Capitalist Realism: Discipline and Control

In this episode, we're still on challenges to Utopia and getting back to Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternaitve? We're also taking our first little foray in Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze as far as Sovereign, Disciplinary, and Control Socities; some contemporary economic-political issues; and a tiny digression into the auto industry, religion, and ancient Rome.

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October. Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), pp. 3-7. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828) (also here)
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism : Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books
Foucault, Michel. 1984. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Vintage books edition. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc.
Morris, Georgina. “Miners' strike 1984: Why UK miners walked out and how it ended.” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-68244762

"Disciplinary societies and Societies of control" Course Compendium (github)
"It's Happening Again" Bravos Research (YouTube)

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 16: Capitalist Realism; Discipline and Control

Hey, so, first off, quick correction, or I guess update rather, from the last episode. As votes are still being counted, it looks like Trump’s lead has dropped – I mean, he still won, there’s no getting past that – but his standing in the national popular vote has dropped below 50% and is expected to continue dropping as most of the outstanding vote is from deep blue California and from deep blue counties; which based on reporting (at the time I’m writing this), leaves some 941 thousand votes (6 percent) outstanding. So, Trump could still win the popular vote, but by just over 1 percent and by less than 50% nationally. In other words, mandate my ass. If you and your friends are arguing over whether to get pizza or tacos and the room is split but pizza wins by coin toss, there’s no mandate for pizza. So, if you care about those relationships, maybe you don’t spend the evening gloating about getting pizza. 

Alright, back to the task at hand, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? As we mentioned in the Halloween episode, Fisher considers Capitalist Realism to essentially be the postmodern condition, the state of being in the world that is shaping our culture, politics, and economics; or, that it’s because of Capitalist Realism that we, as a society, lack the political imagination to come up with something other than capitalism. I want to unpack some of the details in the book, the notes I previously made in the margins (and some new one’s I added having recently reread it), and some parallels that I had noticed between what Fisher had written back in 2009 regarding figures like Margaret Thatcher that aligned with Trump’s rhetoric back in 2016 (and I expect will only be tripled down on in the coming months, if not years), and we’re also going to dip or toes a little in Deleuze and Foucault. 

So, first up, why Fisher refers to our social state as Capitalist Realism, as opposed to postmodernism, and Margaret Thatcher, since it’s from one of her quotes that Fisher gets the subtitle of the book. 

Fisher notes, “Ultimately, there are three reasons that I prefer the term capitalist realism to postmodernism. In the 1980s, when Jameson first advanced his thesis about postmodernism [that it is the cultural system of the late (i.e. post-Fordist, globalized, financialized) capitalist society], there were still, in name at least, political alternatives to capitalism. What we are dealing with now, however, is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility. In the 80s, ‘Really Existing Socialism’ still persisted, albeit in its final phase of collapse.”

Interestingly, rather than pointing to the fall of the Soviet Union, Fisher identifies the British “Miners’ Strike” of 84/85, the defeat of the Miners and closure of the mining pits as “not economically realistic” as the moment capitalist realism ascended, and the possibility of a politically ascendent working class became a “doomed proletarian romance.”

The Miners’ Strike came in response to Thatcher’s decision to close some 20 pits the government claimed were unprofitable – keep in mind, this was a time where the mines were nationalized. The government operated the mines in order to provide coal and other resources to keep the UK running. The purpose of the mines wasn’t profit, it was to keep people warm at night, the lights on, their businesses running. Thatcher’s decision, to shut these 20 mines and sell off the rest to private companies, prompted some 20 thousand job losses – a little short term pain to do what she perceived best for the country – but resulted in the near collapse of mining communities in England, Wales, and Scotland that never recovered, and, as of a write up earlier this year (the 40th anniversary) by the BBC, resulted in some 5.7 million people that to this day live in poverty, deprivation, and poor health. The closures and ensuing strikes were expected to be damaging to the populace, prior strikes had resulted in massive blackouts and power stations lacking fuel. But Thatcher, expecting this, had previously stockpiled resources, so when the strikes came, the British people, by and large, weren’t affected (in the short term) and could be swayed that it was the miners, and not conservative or capitalist policies that were to blame. 

