What Counts
Friday morning is bright, a rare sunlit day for midwinter. Mentally I wrestle with a better understanding of artificial intelligence, the future which accelerates toward me with self-driving vehicles and all manner of intelligent things busily analyzing my habits and tastes.
I just finished reading a four page essay by Gilles Deleuze published in winter of 1992 that speaks to wide ranging social change, the large scale shift in the ways we earn our living and relate to one another. My instinct tells me that understanding these matters, to the best of my ability is critical for my well being and those that I care for.
Perhaps you have the same sense of things? So, I share with you my transcription and paraphrase of the flow of argument from the Gilles Deleuze essay.
Postscript on the Societies of Control
by Gilles Deleuze
Foucault located disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reached their height at the onset of the twentieth.
The organization of vast spaces of enclosure
The individual never ceasing to pass from one enclosed environment to another…
Each having its own laws….
First the family, then the school, the barracks, the factory, possibly the hospital, and if by dint of ill fortune, the prison (the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment)
According to Foucault the ideal project of these environments was to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time – a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces.
These disciplinary forces, accelerated after WWII,…was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.
New forces were knocking at the door: societies of control were and are, replacing the disciplinary societies
“Control” is the name proposed for the new monster, ultra rapid forms of free floating control. … replacing the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system.
Control mechanisms are numerical, a modulation, continuously changing from one moment to the other..
The corporation has replaced the factory.
The corporation is a spirit, a gas, imposing a modulation of each salary – operating through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions.
If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, its because they
express the corporate situation with great precision.
The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” is the brashest rivalry, opposing individuals against one another.
The corporation replaces the factory and … the school. Perpetual training is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.
In the societies of control one is never finished with anything — the corporation, the educational system, the armed forces are metastable states occupying one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.
In The Trial, Kafka is faced with limitless postponements……….
The old monetary mole, is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent that of the societies of control.
…. Passing from the mole to the serpent in the system under which we live, in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The man-of-control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.
Societies of control operate with computers, whose passive danger is jamming, whose active danger is piracy and the introduction of viruses.
A mutation of capitalism:
19th century capitalism was one of concentration, for production and for property – conquering markets by specialization, by colonization, sometimes by lowering the cost of production.
Capitalism is no longer involved in production. What it wants to sell is services and what it wants to buy is stocks. It is essentially dispersive, the factory has given way to the corporation (as have the family, the school, the army) becoming coded figures, deformable and transformable, — a single corporation that now has only stockholders.
Conquests of markets are made by grabbing control, … no longer by disciplinary training. CORRUPTION THEREBY GAINS A NEW POWER.
Marketing become the soul of the corporation.
Hearing that corporations have a soul is the most terrifying news in the world.
Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.
Capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control not only has to deal with erosion of frontiers but with explosions within shanty towns/ghettos.
What counts is that we are at the beginning of something.
The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.
9 thoughts on “What Counts”
Deleuze seems rather way too dark and blindsighted by his darkness as he fails to simply see that corporations have merely become the new neighborhoods of our societies. Neighborhoods in the sense that those in each corporate community welcome each other each weekday morning with a good neighborly “good morning”, share a good lunch together (as well as often communally share the leftovers throughout the afternoon), band together in committee meetings to address corporate (read neighborhood) issues, logistics to perpetuate or improve) or goals, and then wish each other a “good night and a see you tomorrow” as they go their separate ways into their now non-communicative and barren suburban or city neighborhoods until the next day.
Deleuze’s focus seems misdirected as the wrath he exclaims is at functional structures of communities of people when it should be aimed at inspiring people to involve themselves as much as they do in their corporations into building bonds of community, community involvement, and helpfulness to those in their local hometowns as they are to those in their corporate neighborhoods that they participate in. Or, at least trying to explore why their corporate workplaces have a better sense of community that their local neighborhoods and trying to implement some of those strands of bonding locally…rather than demonizing places where they must be doing something right to build a sense of community. Rather than demonizing corporations for having done so through his rather dark and unconvincing wrath.
Jeff
Jeff, sounds like you are channeling Mr. Rogers, projecting a construct of personal morality, of decency, upon a stock holder owned entity that has a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value (profit) by any means possible. Do you think the CEO and c suite execs would sign on to your vision of comity as the meaning of their business?
Wow, I had no idea you would be so passive aggressive if someone counters what you wrote, like I did.
But, it’s your blog that invites comments. Please unsubscribe me if you can’t handle on your blog a disagreeing non-anti capitalistic or disagreeing non anti corporation comment and need to respond with some passive aggressive reply and unobtainable request to obtain CEO signatures.
I don’t recall you being like this. Especially when a simple, thank you for your comment would have been a lot more appropriate. Or, a thank for your comment although our perspectives and experiences may differ.
I’ve known you too long to not question your reply.
No intent to be passive aggressive. Perhaps you are right though. Conscious intentions often conceal what one really wants. Notice that my response asked you to consider whether personal civility which we owe one another whether in an office environment, or in an actual neighborhood applies to corporations and their purpose. I asked you to imagine what a CEO might think of your assertion that conviviality in the workplace, bonding, community building is the purpose of the organization. As you can tell I am with Deleuze.
