"Postscript on the Societies of Control"

Gilles Deleuze

1. Historical

Foucault located the _disciplinary societies_ in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the
outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast
spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one
closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the
family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then
the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory;
from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent
instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves
as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine
of Rossellini's _Europa '51_ could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing
convicts."

saeed writes: "This is from

Le Monde diplomatique -- November 2002

"Terrorism Is Society's Condemnation of Itself"

Jean Baudrillard

The despair of having everything

The West's mission is to make the world's wealth of cultures
interchangeable, and to subordinate them within the global
order. Our culture, which is bereft of values, revenges
itself upon the values of other cultures.

Is globalisation inevitable? What fervour propels the
world to embrace such an abstract idea? And what force
drives us to make that idea a reality so unconditionally?

"Remaking Social Practices" (1)

by Felix Guattari

The routines of daily life, and the banality of the world represented to
us by the media, surround us with a reassuring atmosphere in which nothing
is any longer of real consequence. We cover our eyes; we forbid ourselves
to think about the turbulent passage of our times, which swiftly thrusts
far behind us our familiar past, which effaces ways of being and living
that are still fresh in our minds, and which slaps our future onto an
opaque horizon, heavy with thick clouds and miasmas. We depend all the
more on the reassurance that nothing is assured.

SCP-New York writes:

"Why We Refuse to 'Play Detective' "

Surveillance Camera Players -- NY

In the early days of the process of identification [...], the identity of a person was established through his signature. The invention of photography was a turning point in the history of this process. It is no less significant for criminology than the invention of the printing press is for literature. Photography made it possible for the first time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being. The detective story came into being when this most decisive conquest of a person's incognito had been accomplished. Since then, the end of efforts to capture a man in his speech and actions has not been in sight. -- Walter Benjamin, The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, 1938

Detective stories are very, very popular these days, not only in bookstores, but also at the movies and on television, where they are sometimes called "police dramas." What accounts for the enduring popularity of the detective story? A big factor is obviously the salacious subject matter, the crimes, the most common of which is murder. To guard against the accusation that the writers and readers of such gruesome fictions are puerile or perverted, the center of attention of these "guilty pleasures" is shifted from the crime and the criminal who committed it to the detective who investigates the case. No doubt this is shift is made with great reluctance, because it is commonly believed that criminals are "more interesting people" than police officers. In any event, the need to compromise suggests that it isn't so much the gruesome crimes, but the narrative's displaced relationship to them, that makes the detective story so popular as a genre. People may love to read about criminals, but, deep down, they identify with detectives.