Regarding her many attacks on the British social security system and national policies that had previously protected and supported the working and middle class, Thatcher defended her actions in that the welfare state harmed the middle class, driving a wedge between the middle and working classes, lowering taxes for the wealthy and eliminating services for the poor (sound familiar?). Her rhetoric, however, is what Fisher identifies as specifically capitalist realism. He notes, “[t]he 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and established, when Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine that ‘there is no alternative’ – as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for – became a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Likewise, here in the US, Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric of the time also certainly fits this bill, though where Thatcher’s primary opponent was the British Labor Party and social security, Reagan’s rhetoric typically takes the form of capitalist realism as anti-Soviet, anti-Communist, and anti-Socialist, that to be anything other than a committed capitalist is to be anti-American. Trump though, is a strange parallel despite also frequently using ‘there’s no alternative’ rhetoric, in that, as opposed to Thatcher and Reagan, who define their economic positions as only capitalism can save us, painting anything other than trickle-down, pro-business, capitalism as evil, Trump takes the stance more common in authoritarian and totalitarian states, where anything other than Trump is evil, and only he can save us, fond of frequently saying ‘you have no choice, there is no choice.’ Who knows, maybe in some twisted way, Trump is the path to getting to something beyond capitalist realism. His announced cabinet picks seem to point to a shock-and-awe policy stance, going all in on policies that would have been extreme for even Reagan and Thatcher, that, if they don’t succeed, will fail spectacularly. One self-made crisis after another until they burn themselves out. 

Now, crisis is itself a double-edged sword, and one that lets us dip into some related theory, with Marx (and Hegel) and Deleuze. Notes Fisher, “[for] all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented with a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic.” Take for example the Patriot Act in the US (and the still active Guantanamo Bay ‘detention facility’); the French ban on facial coverings (not including hijab, since it doesn’t technically cover the face), recently mirrored here in North Carolina, though that was ostensibly to criminalize criminals trying to conceal their faces while committing a crime, but conveniently followed college campus protests over Israel's seizure of Gaza and doesn’t require a crime to be taking place and would have originally also banned masks worn for medical reasons; the English “Prevent” strategy, that massively expanded state surveillance into Muslim communities; the EU’s implementation of biometric surveillance (facial image and fingerprint capture) for citizens traveling across the previously ‘open’ Schengen borders (most of continental Europe), expanded in 2017 to apply to anyone traveling through the EU – eventually we need to talk about Scopophilia, the obsession with seeing what people are doing, in terms of State surveillance, whether you’re talking about harvesting data or privileging (notoriously and fundamentally flawed) eyewitness testimony as trial evidence. If you’re interested in doing some reading on this topic, I strongly recommend Deleuze’s essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” which is a response to Michel Foucault’s “Disciplinary Society” in his text, Discipline and Punish (Foucault also sets the argument up in his essay “Body/Power” in Power/Knowledge and it’s a common through line for him, that power evolved from the sovereign state to the disciplinary state, and eventually to what he’ll refer to as Biopower; Fisher also makes reference to the Deleuze essay, so we will too shortly) and, I’d also recommend, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. On crisis and the nominally democratic implementation of authoritarianism, Fisher continues, “The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable ([and then asks] when will the war be over?)” Already Donald Trump is talking about implementing a state of emergency so that he can mobilize the federal military (not, we should note, the national guard) within the US to assist in mass deportations – now, this would be, in theory, illegal. Following the Civil War Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the employment of the military (originally just the US Army, but it’s since been expanded to include all branches, including the Space Force) as law enforcement. While there was an exception carved out during the Bush administration for the War on Terror, that exception was repealed entirely in 2008, so a simple ‘State of Emergency’ no longer enables the President to do so. Now, I say illegal “in theory” for a couple of reasons; 1. The act doesn’t explicitly call out the office of the President, which, for the purposes of this current Supreme Court, is likely material, despite the President being the Commander and Chief and the language of the act stating, “whoever… willfully uses any part of the [well, at that point it said “Army,” but we’ll just say military]… to execute the laws…” 2. The Act caveats that employment of the military for law enforcement can be done under the explicit authorization of Congress. Now, George W. Bush managed to circumvent Congressional authorization of a declaration of War through ongoing Use of Force authorizations for the entirety of the War on Terror, and while I suspect the Senate may be a bit more institutionally aligned with Thune at the helm, I doubt Trump will get any such trouble from the House in authorizing military use. The Act also places the Secretary of Defense in charge of any/all regulations and authorizations for military personnel to engage in any “search, seizure, arrest, or similar activity” otherwise prohibited by law; which I doubt Trump will get anything less than zealous compliance with his position from a Secretary Hegseth. That all said, if Congress were not to authorize Posse Comitatus (use of the military for law enforcement), which would be required to employ the military to round up and deport immigrants – note, despite all of the media about immigration rights groups and attorneys gearing up to deal with this, Trump has never said a word about allowing these people a chance through the legal system. He’s only ever talked about rounding them up and shipping them out, as though due process doesn’t exist. And if he decides to employ Guantanamo Bay as a temporary housing facility, which he could probably do using the military to round up immigrants, you can bet there won’t be any deportation trials – if Congress doesn’t authorize it, the Act explicitly identifies such an action as a misdemeanor facing fines up to 10 thousand dollars and up to two years in prison. If Trump were to do this and be impeached, again, say following the midterms, there’d be no question as to whether he committed a “high crime or misdemeanor” in the process. 

