Post, Like, Share, Submit: Visual Control and the Digital Image (13 Theses)

Deleuze’s short essay on the societies of control has, one could say, infected thought on the present. Few serious reflections on today’s media society seem immune against the plausibility and evidence of Deleuze’s deliberations, not least because they use the force of abstraction to draw theoretical concepts from empirical facts, allowing for an anticipation of future developments without getting lost in details. Deleuze argues that a society whose media and technologies provide an apparatus of seamless connectivity and global scope has irreversible effects on the way we perceive, think, and create order. At the same time, the naturalization of these effects progresses via retroaction – making us forget it has ever been different. With his text, Deleuze stands in the midst of this naturalization and neutralization process: This may be why it is inevitably a “postscript” to the societies of control – it takes the artificial position of the “post” in order to be able to look at one’s own contemporary culture from an alienating distance, as Foucault once demanded for every description of the present (1999: 91). This “post,” then, by no means signals a retrospective look at a process already completed; instead, Deleuze gives an exaggerated account of the early digitization age from an artificial retrospective standpoint, which, ironically, will also have been one “after” writing