Since the era of deinstitutionalisation, many clinical approaches have emerged to enable the care and treatment of people suffering from mental illness. In recent years, the use of coercive approaches in the community (e.g., outpatient commitment or community treatment orders) has also increased internationally. Although nurses' role regarding these coercive approaches is central and significant, few empirical and theoretical writings have tackled this controversial nursing practice. The purpose of this paper is to analyse coercive nursing care through the lens of (...) French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's concept of ‘societies of control’. Taking up Michel Foucault's work on disciplinary power, Deleuze explores how the move from the striated spaces of closed institutions to the smooth spaces of societies of control took place since the middle of the 20th century. According to Deleuze, the overall objective of ‘societies of control’ is no longer simply to govern deviant behaviour in closed environments (e.g., psychiatric hospitals and prisons) but to ensure a regime of unrelentless surveillance in the open spaces of our communities. (shrink)

The Society of Control is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze in the early 1990s to highlight the transition from Michel Foucault’s Disciplinary Society to a new social constitution of power assisted by digital technologies. The Society of Control is organized around switches, which convert data, and, in this way, exercise power. These switches take data inputs (digitized information about individuals) and transform them into outputs (decisions) based on their pre-programmed instructions. I call these (...) switches “automated decision-making algorithms” (ADMAs) and look at ethical issues that arise from their impact on human freedom. I distinguish between negative and positive aspects of freedom and examine the impact of the ADMAs on both. My main argument is that freedom becomes endangered in this new ecosystem of computerized control, which makes individuals powerless in new and unprecedented ways. Finally, I suggest a few ways to recover freedom, while preserving the economic benefits of the ADMAs. (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)

In this wide-ranging conversation, Berry and Galloway explore the implications of undertaking media theoretical work for critiquing the digital in a time when networks proliferate and, as Galloway claims, we need to ‘forget Deleuze’. Through the lens of Galloway’s new book, Laruelle: Against the Digital, the potential of a ‘non-philosophy’ for media is probed. From the import of the allegorical method from excommunication to the question of networks, they discuss Galloway’s recent work and reflect on the implications of computation for (...) media theory, thinking about media objects, and critical theory. (shrink)

Foucault’s disciplinary society and his notion of panopticism are often invoked in discussions regarding electronic surveillance. Against this use of Foucault, I argue that contemporary trends in surveillance technology abstract human bodies from their territorial settings, separating them into a series of discrete flows through what Deleuze will term, the surveillant assemblage. The surveillant assemblage and its product, the socially sorted body, aim less at molding, punishing and controlling the body and more at triggering events of in- and ex-clusion (...) from life opportunities. The meaning of the body as monitored by latest generation vision technologies formed from machine only surveillance has been transformed. Such a body is no longer disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense. It is a virtual/flesh interface broken into discrete data flows whose comparison and breakage generate bodies as both legible and eligible (or illegible). (shrink)

The article presents an analysis of the notion of debt in the context of Deleuzean philosophy of affect. The interpretation presented on the following pages is “indebted” to Lazzarato’s conception of the notion of debt as a figure of subjectivity typical for capitalism. Debt is understood as an assemblage of sad passions and considered in relation to social transformations, that have led to contemporary societies of control. The article shows the connection between the concept of debt and the process (...) of individualization characteristic for contemporary society. Firstly, the concepts of control, debt and affect in the philosophy of Deleuze are put into consideration. Secondly, their relation to the forces and assemblages typical for contemporary societies is discussed. In order to grasp the social significance of the philosophical analysis, the article involves a sociological excursion that demonstrates sociological interpretation of the processes that were described in terms of philosophical analysis in the main body of the text. (shrink)

The introduction of new accountabilities and techniques of government for the purposes of educational reform have created new complexities and tensions for school leadership. Policies such as the publishing of league tables in the UK, high stakes testing in the US and the introduction of the My School website in Australia are particularly significant for school principals. In this article I appeal to the work of Foucault and Deleuze to provide an alternate approach to understanding how principals are constituted as (...) subjects through a range of practices and discourses associated with the introduction of the My School website. I specifically draw upon Foucault’s notion of governmentality and Deleuze’s notion of societies of control to provoke new lines of thought into these government practices. I argue that it is through the performative in the education system that school principals are becoming perpetually assessable subjects. (shrink)

Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer's oft-quoted 1944 essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption affirms that the Frankfurt School duo scrupulously envisaged a “new kind of barbarism,” or an inversion of modernity’s Enlightenment project illustrated by our contemporary political semblance. Surveying the critical social fissures that index contemporary Western civil society—from 9/11 to the 2002 Nanterre massacre and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting—Stiegler diagnoses that our epoch is plagued by the “absence of (...) epoch,” whereby computational capitalism and algorithmic governmentality have extirpated the “transcendental imagination” underlying vital primordial narcissism. In short, these are symptoms a world increasingly “going mad,” in a thousand ways, possible because we are the bearers of “a negative protention of a becoming without future,” yet “we prefer not to say so: we do not want to know about it.”. (shrink)

This book reveals the sense in which our postmodern societies are characterized by the obscene absence of the intellectual. The modern intellectual--who had once been associated with humanism and enlightenment—has in our day been replaced by media stars, talking heads, and technical experts. At issue is the ongoing crisis of democracy, under the aegis of the société du spectacle and its vast networks of politically-induced idiocy, industrially-produced biocide, and militarily-provoked genocide. Spectacle fills the resulting moral and intellectual vacuum with electronic (...) technologies of control, punishment, and destruction. This postmodern tyranny reduces intelligence to mechanistic, positivist, and grammatological models of inquiry, while increasing the segmentation, fragmentation, and dissolution of human existence. The apotheosis of the spectacle explains the intellectual void that lies at the heart of our postmodern decadence; it also accounts for the need to recuperate the humanist values of enlightenment promoted by the modern intellectual tradition. (shrink)

There is a common tradition in European education going back to the Middle Ages which long played a part in providing the curriculum of schools which catered both for the wealthy and for able sons of less well-to-do families. Originally published in 1974, this volume examines the relationship between education and society in the different countries of Europe from which differences in tradition and practice emerge. The countries discussed include: France, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Poland and Sweden.

Originally published in 1972, this book is concerned with education as part of a larger social history. Chapters include: The roots of Anglican supremacy in English education The Board schools of London The use of ecclesiastical records for the history of education Topographical resources: private and secondary education from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Society has historically not taken a benign view of genetic disease. The laws permitting sterilization of the mentally re tarded~ and those proscribing consanguineous marriages are but two examples. Indeed as far back as the 5th-10th centuries, B.C.E., consanguineous unions were outlawed (Leviticus XVIII, 6). Case law has traditionally tended toward the conservative. It is reactive rather than directive, exerting its influence only after an individual or group has sustained injury and brought suit. In contrast, state legislatures have not (...) been inhibited in enacting statutes. Many of their products can be characterized as hasty, unnecessary, ill-conceived, and based on the heart rather than the head. Moreover the lack of expert consultation sought has also been remarkable. One state legislature, for example, has advocated immunization for sickle cell anemia! Many others have enacted laws for the screening of inborn errors of metabolism, e.g., phenylketon uria, but have poorly defined the lines of responsibility to secure compliance. A spate of specific disease-related bills has emerged in the u.S. Congress, each seeking recognition and appropriations. Sickle cell anemia, hemophilia, Cooley's anemia and Tay-Sachs disease have been among the front-runners for support. Finally, in 1975, Congress has begun to examine an omnibus bill concerning all forms of genetic disease. The bill, termed the National Genetic Diseases Act is, however, still far from being enacted. (shrink)

Part of the educational system in England has been geared towards the preparation of particular professions, while the identity and status of members of some professions have depended significantly on the general education they have received. Originally published in 1973, this volume explores the interaction between education and the professions. It also looks at the education of the main professions in sixteenth century England and at how twentieth century university teaching is a key profession for the training of new recruits (...) to other professions. (shrink)