But the normalization of crises, in capitalist realism, goes well beyond any political administration’s behaviors or acute geopolitical incidents. Just take the regular boom and bust cycle of stock (i.e. capital) markets. What goes up, must come down. If you look at the market crashes of 1929, the Great Depression; 1987, Black Monday; 1990, the Iraq War recession; 2000, the Dot-Com bubble; 2001, the 9/11 crash, 2007 through 2010 – the Great Recession, with 4 individual crashes and bear markets in the mix; the 2020 Covid-19 crash, and this is just some of the most recent crashes. Since 1792, when the New York Stock Exchange was founded in response to a financial panic, there have been 26 crashes, the longest period without a crash having been 27 years, from 1792 to 1819, the next longest (and the last double digit year period) was 1987 after 25 years without a crash. Since then, the longest crash-less run ended in 1997 after only 7 years, and then 2007 after only 5 years. It’s been 4 years now, and pushing 5, and there are a lot of economic indicators (current duration and degree of growth, lowering interest rates, low inflation, sustained and depressed consumer confidence, massive income inequality unparalleled since the 1920s, the inverted yield curve – when interest rates on long term bonds is lower than short term bonds, the appearance of another cryptocurrency bubble (only getting worse the closer Trump gets to the likes of Elon Musk and Howard Lutnik, not to mention the likelihood of a new ‘Trump crypto coin’ entering that market), yeah, a lot of indicators that, not just another downturn or bear market, but another full-on crash is basically imminent probably sometime around March. 

Side note, I’d add to the economic data, the increased odds of a crash and/or recession by virtue of having a Republican president, despite the fact that the President really has very little to do with the country’s economic state. Since the ‘modern’ market era (from the crash of 29 to today) where the Republicans flipped from Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-monopoly, Progressive economic position to Hoover’s pro-business, anti-union, pro-financialization position, there have been 8 crashes under both Democrats and Republicans, though Republicans lead on most-under-one-President (George W. Bush with 4 crashes), the two longest eras without a crash were ‘spearheaded’ by progressive Democratic policies: 24 years from FDR to JFK, 1938 to 1962, and 25 years from JFK to Ronald Reagan, 1962 to 1987. FDR’s New Deal resulted in 2 crashes in 54 years; compared to trickle-down, supply-side Reaganomics which has produced 13 crashes in 44 years (not including 2020, Covid is just too obvious and tremendous an outside influence to pretend that was any kind of typical market crash). 

