Deleuze on Control & Resistance

Instructor: Anna Longo Date & Time: October 30, November 6, 13, 20. 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: In “Postscript on Control Societies,” Deleuze announces the rise of a new social organization rooted in a mutation of capitalism. While the previous phase was characterized by the subjection of humans to motorized machines, the new one is marked by the appearance of a third type of machines: cybernetics and informational technologies. Rather than imposing social roles and fixed identities, the system’s further deterritorialization requires a continuum variation of subjectivities, operating through a smooth modulation of fluxes. Individuals are no more cast by discipline in closed spaces of surveillance but, within an open network, they are constantly called upon to adapt to contingencies: “everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.”

Thus, what differentiates the required fluidity of the present away from the revolutionary becoming that Deleuze usually invokes as a form of creative resistance against the normativity of power? What is an act of resistance against a system that appears to evolve unpredictably by dragging identities into its accelerating deterritorializations? To answer these questions, this Seminar proposes going through Deleuze’s final political writings and interviews to clarify the mutant logic that he attributes to capitalism and the role of information and technology in the continuous modulation of identities. Moreover, we will put into question his concept of creation as an act of resistance to understand the sense of the revolutionary role that it assumes for the artist and the philosopher. The Seminar asks: do art and philosophy still have the capacity of surpassing the impressive acceleration of technological and algorithmic creativity?

IMAGE: Taeyoon Choi, Foucault’s Disciplinary Institutions, 2018.

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