Control towards Doom: What Deleuze and Serres can tell us about our Ecocide Predicament
Production and consumption in capitalist society has become virtually equivalent to environmental destruction. Knowledge concerning this destruction has only become more extensive and apocalyptic in recent years and ties to contemporary economic activities have strengthened. And yet, society at large ignores warning after warning, seemingly intent on prolonging consumption at any cost to the environment. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s Postscript on Societies of Control and Michel Serres’ The Natural Contract, I theorize that manipulative control necessitating destructive methods of production coupled with a species that possesses ever greater power over the Earth, most notably through extensive technological advancements, will lead to inevitable environmental collapse. The methods of control practiced by disciplinary societies have prioritized capitalist desire over the survival of the human race, to the detriment of the entire species. I believe these methods have been so effective, humans will not be able to change before the chance of successful environmental action is eliminated.
In his Postscript on Societies of Control, Deleuze highlights three different models of society through which those societies govern their citizens: Foucault wrote of societies of sovereignty, disciplinary societies, and societies of control. From his brief description, societies of sovereignty fulfill a less direct form of control over their populations, namely by opting to “tax rather than to organize production”. This is noticeably altered in their evolution, disciplinary societies, in which the methods of control do not revolve around their methods of production, but are instead one and the same, necessarily inseparable. These methods of production are simultaneously inseparable from what Foucault calls “environments of enclosure”. Factories, schools, hospitals, essentially all capitalist and government institutions constitute these environments, modelled after the prison. From their name, it is apparent that these disciplinary societies use punishment first and foremost as a form of control, or more specifically, as a deterrent to oppose control.
As these disciplinary societies also conform to capitalist forms of production, they use their control to force the population into producing, and the necessity to produce in turn becomes control itself. Wage-labour keeps people servient as monetary income is essential for survival in these societies, with bonuses on top and even just the potential of receiving them being enough to ensure conforming to exploitative employment. Necessities can be bought and what is desired can be lusted after, and the potential to earn more money and then be able to buy more expensive, nicer things keeps people producing for the factory owner: the capitalist administering control over the lives of the workers.
These disciplinary societies are the precursor to societies of control. They again differ in methods of production, replacing the factory with the corporation, wages with salaries. Further, they operate on the basis of “perpetual training”, a continuousness. There is no break from the control looming over the population, no “leaving the factory” so to speak. The only stasis in a society of control is the continuous variation, the population walking on eggshells, constantly having to be prepared for the next rule to avoid breaking. This effectively eliminates the need to actually discipline on the majority of the population: the mere threat is sufficient.
Another key difference is the how the population is conceptualized. Disciplinary societies think of the individual as part of a mass; there is a dynamic existence they fulfill. Societies of control alternatively do not distinguish individuals from one another. Instead the population becomes “dividuals”: they are masses, or more to the point, data, a “bank” to study, measure, and exploit. This conception of the human population is reflected in Serres’ The Natural Contract, with his formulation of humans as “we”.
Serres determines that, due to the overwhelming large human population and the incredible influence we have over the environment we inhabit, namely, the entire Earth, humans must be considered first and foremost as a collectivity. The population constitutes this mass: the object of control for Deleuze, a literal object for Serres; he considers the human presence/influence relationship with the Earth akin to that of an ocean or tectonic plate. It is important for Serres, however, that for the majority of human history, the Earth has been left almost completely unconsidered as a contender in the face of violence: war has always been human versus human, the Earth merely a stage upon which war is waged.
Of course, Serres makes clear that recent science has shown the irrationality of continuing to disregard the Earth in this way. The Earth (or at least local environments, on an ever-increasing scale) has always been the seemingly silent, seemingly neutral opponent caught up in a human history of subjective wars. He defines subjective war as “nations or states [fighting] with the aim of temporary dominance”. But these wars produce (at varying degrees of impact) objective violence, “that in which all the enemies, unconsciously joined together, are in opposition to the objective world”. This objective violence can be thought of essentially as the destruction of the environment and is quite broad in its causes. Though war is a clear, tangible example of a method of causation, most facets of modern human life contribute. Industry is another obvious perpetrator, essentially synonymous with production and therefore inseparable from the methods of control of which Deleuze speaks.
In the modern context, most notably beginning with the industrial revolution, humans have increased the severity of our environmental impact exponentially. Serres writes of “world-objects”: machines, factories, vehicles, weapons, etc., that “have at least one global-scale dimension (such as time, space, speed, or energy)”. It is easy to imagine how nuclear arms cause violence to the Earth as they literally explode potentially vast areas of it, but a world-object need not be a weapon to cause objective violence: modern means of production, according to Serres, can be just as capable. Oil tanker and pipelines spill and leak often enough, and have dire ecological consequences for affected areas; coal plants emit tonnes and tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere accelerating global warming; plastics produced in factories that are bought and then discarded by consumers pollute oceans en masse; the list goes on.
Deleuze states that “types of machines are easily matched with each type of society […] because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them”. For disciplinary societies, these are “machines involving energy”; for societies of control, computers. Serres’ world-objects, then, appear to conform to the machines of disciplinary societies, and indeed Deleuze considers the West to be in a state of flux, converting from a disciplinary society to a society of control. It appears that still, over two decades after Deleuze wrote this, we have not fully converted to a society of control: there are clearly aspects of both. Corporations are becoming more prevalent, but cannot be considered to have relegated all production to the “Third World” by any means (though of course so much of it has been). There has certainly been a trend towards this, but the West still produces in similar ways to the past (consider the Canadian tar sands, for instance): the “First World” under capitalism cannot be shielded from the exploitation of resources and therefore objective violence, as anything that can be profited off of must be claimed, processed, and sold.