But the upside for Trump, and for trickle-down economics, is that the frequency and regularity of market crashes inures the public to the crises that ensue, to the point the crash is no longer a crisis, it’s just the cost of doing business. A regular event that’s to be expected. Much like the latter days of the pandemic when pressure was mounting to end the state of emergency solely on the grounds that emergencies must be acute and cannot last as long as the pandemic was lasting. Presuming a crash occurs within the next two years, which appears to be highly likely, Trump can easily pivot that this is just normal market behavior and has nothing to do with his policies; which may, actually be right, but I suspect his policies will expedite and exacerbate it, likewise, I suspect he’ll just try to blame it on someone else, likely immigrants, liberals, woke-ism, and the LGBTQ community, even if he does have the reasonably honest cover that it’s just market forces at work. 

While on the topic, one more thing to be on the lookout for, is Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk, because, man, Tesla is a market disaster waiting to happen. 

For those that don’t follow market details, one way to track whether or not a stock is worth it, is the P/B ratio, the ratio of the price of a company’s stock compared to the company’s reported “book value” per stock – i.e., what the company stock is worth divided by what the company’s assets are worth if the company had to be liquidated right now. A PBV, or Price/Book Value, of 1 (or P/B ratio of 1 to 1) is an accurately valued company, anything below 1 is undervalued (a good buy) and above 1 is overvalued (stay away, or at least wait for a correction). According to stern.nyu, as of January 2024, the PBV of the US automotive industry (autos and trucks) is 4.6, a bit overvalued (eh, a bit, especially compared to computers and peripherals, being impacted by AI investment and not a whole lot of profit, as yet anyway, of 30.98). So Tesla, compared to the big 2, Toyota and GM, is, let's be honest, a meme stock. GM has more than double the assets and 1.36 times the revenue, Toyota has over 5 times the assets and over 3.5 times the revenue, yet GM has a stock value (stock price multiplied by total outstanding shares) of about 61 billion, Toyota, 232 billion, but Tesla? Tesla is worth over a Trillion dollars! The market reality doesn’t remotely justify its stock price. Toyota’s last reported PBR is an even 1, according to Macrotrends, (my math is more like .37, so I guess I’m missing something – they have 232 billion in stock value, 621 billion in assets, 64 billion in revenue, but a whopping 379 billion in liabilities), GM’s PBR is an undervalued .74 (which is more than I believe can be said about their cars and trucks; having previously, briefly, worked for Toyota and having seen invoices and consumer data on sites like Edmunds, and the previously industry-only black book (like Kelley Blue Book except on reported actual sales revenue in the industry) the markup on American cars compared to Japanese is astonishing). Tesla, however, is massively overvalued at 12.95! The stock is worth almost 13 times what the company is actually worth. Tesla stock could go belly-up and wipe out a trillion dollars from the economy, almost 3% of US GDP. Now, this wouldn’t take anything changing at all with Tesla’s actual business, all it would take is a market correction on one stock, and a full-on recession could follow. Now, granted, the market has put automated processes in place to prevent this from happening, so there’s a little capitalist realism for you. Even correcting the market according to capital’s own terms is prevented by the market because of the disruption it could cause to itself. And with Musk, who I can only imagine is at least smart enough to know he’s massively overvalued, cozying up to Trump, as transactional a human being as may have ever existed, you can bet Musk will be jockeying for administration and tax policies that will cement his wealth before such a market correction could happen. 

Whereas on the one hand, as Fisher points out, the constant state of crisis, such as the War on Terror, produces a social mindset of the impossibility of repealing the measures instituted to deal with the initial or acute crisis – take for example, eliminating TSA security checkpoints or body scanners, or pat downs, or baggage and phone content searches, etc., put in place in the aftermath of 9/11 (despite the fact that, not once, ever, has the TSA actually discovered a threat, they have apprehended a few, after having been notified of the potential threat by local police or the FBI, but they have never actually, proactively, discovered and apprehended a threat) – on the other hand, the constancy of state of crisis also inures people to the sense of threat – for example, the almost shocking speed at which people were ready and willing to abandon face coverings and social distancing by late 2020, (fueled by the rhetoric from Trump and Fox News) despite the ongoing crisis and a 4th quarter upswing that jumped up to about 20 thousand covid related deaths per week in December 2020. 

