The decline of symbolic eficiency links to Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's account of the shift from disciplinary society to the society of control.43 As Hardt and Negri explain, disciplinary logics worked primarily within the institutions of civil society to produce subjects. These institutions-the nuclear family, union, school, neighborhood-are now in crisis. According to the 2000 census, for example, less than a quarter of Americans live in families comprised of a married couple and children.4 Union membership has likewise declined such that in 2006 only 12 percent of workers were unionized and public sector employees were five times more likely than private to belong to a union.45 Hardt's and Negri's point is that the old political subject, the citizen-subject of an autonomous political sphere, the disciplined subject of civil society, can no longer be said to exist.
The implications of this point are broad. For just as the disciplined subject of civil society can no longer be said to exist, so is there a fragmentation among the identities mobilized politically in and as civil society. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the categories of social inclusion and exclusion were politicized and mobilzed.46 Social movements organized along lines of race, sex, ethnicity, and sexuality .radically transformed everyday life as they sought to eliminate entrenched hierarchies. As a result of the critical. work of these movements, as well as the accompanying decline of the welfare state and empowering of neeliberalism, racial, sexual, and ethnic identities are less fixed, less stable, less available as determinate subject positions. The category "we" seems permanently to have been called into question and in its place are fluid, hybrid, and mobile imaginary identities (Hardt and Negri use the term singularities) .
Emerging in the context of the breakdown of determining social norms, the subjects inhabiting these identities are generally undisciplined, although subject to ever more controls. We might think here of changes in public schools away from practices of discipline and normalization and toward searching, surveilling, and policing. Contemporary subjects increasingly lack self-control, in part because they lack a strong sense of self that arises through discipline, and, as I detail below, look outside themselves for some authority to impose control. External control-through the direct or indirect use of force, through threats and fears, and through the mobilization and intensification of afects and desires-takes on more of the work previously done by internalized control.47 In psychoanalytic terms, we can say that symbolic identity is increasingly fragile, uncertain, and meaningless in the society of control. Imaginary identities sustained by the promise and provision of enjoyment replace symbolic identities. And the multiplicity and adaptability of these identities does not mean that subjects are somehow freer or more liberated than they were under the discipline of the welfare state. Rather, they come under diferent sets of controls, diferent organizations of enjoyment.
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