What is a control society and how does it develop?
Gilles Deleuze has most influentially described control societies in his “Postscript on Control Societies,” in which he argues that we are moving from disciplinary societies, as outlined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, to control societies. According to Foucault, disciplinary societies emerged in the 18th century in response to the rise of capitalism and the attendant need for useful bodies. The disciplines offered a finer resolution than sovereign power at a lower cost: the disciplines made power productive, continuous, and cost-effective by moving the emphasis from the body of the king to those “irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements, their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations.”9 Whereas sovereign power was based on the physical existence of the sovereign, who exercised his power spectacularly, if discontinuously—whereas sovereign power was over death, the power to inflict death—disciplinary power operated through visible yet unverifiable