Using the “neo-noir” works of Frank Miller and James Elroy as examples, Fisher, also citing Mike Davis (American writer, activist, and Critical Theorist) on Elroy, notes, “‘there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest’. Yet this very desensitization serves a function for capitalist realism: Davis hypothesized that ‘the role of L.A. noir’ may have been ‘to endorse the emergence of a homo reaganus.’” Or, I would add, a homo trumpus. At once there is no limit to the never-ending parade of crises and scandals, and yet there is no disruption to our general sentiment, as ‘normal’ simply becomes everything being on fire. After Trump, Biden’s efforts to return to a pre-Trump normalcy and, by all traditional metrics, blazingly successful economy, it felt like Biden just wasn’t doing anything, despite all evidence to the contrary. This isn’t, of course, Trump’s doing though, or at least not Trump’s alone, the capitalist realist/postmodern world we’ve lived in these past 45 years ‘prepared us for such a development.’

Let’s backtrack a little bit. Now, I mentioned earlier surveillance and scopophilia, and Gilles Deleuze’s essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” and I think what Foucault and Deleuze have to say about how power and capitalism are exercised in society and over (and in) bodies, is pretty crucial to understanding how capitalist realism functions as deterministic – how it becomes our social ontology. Fisher notes, in a section regarding British students’ “reflexive impotence” (how that their political disengagement, rather than responding to politics with apathy or cynicism, is one of impotence). “They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Foucault and Deleuze help explain how we get here, so, a quick word about the evolution of power: about Foucault and discipline, and Deleuze and control. We’ll get into these in more detail some time later, I mean, as far as the entire podcast, right now my thinking is to move from Utopia to History, and from there to Power. 

Narrative-environments.github has a great, but author unlisted, primer on disciplinary and control societies in their Course Compendium. The author notes, quote

As outlined by Deleuze [in Postscript on the Societies of Control, 1992], Foucault defined disciplinary societies as those which arose during the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and reached their peak at the outset of the 20th. Such societies inaugurate and develop the organization of vast spaces of enclosure, in which the individual passes sequentially from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws. The first (narrative) environment is that of the family. From there, the individual passes on to the school and after that, if a man at that time, to the barracks. The passage continues to the factory and, on occasion, the hospital, and possibly the prison, this last place being the preeminent instance of the enclosed (narrative) environment. For Foucault, the prison serves as the central analogical model.

The ideal project of these environments of enclosure, as analysed by Foucault, is particularly visible within the factory. It seeks to concentrate in place; to distribute in space; to order in time; and to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. Foucault also recognised the transience of this model, as itself a successor to the societies of sovereignty. The goal and functions of societies of sovereignty were to tax rather than organise production and to rule on death [imprisonment and execution] rather than to administer life [hospitals and healthcare, social security, schools, roads, etc.]. This prior transition took place over time, with Napoleon seeming to effect the large-scale conversion from one kind of society to the other. However, in their turn, the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society had ceased to be dominant.

