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In one of his more popular and accessible essays, "Postscript on Control Societies' (1995, pp. 177–82), the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, reflecting on Foucault's later work, sketched the evolution, in late modernity, from disciplinary societies to control societies. Whereas the former were characterised by the emergence and reproduction of what Deleuze called order words that is, codes that embodied, and helped construct a particular order, the latter now tend to abandon all desire for, and all will to structured order. In post-disciplinary societies the issue no longer is the construction and maintenance of a particular order (e.g. through discipline) but the control — through the deployment and circulation of mere passwords — of situations. Situations are local, or localised. They are singular. The mere control of situations does not require order words. On the contrary, order words — and the resulting construction of order, or orders that supersede local situations — are to be avoided at all cost. Indeed, order words simply block off the proliferation of singular situations, each controlled by their own, singular passwords. Order words break up, wash over and actually, in their very attempt to universalise, destroy local, singular situations and their local, singular passwords. In control societies there is no longer any need for the construction and maintenance of a particular, supposedly "universal", order. What is needed here is the mere control of situations, as and when they emerge and develop. Passwords, not order words, are needed in control societies. Passwords regulate and control the modalities of access to situations.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230343184_9

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