[liberationtech] CfP: "Societies of Control" for Special Issue of New Formations

[Yosem Companys]

New Formations Special Issue  'Societies of Control'

Call for Contributions

Deadline for paper proposals March 31st 2014

Potential contributors: please submit title, full abstract (300 words) and 
a short c.v. tonfsubmissions at me.com  by this date.

Contributors will be notified of acceptance by April 14th 2014

Submission of papers will be required by  September 30th 2014.

Journal Info:http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/contents.html

This issue of New Formations will address a complex set of interrelated 
issues in the theorisation of contemporary societies and power relations. 
The emergence of distributed systems, network relations and decentralised 
institutions has been widely observed as a key feature of social, cultural 
and political change for several decades, across a wide range of domains of 
practice and discourse. The issue will provide an opportunity to reflect 
upon this convergence and the diverse positions from which it has been 
theorised.

A key reference point in these discussions, Deleuze's 'Post-Script on the 
Societies of Control' remains a enigmatic text on several levels. Easily 
dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a metaphysician on a fundamentally 
sociological set of questions, the essay's theses have nonetheless proven 
irresistibly suggestive to many commentators. The claim that contemporary 
mechanisms of government, regulation and administration must be understood 
as operating according to different logics than the classic 'normative' 
mode of 'disciplinary' power seems increasingly relevant in the era of 
networked communications and official encouragement of cultural, social and 
sexual 'diversity', and yet Deleuze's delineation of those mechanisms 
remains frustratingly abstract and cryptically suggestive.

However, Maurizio Lazzarato has persuasively linked Deleuze's suggestive 
account with the general thesis that contemporary capitalism is best 
understood in terms of the shift from 'Fordism' to 'post-Fordism' in the 
1980s. Whilst Fordism relies on a typically 'disciplinary' set of 
institutions and practices (the factory, the centralised nation state, the 
collectivist and conformist education system, 'mass' media), post-Fordism 
relies on quite different mechanisms and organisational forms 
(disaggregated networks of corporations, trans-national regulatory bodies, 
'narrowcasting' and social media) which the notion of 'control society' 
tries to capture at the same level of abstraction as Foucault's concept of 
'discipline'.

In fact, although Foucault's studies of 'disciplinary' society have 
influenced understanding of both historical and contemporary societies 
across a swathe of disciplines and in many spheres of political thought and 
cultural work, his later lectures seem also to propose that the logic of 
'security' which emerges in the 20th century is different from the logic of 
'discipline' and in this regarid is close to Deleuze's understanding of 
'control'. Reading Foucault's later lecture sources with care, Lazzarato 
argues persuasively that it is a common but categorical mistake to believe 
that Foucault's studies of disciplinary power are attempts to delineate the 
basic mechanisms of contemporary forms of power, rather than historical 
studies of institutional forms and practices which, while they may well 
persist, are today definitively 'residual' in character.

Simultaneous with and subsequent to Deleuze’s and Foucault’s work on these 
issues the emergence of interest in post-Fordism in the wake of the 
Regulation School’s theorisation of Fordism and its decline has generated 
interested in a similar set of issues since the 1980s, particularly on the 
Anglophone Left. The claim that the shift from ‘Fordism’ to ‘Post-Fordism’ 
or ‘the New Capitalism’ constitutes the definitive historical process of 
recent times has been influential on various strands of social and 
political theory and analysis since the early 1980s. What might be the 
points of resonance or dissonance between these theses and those proposed 
by Foucault and Deleuze and their followers?

Another element of much commentary on these issues has been the proposition 
that ‘the network’ now constitutes the prevalent organisational form for 
both corporations and political and social movements. The fact that 
‘networked’ and ‘horizontal’ organisational forms were pioneered by the 
radical movements of the 60s and 70s - most notably the women’s movement - 
is well known. What is the significance of this historical fact, of the 
agency of the women’s movement and the desires it expresses in shifting the 
dynamics of advanced capitalist culture? How does the emergence of post- 
Fordism and the societies of security / control transform gender relations 
and the politics of sexuality, and how far have those shifts themselves 
been driven by the multiple refusals of gendered and sexual normativity 
which have characterised the cultural radicalism of recent decades?

This issue will explore the analytic possibilities generated by this set of 
issues, questions and theses with reference both to a range of possible 
objects of study in contemporary politics and culture and to a number of 
different conceptual and theoretical positions. Should we bother to develop 
and flesh out Deleuze's and Foucault’s suggestions at all? If so, how might 
we do so and what would be the analytic gains? Are there alternative 
conceptions of phenomena addressed by their work which would allow for 
better diagnosis and more sophisticated analysis?

What phenomena of contemporary culture and politics might be best analysed 
in terms of the idea of 'control society'? How could such analyses inform 
our broader understanding of such issues as the 'war on terror', new modes 
of sexual regulation, new forms of censorship (especially online) and 
'surveillance' by corporate or state agencies and debates over intellectual 
property? What forms of democratic, libertarian or anti-capitalist politics 
and culture might be possible or necessary in an era of ‘control'?



Confirmed Contributors:

Andrew Goffey
Luciana Parisi
Tiziana Terranova
Angela Mitropoulos
Athina Karatzogianni
Will Davies
Alex Williams
Tony Sampson
Yuk Hui
Erich Hörl
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