One of the greatest examples of the evolution of disciplinary enclosure, and Fisher points to this as well, in the workplace is the Fordist factory. Ford didn’t simply revolutionize the factory with the assembly line, he transformed working people into working subjects. Labor was simply another form of the machine of production, Ford’s emphasis on efficiency analysis of the work done down to the smallest detail, to see what could be automated and what needed to be done manually simultaneously reduced his workforce to a series of single-function tasks, as dumbed down as possible to make for quick and easy replacement by any other body off the street, and he convinced his workforce this was actually a good thing by increasing their pay. The assembly line model dramatically reduced the cost of production, from which he could reduce the cost of the finished product, and while the vast majority of the profit went to Ford himself – sidenote, from day one Ford vehicles have been shockingly overpriced compared to the cost of production – to this day, take for example the top selling Ford F150 and comparable Toyota Tundra. At base, Edmunds lists the F150 XL Regular Cab at MSRP 38,960, and ‘suggested buy’ price of 36,367. Now, best I could find, the profit (I couldn’t find anything on actual production cost reported by Ford) to Ford, not even the dealer, at this price, is somewhere around 10-13 thousand dollars. The website Rydeshopper lists the base F150 average dealer price at 54,263, and a highest found price at an astonishing 79 thousand dollars – for a truck that cost, approximately, 28 thousand to build. Compare that to the base model Tundra (now I did find approximate invoice, MSRP, and suggested buy price for this on Edmunds): MSRP, 43,865 (5 thousand more), suggested buy, 41,046 (about 47 hundred more), and invoice 40,714 (around 11 to 14 thousand more). The brief time I worked for Toyota it never ceased to amaze both buyers and new sales staff that had come from Ford (turnover in a dealership is bonkers) how much more Toyota charged and how much less Toyota was willing to discount than Ford, but, to Toyota, Ford isn’t considered a competitor. It’s like Nordstroms competing with the dollar store. Previous Ford sales staff were astonished at the volume Toyota sales staff were pushing, if you couldn’t move 15-20 vehicles a month, you were done for, whereas at Ford a high-volume month might be 5 units, but those same 5 units netted as much or more in commission than the 20 Toyotas. I mean, I once sold a brand new 2007 Prius, all we discounted was the floor mats, and since they were another salesman’s lead, I had to split the commission. After working with that couple for 7 hours, including 2 hours past the time the dealership closed, I made 75 bucks, all from the base fee of moving a new unit, the sale actually lost money, there was no commission. 

Back to Ford, beyond revolutionizing how factory work was done, he used a small portion of his massive profits to pay his workers dramatically more than anyone else in manufacturing, creating a middle class, a working class that had far more income than the rest of the workers but less than the wealthy, leisurely, bourgeois class. And on top of that, he created a sense of indebtedness in his workers. They knew they had nowhere else to go that would pay as well, and, they knew, they were easily replaced. Ford was employer and savior. 

Okay, back to Foucault. 

Now, the github article’s author refers to Foucault’s comments regarding changes in the application and places of power and enclosure through the 18th and 20th centuries from his essay “Body/Power” in Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, but I think the following passage from “The Body of the Condemned” from Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975) provides better detail and nuance, and sets up Deleuze’s (and Fisher’s) argument better. 

Foucault states, “[b]ut we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction.” But, he continues, 

But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labor power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated, and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.

Note, need, is critical to the proper functioning of the subject-worker. It’s not only against the employer’s best interest to pay the worker well, it’s against the capitalist society’s interests, because if the worker had no need, if they were financially independent (whether by possession of wealth or by the elimination of money and labor classes) the individual would have no reciprocal need to work in order to provide for the basic needs of subsistence. The worker must be kept in a position of need in order to remain a “worker.”  

From here Foucault begins to lay out ideas regarding a “political technology of the body” which he’ll come to call Biopower. If you’ve heard of Foucault’s work, you’re probably at least nominally familiar with biopower and his critique of neoliberalism. 

Now, what Foucault sets up in terms of the history and evolution of state power from sovereignty to discipline, his friend and colleague Deleuze picks up and notes even this is already out of date. We’re no longer in a disciplinary society, but a control society – his essay here is largely a response to Foucault, though coming 6 years after Foucault’s death. Foucault and Deleuze were both active at the same time as philosophers and activists (biographer Didier Eribon referred to Foucault as a “militant intellectual,” a term I absolutely love, coming to the scene in France on the heels of Sartre and De Beauvoir, and died of AIDS at 57 in 1984 (though the cause of death wasn’t officially confirmed for a few years). 

Deleuze states, and this brings us back to the issue of crises, which neither sovereignty nor discipline are sufficient to address, quote

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure—prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors—scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.

These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies.

We are no longer enclosed within the factory, the school, the panopticon prison, hell, even the office, but rather the panopticon has been turned outward through surveillance cameras and data mining, large scale, voluntary self-reporting, willingness to exchange personal information for a small discount on already massively and artificially inflated prices of goods and services. We (Foucault’s productive and subjected bodies) are no longer enclosed by guards or walls or time clocks, but by passwords, access permissions, secretive and varying salaries, we hide behind gated communities rather than being locked within them. 

Deleuze continues, regarding the logic of control societies, quote

Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at a level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination, which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.

