtrack and overall mode) of the joy which is present in the text which it is commenting on. Mediating the text in this way is very dangerous because images have a tendency to dissolve the highly individual threads present in the words of Deleuze.

[RogerHoare]

This is surely a gaseous emission emanating from the dyspepsia of the real.

[petewoodbridge]

@discoapocalypse last few responses are from Pete, Clare and Gary

[petewoodbridge]

@discoapocalypse As we explain in a little more detail in the commentary that accompanies

the next episode in the series, ‘The Post-Secret State: Openness and

Transparency in the Era of Gov 2.0’, which is shortly due to appear in

the journal NMediaC, it is with some of the ways in which we might begin

to speculate on the implications of Flusser’s question for critical

theory – how it is created, developed, performed and circulated – that

the Liquid Theory TV series is experimenting.

[petewoodbridge]

@discoapocalypse 'What is distinctive about writing? What sets it apart from comparable

gestures of the past and future – from painting, from pressing on

computer keys?

These are simple questions only at first glance. A comprehensive book

would be required to grasp them all. But the crux of the matter is that

such a book would still be a book. Instead of what? That is the

question.' (2011a, p.4)

[petewoodbridge]

@discoapocalypse How significant is it that Poster (like the

Deleuze of the ‘Postscript’) continues to use the technology of the

print-on-paper codex book and the associated written forms of

presentation and debate to try to tell us something about the

specificity of networked computers? To quote Flusser in Does Writing

Have a Future?:

[petewoodbridge]

@discoapocalypse Yet could this theory concerning the continual shaping of the subject’s

temporality by different media cultures not be said to itself experience

a certain degree of difficulty when it comes to accounting for the very

media technology with which Poster – like Flusser, Derrida, Stiegler and

indeed Deleuze – is most clearly engaged, and to which his consciousness

is presumably tied most tightly: namely writing, the text and the

print-on-paper codex book?

[petewoodbridge]

@discoapocalypse As a

result, deconstruction has difficulty distinguishing between media

cultures such as between writing cultures and image cultures. Bernard

Stiegler finds fault with Derrida on precisely these grounds… ' (Poster,

2011, p.xv-xvi)

[petewoodbridge]

@discoapocalyspe 'For Flusser, writing as a medium encourages a specific form of

temporality. The medium and the character of time are particular. This

suggests that each medium might have an associated, special form of

temporality. Flusser’s media theory thereby accounts for the specificity

of each information technology.His view contrasts sharply with

Derrida’s view in the sense the latter understands the temporal logic of

writing as paradigmatic for all media–indeed, for all technology

[petewoodbridge]

@discoapocalypse One exception to this is the Deleuze of the ‘Postscript on

Control Societies’ - a text which has a rather ‘marginal’ position in

relation to the rest of Deleuze’s corpus, however, but which has

nevertheless been over-celebrated precisely because it is one of the few

concerned explicitly with media.