Even more so than these trends in production, both in stasis and flux, is the current relationship with data. As Deleuze states, societies of control use and rely on data: the masses are the equivalent of data, and that data is studied and the methods of control are adapted accordingly. Viewing humans as data awards many revelations, many of which are exploitable: socioeconomic trends, successful marketing strategies, the desires of a population, but also their impact on the environment. When Serres writes of “we”, he is considering humans as data, and the same with objective violence (the destruction caused by bombs is perhaps disassociated from humans in the pure math of measurement, but of course in actuality no bomb is independent of humanity). Essentially, the scientific data concerned with objective violence (i.e., climate change, pollution, etc.) is still human data.
If societies of control use data for more nuanced methods of control, disciplinary societies disregard it in favour of production. It became clear long ago, however, that industrial production is unsustainable: Serres even claims that “fragility has just changed sides”. This is in reference to the direct increase in survivability of humans due to the progression of technology: humans have gone from hunters and gatherers more or less unsure of their next meal to having complex industrial agriculture systems capable of producing enough to feed billions with seemingly limitless options in supermarkets; we have vaccines that decrease death-rates substantially from previously fatal diseases.
All of these technological advancements, whether consciously or not, began with the purpose of increasing the carrying capacity of the Earth, or at least to ensure as much human survival as possible. There is of course merit to that: suffering is horrible, and we should hope to avoid it for everyone wherever possible. However, beginning with the industrial revolution and continuing until today, these technologies have simultaneously increased in effectiveness at causing objective violence to the Earth. Just the same as war destroys locales, industry makes the Earth less livable, and if the data is correct, will put the survival of the human race into question just as it was prior. A rational society of control, acting in its own best interest, would not ignore this data. There is no society without an Earth that can sustain it, and therefore no society to control, and the data shows that the path humans are taking in terms of military, economic, political avenues are actively jeopardizing the Earth’s ability to sustain humans.
First, it must be stated that control in itself possesses neither positive nor negative value. Between controller and controlled, a best-case scenario could manifest as a mutually beneficial relationship (for example, a child forced to brush their teeth awards benefits to both the parents and child: less money spent on dental work for the parents; a healthier mouth for the child). Further, a contract is a form of control. Serres makes a compelling argument for the existence of a social contract to limit the effects of human-human violence, and argues that the Earth ought to be included in a similar type of contract: the natural contract. Indeed, for a society of control to have a healthy population to exploit, a natural contract is necessary: a fragile population cannot produce at their full potential. Based on the data, it is hard to imagine a society of control without a natural contract (even if this is because it is hard to imagine any future society without it).
It is clear, then, that there is a time-limit (or pollution-limit) on our use of world-objects, the machine-type of disciplinary societies. These world-objects are central to their control: large-scale, efficient, high-speed production. Tied to this production is the exploitation of the masses through wage-labour, which they are all but forced to conform to (as human necessities are obtained through the exchange of money). At the same time, however, there are extra “rewards” that these wages can buy that are conveniently both what the capitalists are producing and what provoke the desires of the masses. As the methods of production generating these products cause violence to the Earth, though unintentionally, the needs and desires of an entire society are hinged on objective violence. The products people strive for (e.g. fancy cars, cruises, fashion, meat), are also those that are putting the future of the human race in jeopardy. Further, these desires have become expectations, and are not quashed even with the knowledge that has been acquired of the environmental doom directly related to these practices, ways of life, methods of control.
By manipulating the masses and indoctrinating them into believing that these unsustainable methods of production are necessary to fulfill their needs and desires, disciplinary societies may have very well doomed humanity. Even if production is “[relegated] to the Third World”, this is merely removing the pollution from the public eye: the objective violence is still occurring, just on a different continent. Serres implies that the natural contract will begin humanization of the environment, just as it did for enemies in the social contract. At the same time, Deleuze states that “we are taught that corporations have a soul”. From this stems the illogical priorities of the masses, who have been marketed to by corporations they are led to believe are benevolent at worst and trying to improve their lives as much as possible at best. They are also taught that if these corporations fail, so will the economy, and they are led to believe the economy in its current form is the only thing keeping them alive, or from civil order from completely dismantling.
Serres states we are the most powerful we have ever been, with technology able to “crush the universe”. We, as a collective, are more than capable of destroying the planet, and can be profited off of quite easily with somewhat clever marketing. We are led to believe that money is freedom, so wages are freedom, so production is freedom, so capitalism is freedom. Disciplinary societies have practiced methods of control so effective, so successfully manipulative of human desire that reckless consumption has been prioritized over human survival.
In conclusion, the methods of control practiced by disciplinary societies have been so effective that fulfilling desire has been prioritized over human survival by the masses. Because humans have access to world-objects, these are necessary for capitalist production, and that production fulfills these provoked desires, humans must either free themselves from these desires or accept their doom. We have not seen meaningful decreases in objective violence to the Earth, even as research on the subject illuminates more and more alarming data. I believe it is very unlikely humans will be able to change paths before our doom is caused by our own hands, as there is certainly a time-limit on the effectiveness of environmental action. It is worth asking, however, if, once the consequences of objective violence can truly not be ignored any longer capitalism will be able to adapt, or if it will be overthrown altogether? And further, what lengths the controllers of society will go to in order to ensure their survival? How long do we have before a point of no return is passed and sufficient production cannot be maintained due to the objective violence of the past, present, and future?
Sources:
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Societies of Control.” The MIT Press, October 1992.
Serres, Michel. “The Natural Contract.” The University of Michigan Press, 1995.