Originally published in 1971, this volume examines the relationship between the history and sociology of education. History does not stand in isolation, but has much to draw from and contribute to, other disciplines. The methods and concepts of sociology, in particular, are exerting increasing influence on historical studies, especially the history of education. Since education is considered to be part of the social system, historians and sociologists have come to survey similar fields; yet each discipline appears to have its own (...) aims and methodology. (shrink)

In controlled human infection (CHI) studies, investigators deliberately infect healthy individuals with pathogens in order to study mechanisms of disease or obtain preliminary efficacy data on investigational vaccines and medicines. CHI studies offer a fast and cost‐effective way of generating new scientific insights, prioritizing investigational products for clinical testing, and reducing the risk that large numbers of people are exposed to ineffective or harmful substances in research or in practice. Yet depending on the pathogen, CHI studies can involve significant risks (...) or burdens for participants, pose risks to individuals or communities not involved in the research, and lead to public controversy. It is therefore essential to ensure that the risks of CHI studies are justified by their social value—that is, their potential to generate benefits for society—and that public trust can be maintained. In this paper, we aim to clarify how research sponsors, research ethics committees and other reviewers should judge the social value of CHI studies. We develop a list of relevant considerations for making social value judgments based on the standard view of social value. We then use this list to discuss the example of potentially conducting dengue virus CHI studies in endemic settings. We argue that dengue virus CHI studies in endemic settings would fall on the higher end of the spectrum of social value, mostly because of their potential to redirect all fields of future dengue research. Drawing on this discussion, we derive several general recommendations for how reviewers should judge the social value of CHI studies. (shrink)

This paper is broadly concerned with Deleuze’s distinction between ‚la loi et les lois’ on the one hand, and jurisprudence on the other. Jurisprudence is the␣creative action of legal practice, the process by which it is forced to think constructively and anew. In such circumstances legal thought is akin to Deleuze’s concept of the event. I explore the distinction between law and jurisprudence by way of Deleuze’s comments on control societies, arguing that, under control, law ceases to be (...) a juridical hierarchy conforming to disciplinary modes to become a regulatory practice of interminable modulation. In order to begin to explore the relations and connections between law/jurisprudence and control, the paper will look to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce (who influenced Deleuze’s work on cinema). In particular it will argue that control operates predominantly through icons. As a consequence I argue that the proper ground of the sign, the event, is co-opted and, following from this, that control functions through the confusing of sense and meaning. (shrink)

This paper maps Hardt and Negri’s use of Deleuze philosophical commitment to the control society as a temporal phenomena in the context of education. Education is important because it is pushed and pulled by those vectors that Hardt and Negri see as central tensions in late capitalism: localism vs globalisation, discipline vs control, codes vs axioms, metrics vs expertise and so on. In Empire, Hardt and Negri represent Empire as a form of governance that responds to the (...) passing from disciplinary societies to societies of control. The societies of control are central to their concept of Empire defined “as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization”. Empire, then, is a macropolitics that produces, or infiltrates, subjectivation as a means to affect the self within globalising and localising regimes. This paper takes up Hardt and Negri’s challenge in two areas. First concerns what appears to be the collapse of the ideal of publicness within public school systems. The second provocation concerns the digital, or presumptive, economy of online and adaptive learning systems. (shrink)

The problem of controlling an artificial general intelligence has fascinated both scientists and science-fiction writers for centuries. Today that problem is becoming more important because the time when we may have a superhuman intelligence among us is within the foreseeable future. Current average estimates place that moment to before 2060. Some estimates place it as early as 2040, which is quite soon. The arrival of the first AGI might lead to a series of events that we have not seen before: (...) rapid development of an even more powerful AGI developed by the AGIs themselves. This has wide-ranging implications to the society and therefore it is something that must be studied well before it happens. In this paper we will discuss the problem of limiting the risks posed by the advent of AGIs. In a thought experiment, we propose an AGI which has enough human-like properties to act in a democratic society, while still retaining its essential artificial general intelligence properties. We discuss ways of arranging the co-existence of humans and such AGIs using a democratic system of coordination and coexistence. If considered a success, such a system could be used to manage a society consisting of both AGIs and humans. The democratic system where each member of the society is represented in the highest level of decision-making guarantees that even minorities would be able to have their voices heard. The unpredictability of the AGI era makes it necessary to consider the possibility that a population of autonomous AGIs could make us humans into a minority. (shrink)

