Reflections on Control: A Conversation with Patricia Clough, Seb Franklin, and Jasbir Puar
February 19, 2016
When
construction began on the Interstate Highway System in the 1950’s, the
state began a project of social and cultural engineering that began to
reconfigure how we understood mobility, cities, race, community and
indeed America itself. However, we are likely to think little of this
vast sprawling system except in traffic, certainly not dwelling on the
military logics embedded in what is formally known as the Dwight D.
Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense
Highways. Such is the power of infrastructure–to become a neutral
background for activity, exerting its force not through the discipline
of enclosure, but the softer control of what Gilles Deleuze famously
described as surfing “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network” (from “Postscript on the Societies of Control” October 59 Winter 1992).
Deleuze’s
short but widely cited article loomed large during Friday’s discussion
between Patricia Clough, Jasbir Puar and Seb Franklin on the topic of
Franklin’s new book Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic. In Control,
Franklin proposes that the cybernetic model of digital control, a
control via the removal of noise in a system to render it legible, has
reshaped social life in its image. Franklin began the evening by giving a
brief overview of his book, highlighting a variety of ways that the
digital serves as the cultural logic of late capitalism. In this model
digitality describes not simply a technical system but a generalizable
metaphor that frames sociality, governance and life itself as analytical
systems of control and exclusion. This notion of digitality as
epistemology precedes and exceeds computation, and Franklin finds echoes
of this logic in the 20th century writings of Marx and Charles Babbage
and its cultural tentacles stretching from labor management to
literature and even language and subjectivity.
After the presentation, comments by Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar framed a lively discussion. Clough began by praising Control’s
impressive breadth and insightful analysis of the ways that cybernetic
theories of the digital are entangled with the mutable persistence of
capitalism. Clough cautioned however that Franklin’s version of control
is framed by first-order cybernetics, which presumes a system controlled
by an outside observer. Clough asks us to imagine how capitalism might
have already shifted through both second order cybernetics (which
complicates the relationship between system and observer) and a
post-cybernetic digital logic that seeks less to control a system than
to profit through the prehensive modulation of emergent forms of
sociality.
Puar connected Franklin’s work to both her current research and the surrounding installation
to consider the mechanism of control in contemporary Palestine.
Picking up on what Franklin notes are the necessary exclusions required
for the control of a system, Puar argues for an understanding of Gaza as
a population disabled through exclusion and capture. Puar looks at Gaza
as a scientific lab of trauma, and as the systemization of what Lauren
Berlant has termed “slow death.” Encouraging the audience to focus on slow
part of this equation rather than the more frequently emphasized death,
Puar describes a system of measuring, restricting and maiming.