Control society, after all, is a term meant to point to a normative, if not compulsive, attending to the self, a dispersion of power, even to preindividual impersonal domains such as affect, with the accompanying smoothening of the space of civil society institutions, capitalizing on their increasing reluctance or inability to socialize, to interpellate individuals to the ideal of the nation-state. It points as well to a global extension of media, especially digital media, and their reconfiguring of the private and pubic spheres, economy, the state, and the market. While control society coincides with the shift from disciplining the subject to what Foucault called biopolitics, which focuses more on species life, expressed in terms of the capacity for life across populations, the shift to preemptive/hensive power is an intensifying of control at every scale of matter, a cosmological politics. It is the meeting of control with the curvilinear. As Parisi puts it: “mathematics of smooth space has become operative in a postcybernetic control of aesthetic curavature or continual variation... the curving space of control itself" (Parisi 2009b: 9).7
This intensification of control hearkens back to the way Foucault has discussed measure in his 1970s lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism. As Tiziana Terranova has argued:
Foucault's lectures in particular allow us to think about the process by which the economic-institutional reality of capitalism . . . has not simply subsumed life in its economic processes of production, but actually has drawn on life as a means of redefining a whole new political rationality where economic and vital processes are from the beginning deeply intertwined. (Terranova 2009:235)
The market, as Foucault sees it, drives governance to be concerned with securing circulation through a milieu, moving into life or nature to make it work well. Securing nature, or being able to optimize natural processes artificially, serves to limit the function of sovereignty in governance, as governance becomes the biopolitical action on a milieu: first the town and finally something more abstract like an oblique environment that never reaches a point of equilibrium.
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InterrogatingModes of Digital Labor