THE WHALE AND THE REACTOR: A SEARCH FOR LIMITS IN THE AGE OF HIGH TECHNOLOGY by Langdon Winner Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 200 pp. $17.50AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY: TECHNICS‐OUT‐OF‐CONTROL AS A THEME IN POLITICAL THOUGHT by Langdon Winner Cambridge: MIT Press. 1977. 386 pp., $7.95 paperTECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA edited by Stephen F. Goldberg and Charles R. Strain Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. 240 pp., $19.95TECHNOLOGY, THE ECONOMY AND SOCIETY: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE edited by (...) Joel Colton and Stuart Bruchey New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. 287 pp., $35.00. (shrink)

The growing body of whistleblowing literature includes many studies that have attempted to identify the individual level antecedents of whistleblowing behavior. However, cross-cultural differences in perceptions of the ethicality of whistleblowing affect the judgment of whistleblowing intention. This study ascertains how Chinese managers/professionals decide to blow the whistle in terms of their locus of control and subjective judgment regarding the intention of whistleblowing. Hypotheses that are derived from these speculations are tested with data on Chinese managers and professionals. Statistical (...) analysis largely supports the hypotheses, which suggests that an individual''s locus of control does moderate the relationship between ethical judgment and whistleblowing. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul propounded substantivist accounts of technology which rejected the received instrumentalist view of technology according to which only the ends to which technologies are applied can be evaluated. In opposition to instrumentalism, they claimed that modern technology involves a displacement of non-technological values or (in Heidegger’s case) other ways of relating to Being. The theory of technical autonomy that Jacques Ellul sets out in The Technological Society is distinguished from Heidegger’s brand of substantivism, however, in (...) providing a non-transcendental, naturalistic account of the conditions under which technique displaces non-technical values in modern societies. I show how Ellul’s theory resolves into two components – 1) a theory of the essence of technique given in terms of the notion of efficiency and 2) a theory of the conditions for autonomy - and set out some criticisms of Ellul’s essentialism by way of an analysis of the concept of efficiency. I argue that component (2) is incompatible with his essentialism because it is committed to techniques being replicable across different contexts of use. I then use Jacques Derrida’s notions of iterability and generalised writing to develop a theory of technical replicability which accounts for the historical particularity of techniques and for their mechanism-dependent replicability. I support this account of technical iteration by showing how it allows explanatory connections to be made between specific mechanisms of technical replication and the fragile cultural forms or phenomenologies they support. I then use it to reformulate Ellul’s theory without its essentialist commitments and claim that the background assumptions of the resultant theory are sufficiently weak to render it plausible. However, while this supports certain aspects of Ellul’s original thesis, I argue that the modified theory no longer implies a hegemonic role for technique. While technical process may be self-augmenting and uncontrollable (much as Ellul describes it) there are no grounds for claiming that it prescribes a particular set of values. (shrink)

Many office workers use computers and the Internet not only to get their daily jobs done but also to deal with their personal businesses. Therefore employers nowadays monitor their employees electronically to prevent the misuse of the company resources. The use of electronic monitoring in organizations causes issues of trust and privacy. This study is dedicated to developing a conceptual model on the two issues under electronic monitoring. Control, considered as the essence of the definition of privacy as well (...) as the foundation of the control model in the theory of procedural justice, plays an important role to people’s privacy concerns and trust. People’s perceived‐self, as essential in the group‐value model in the theory of procedural justice and in the cultural studies, also plays an important role to people’s privacy concerns and trust. This study presents research hypotheses on trust and privacy under electronic surveillance based on the two models of the theory of procedural justice, social identity theory, and cultural studies. (shrink)

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)