Frida Beckman - Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze After Discipline

Control Culture

Control Culture

Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline

Edited by Frida Beckman

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editorial matter and organisation Frida Beckman, 2018
the chapters their several authors, 2018

Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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12(2f) Jacksons Entry
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 3678 6

The right of Frida Beckman to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Introduction. Control of What?
Frida Beckman

1 Notes from an Investigation of Control Society
Gregg Lambert

2 Post-Mortem on Race and Control
Neel Ahuja

3 Periodising (with) Control
Seb Franklin

4 Subjects of Sovereign Control and the Art of Critique in the Early Modern Period
Carin Franzn

5 Posthumanism, Social Complexity and the Political: A Genealogy for Foucaults The Birth of Biopolitics
Cary Wolfe

6 That Path is for Your Steps Alone: Popular Music, Neoliberalism and Biopolitics
Jeffrey T. Nealon

7 Cinema in the Age of Control
Gregory Flaxman

8 Towards a Minor Fascism: Panoptic Control and Resistant Multiplicity in TVs Spooks
Colin Gardner

9 Species States: Animal Control in Phil Klays Redeployment
Colleen Glenney Boggs

10 Control and a Minor Literature
Frida Beckman

11 Philosophy and Control
Paul Patton

This book has been a long time coming and has had various potential shapes along the way. I know the idea of producing an edited collection on the topic of control existed before me, but I guess I was born to embody it. This, I realised at the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Study of Biopolitical Futures (SSBF) at Syracuse University in 2013 and I want to thank Gregg Lambert for inviting me, and him and Cary Wolfe for continuing to keep me in the loop. The collection is part of the larger and collective endeavour of this society to analyse the status of biopolitics in our present moment and also and more specifically part of my own affiliated project on control.

This project on control entitled Cultures of Control developed into a research network with that name, a speaker series at Stockholm University called Dialogues on the Cultures of Control, at which several of the chapters of the volume have been presented as work-in-progress papers, a larger conference on control (SLSAeu: Control) in Stockholm in 2016, and the monograph Culture Control Critique: Allegories of Reading the Present (2016). These various activities have been possible thanks to generous research and network grants from the Swedish Research Council, The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, and Literature as a Leading Research Area at Stockholm University. The collection has benefited enormously from all the many encounters and conversations had within these frames. I want to extend a great thanks everyone involved in one way or another: to the contributors who came to Stockholm for the dialogues Neel Ahuja, Colleen Glenney Boggs, Gregory Flaxman, Gregg Lambert, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Paul Patton and Cary Wolfe to the others who participated in these dialogues Roberto del Valle Alcal, Ron Broglio, Brad Evans, Jairus Grove, Ulf Olsson, Jakob Nilsson, Lauren Wilcox and David Watson and to the contributors who have joined the collection directly Seb Franklin, Carin Franzn and Colin Gardner. This book is truly a collective effort.

Many thanks also to Carol Macdonald it has been a great pleasure working with her and the team at EUP again.

As with most efforts, the completion of this book has also demanded patience and support from family and friends. Some of the travelling and symposia connected to this project happened while my mother, Yvonne, stayed with my children. Some of the final editing of the volume took place while Tomas cooked a Christmas dinner for my family.

For all of you, and of course, and encore, for Julia and Logan.

Neel Ahuja is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Among other works on race, posthumanism and security, he is the author of the book Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Duke University Press, 2016) and the article Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar, Social Text 29:1 (2011).

Frida Beckman is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, Sweden. She is the author of Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), Control Culture Critique: Allegories of Reading the Present (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016) and Gilles Deleuze: A Critical Life (Reaktion Books, 2017), and she has authored many articles and book chapters on literature and film.

Colleen Glenney Boggs is a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society and the Mellon Foundation, she has published two books: Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 17731892 (Taylor & Francis, 2007). Her work has appeared in American Literature, PMLA, Cultural Critique and J19. She co-edits the book series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures, serves on the PMLA editorial board, and has edited the volume Options for Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War (MLA, 2016).

Gregory Flaxman is Associate Professor and Director of Global Cinema Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy (2011) and the editor of The Brain is the Screen (2000; both from University of Minnesota Press), and he is the co-author of a forthcoming book on film, faith, and philosophy (from Edinburgh University Press).

Seb Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at Kings College, London. He has published on contemporary literature, digital technology, cybernetics and critical theory in journals such as Grey Room, Novel: A Forum on Fiction and Camera Obscura. In 2015 he published the monograph Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic with MIT Press. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Forms of Disposal.

Carin Franzn is Professor in Language and Culture at the Department of Culture and Communication at Linkping University, Sweden. She specialises in relations between the early modern period and our contemporary world, with a particular focus on literary representations of subjectivity in relation to love, passion and desire. She has published many books and articles including, recently and in English, Joi damor as Discursive Practice (2017), Love and Desire in French Moralist Discourse (2017) and Duras and the Art of the Impossible (2016). In her most current project she explores the way early modern libertinism was involved in the questioning of established dogmas, thus contributing to a mode of critical thought.