Now, this brings up and important question that Deleuze doesn’t answer in this fairly brief essay (but had certainly laid the groundwork for one in Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus both subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia with Félix Guattari), and Foucault points to, across much of his work, the point of both discipline and control is to do what sovereignty cannot: internalize the, for lack of a better word, “master’s” power over the subject within the subject. The subject of discipline and control is a willing subject. And this, I think, is where religion can be highly informative, and that both Marx’s ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’ and Freud’s ‘religion is the infantile desire to be cared for’ are at once right and really shortsighted. And the perfect example for this, is the Roman Empire under Constantine. 

The Roman Empire in 324 CE ran the entire perimeter of the Mediterranean Sea, from the border with Persia in the East to Hadrian’s Wall and Caledonia (Scottland) in the Northwest, and the borders of modern Romania and Hungary in the Northeast, the northern coast of Africa, and all of modern Greece, Italy, France, and Spain. Policing this vast a territory, especially on the heels of expansionist and civil wars to unify the entire area, was a tremendously expensive undertaking in gold, food, manpower, and political stability. But Constantine had an ace up his sleeve, early Christianity. Rather than persecuting Christians, Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion of Rome, allowing the church, at its own expense, to proselytize its beliefs, and more importantly, it’s rules of self-governance, across the Empire. Letting the people police themselves for fear of eternal damnation is not only far more effective than military occupation, it is infinitesimally cheaper!  

Now, I think we’ve got enough theory and theorists being brought into this episode without tagging in another thinker, and we’ll get to him later, but I think this is where Max Weber and his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism plays a huge roll in understanding the internalization of subjection to disciplinary and control societies. Now, that’s not to say, of course, that we’ve fully abandoned societies of sovereignty. Sovereignty is still a real force, the state still absolutely claims the right to ‘rule on death’ – hell, this seems pretty clear to be a core principle of the impending Trump administration as far as ‘liberating’ police officers from any accountability for violence and murder. Rather, I think it makes sense to think of these forms of society as overlaying in a not dissimilar way to how Freud describes the Id, Ego, and Superego of the self, that, similarly, the state is the primary sovereign, the disciplinary, and the control power; it’s just that as power has evolved, it has also been diffused, distributed to multiple sites of power. 

Okay, let’s get back to Fisher before wrapping this up. I’ve gone on quite a bit already and only scratched the surface of a pretty small book – I recommend checking it out, it’s less than a hundred pages, and depending on how quick of a reader you are or how much time you have, it can pretty easily be knocked out in a day or two. I want to touch on a last couple of ideas, some other things like Fordism we’ll come back to when we get to History, or capitalism and mental states and pathologization, and ideas like “depressive hedonia” we’ll hold off on until we get to Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents – sidenote, if you want a solid crash course on Freud, check out the Freud episode on the podcast “European Intellectual History Since Nietzsche,” this podcast is a recording of the lectures from the class of the same name taught at Yale by Professor Marci Shore in 2023 – and things like the changing landscape of discipline and control in the workplace we’ll revisit when we get to a more in depth look at Foucault and Deleuze in the upcoming section on power. I’m thinking I may bring Fisher back into the conversation again after we talk about neoliberalism. 

I want to return to the idea that capitalist realism functions such that there is no alternative to capitalism. Fisher notes that “[f]or most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.” Whereas punk rock and protest, avant garde art, subversive stand-up comics, and bohemian counter culture once provided a space for resistance and imagination, they’ve been transformed into productive niches within capitalism. “What we are dealing with now,” Fisher continues, “is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations, and hopes by capitalist culture.” He goes on to lay out alternative rock and Kurt Cobain as failed sites of resistance. “Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat upon which the system could feed.” 

Okay, I believe that’s all we have time for today, but, we’re not done with Fisher. I’m updating my schedule a little and we’re going to do one more episode on this. We still need to get to Market Stalinism and the Marxist Supernanny, but I don’t expect the next episode to be super long, but, hey, we’ll see how things go. I think that will make for a good pivot back to Utopian thinking as Fisher’s conclusion pivots to something a little more hopeful, and man do we need a little of that right now.

Alright. 

‘til next time. 

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