Introduction: Foucault and political philosophy -- Marx: antinormative critique -- Lenin: the invention of party governmentality -- Althusser: the failure to denormativise Marxism -- Deleuze: denormativisation as norm -- Rorty: relativising normativity -- Honneth: the poverty of critical theory -- Geuss: the paradox of realism -- Foucault: the lure of neoliberalism -- Conclusion: What now?

American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call ‘a society of control’ or ‘a surveillance culture’, and, moreover, as a textual embodiment as well. That is, Burroughs was as much a media theorist and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we generally call a writer, or novelist, although he (...) lauded those latter categories. Through such multimodality he offered critiques of a ‘control society’ and of ‘thought control’ by a media that strips us of volition. In his lectures on Michel Foucault delivered at the Université de Paris VIII in the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze detailed Burroughs's influence on both philosophers with his critique of our ‘control societies’, a term they adopted from him. These critiques of what Burroughs calls ‘thought control’ were and currently remain inseparable from his emergence as a performance artist, such embodiment of his art readily available amid our own image-obsessed electronic revolution. That is, the products of this period are currently being recirculated through commercial media outlets and through multiple open access formats to suggest – to confirm – that the artist whom many another ‘outsider’ has called ‘the Priest’ and who saw himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ and ‘a technician of consciousness’, this dystopic modernist author, visionary science fiction writer, and aesthetic weapons maker was one of the major media artists, social critics, cultural theorists and literary figures not only of his but of our ‘postpersonal’ time. Michel Foucault closes The Order of Things by imagining a time when ‘man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’. The closing image was crafted some fifteen years before Foucault met Burroughs in New York in 1975, but in the 1960s Burroughs, too, was already imagining and theorising the disappearing author and a post-human, media-dominated world. Such lines of thought suggest parallel trajectories that Deleuze will see as bridging philosopher and artist if not philosophy and art. (shrink)

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain—a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in (...) two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a pool of materials that may be freely appropriated as inputs to economic production. That framing supports the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, the biopolitical public domain constitutes the personal information harvested within networked information environments as raw. That framing creates the backdrop for culturally situated techniques of knowledge production and for the logic that designates those techniques as sites of legal privilege. (shrink)

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain—a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in (...) two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a pool of materials that may be freely appropriated as inputs to economic production. That framing supports the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, the biopolitical public domain constitutes the personal information harvested within networked information environments as raw. That framing creates the backdrop for culturally situated techniques of knowledge production and for the logic that designates those techniques as sites of legal privilege. (shrink)

In 1990, Gilles Deleuze publishedPostscript on the Societies of Control, an introduction to the potentially suffocating reality of the nascent control society. This thirty-year update details how Deleuze’s conception has developed from a broad speculative vision into specific economic mechanisms clustering around personal information, big data, predictive analytics, and marketing. The central claim is that today’s advancing control society coerces without prohibitions, and through incentives that are not grim but enjoyable, even euphoric because they compel individuals to obey their own (...) personal information. The article concludes by delineating two strategies for living that are as unexplored as control society itself because they are revealed and then enabled by the particular method of oppression that is control. (shrink)