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/

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• deleuze
• foucault
• michelle
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• gilles
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• network
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[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.

[lod1222]

Take a look at youtube's subtitles. -__-'

[MrVoulezvous]

The search after the "new," the idea that "there is nothing particularly new here," in the descriptions offered by the commentator, are not particularly new. Or interesting. It is not so much a repudiation, or an expansion, on the theories being accessed, as it is an empty gesture participating in the marketing-oriented forms of control described by Deleuze.

[Mitchthews]

Occupy Wall St. - Deleuze would be proud.

[katheryncruz24]

Brilliant

[karovievAndMadness]

+ + + + +

[safwan321]

great work

[stantonmick]

While well put together, I find there is little contributed in thought here other than synopsizing Societies of Control and entering into the very tired debate surrounding post structuralism. The rhetorical gestures here imply a greater sense of understanding that Deleuze was not privy to, when, if anyone has thoroughly read the works of Deleuze, would know, that there is anything but a 'linear', grand narrative, and so forth style of argumentation coming from him, or he mistakenly fell into