The Financial Regime

In his “Postscript on Control Societies,” Deleuze notably refers to a “mutation of capitalism” as one of the key characteristics of the post-disciplinary regime he terms control society. “The operation of markets,” he writes, “is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters” (1992: 6). In the following essay, I will focus on a section of the economy in which this mutation is especially visible: the realm of finance, which in recent years has assumed an increasingly political and governmental function