Having known corporate CEOs, and having worked in public corporations (as well as having a wife who worked in public corporations), and having worked in 3 of Chicagoland’s commercial banks whose clients were corporations, their CEOs, and their employees…I can unequivocally say yes, corporations and their CEOs consider personal civility towards one another in their workplace as well as in their work-home life of extremely high importance. That is why they have intricate Human Resource policies and procedures addressing the subject to ensure civility and community within their borders and confidential work-life coaching and therapy channels built into the Human Resources programs. This is a necessary ingredient in any public corporation from not only an executive management perspective, but also from an employee perspective, and from a shareholder perspective. Now, a case can be made that such intricate Human Resources policies and procedures are necessary to limit corporate liabilities by having such policies that require civility, as well as keeping unionization at bay (which serves the same purpose as intricate internal Human Resources politicizes and procedures via a union-management agreement…but, dually significantly contributes to hiring and retaining employees by making their places of employment desirable places to work (which aids recruitment, employee retention, and productivity.) So it’s win win for corporations, employees, and shareholders to have intricate HR policies and procedures that require civility (or Union-management agreements in place that do the same.) Such policies and procedures also provide a grievance procedure as well as an enforcement procedure to terminate employees who refuse to be civil in the workplace.
Additionally, any public corporation also includes in its highest priorities a high value for community reputation as they know that a poor grade in reputation risk can easily translate and cascade into loss of clients, clients’ clients, loss of employees and management, and loss of shareholder value. If they did not care about their reputation risk in their communities, they would simply not have marketing departments, public relations departments, investor-analyst briefings, nor in-depth annual reports that describe the company’s intentions and community culture as well as pending large lawsuits brought against them (keeping in mind, anyone can sue a company for any reason jeopardizing their company) Which is all the more reason to ensure an internal healthy environment exists as well as reputation risk is non-existent or well managed by any corporation.
But, none of this can stop blaming attacks, demonizing corporations.
It reminds me of someone who was at our holiday season dinner who went rampant about Amazon not paying any taxes. Really angry stuff. Except she became silent when her college aged son and I discussed how Amazon actually probably did nothing legally wrong by not paying taxes, rather as assuredly they employed a team of tax expert to ensure that any tax breaks they took, were permitted by law, which is a whole lot different than not paying taxes because they illegally took tax breaks. And, how the problem is not with Amazon following the tax laws, but rather with changing the tax laws to not allow a company like Amazon to not incur any tax payment. Amazon cannot be faulted for hiring good tax experts who know the tax law when filing their taxes.
But, we live in a world where no one wants to know how things work. And, then work within the system to change those things that do not work fairly, even if it means one step at a time. It’s much easier to blame. Or to just imagine how bad things are.
Don’t get me wrong. Corporations have come a very long way in this regard over the past 30 years. But, it’s standard stuff in today’s corporate world.
Jeff, a full and cogent response. Your experience is relevant to the issue. There are differences in corporate behavior to be sure, especially between those that are closely held and those subject to Wall Street. As to your comment about Amazon hiring smart accountants capable to taking advantage of tax regulations,— perhaps not as innocent it appears as Amazon and others organizations of similar scale routinely lobby to influence tax legislation. The practice is quite common. It is an incestuous circle. Who pays? You and I of course. Especially if word should come that there is no longer funding for medicare…etc.
You make a good point about corporate lobbying efforts. But, the problem again is not the corporations working within the laws that allow lobbying. It’s getting politicians who will not cave into lobbying efforts as they also can fund their reelection campaigns. The challenge is to change campaign finance laws to not allow lobbiests to fund elections (via PACs and vast SuperPacs.) I can understand lobbiests trying to educate and influence a politician by making them aware of their needs, politicians need some form of lobbiests so they can better understand industry sectors. But, what is unacceptable is them having the ability to hold campaign funding over a politician if they are not favored and as a result to unduly influence the politician. How that came about to be allowed is something that needs to be reversed. Something we keep hearing, and needs to be reeled back in. We have consensus on that.
Why would any politician change a campaign financing law that helps them meet the costs of keeping their job. The only consensus is that’s never going to be done. The manner in which we’ve structured the relationship between those elected to conduct the people’s affairs and business engenders corruption.
A number of Democratic politicians have called for campaign finance law reforms, specifically to rescind SuperPacs that enable anonymous SuperPac donors to fund a candidate’s campaign, or elements of it (usually at least media ads.) Those SuperPacs are special interest or lobbiests. Court rulings that enabled them (circa 2012) totally changed campaign finance laws by enabling SuperPacs that need never disclose their donors or limit donors contributions to them. The Court ruling is sometimes referred to as Citizens United. I believe it also removed the normal ceiling for a donor to a campaign which has to be disclosed, because the SuperPac becomes the donor and SuperPacs can have no limits and only the SuperPac need be disclosed. Since donors remain anonymous, the Court ruling enabled unlimited donations comprising the total. A donor simply skirts campaign contribution limits, if it goes into a SuperPac and can’t legally be tracked. Nothing to stop a special interest from talking a politician and telling them they will donate $xxxxx to a SuperPac if a politician does something for them. Most Democratic candidates have come out on record as saying they will work to stop SuperPacs if they are elected. Of course, those candidates get less SuperPac funding. Some refuse it, on principle.
Will they cave into SuperPacs by continuing to enable them if they are elected. We need to see if they 1) get elected. 2) can get Congress to back rescinding the SuperPac ruling by passing a law that outlaws SuperPacs. It’s a major campaign issue in my opinion. Hillary promised to put a law into place to outlaw SuperPacs. Many present campaigners say they will, too. I think those who claim to be against the SuperPac have integrity to actually try to do that. Whether they can get others too, is the question. That story is still being written. It’s too soon to tell if their integrity will wane, if they do not at first succeed. I suspect SuperPacs are such a big issue and such an albatross that eventually a law will pass to outlaw them as this is a pretty big populist issue.