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The
International Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies
Vol. 1,(1): 00-00. 1997 Rethinking
Institutions in Societies of Control
Miquel Domènech
and Francisco J. Tirado
Weber (allowing
time out for his lengthy 'nervous breakdown') closes thenineteenth
century for us with a genealogy of modernity (we are referring to
hisclassical work 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'
originallypublished in 1920) and he closes this genealogy with the
following words: "In
Baxter's view, the care for external goods should only lie onthe
shoulders of the saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside
at anymoment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron
cage (...) No oneknows who will live in this cage in the future (...)
`specialists without spiritsensualists without heart'" (Weber, 1968:
181-182) Fifty years
later, Foucault follows the intellectual trail left by Weber andcloses
his archaeological stage and the structuralist period of the 'sixtieswith
a genealogy of the "disciplinary society" (Foucault, 1975:
209).The Foucauldian genealogy presents some new elements over and
above the Weberianone. First, the heavy bars of the cage are not made
with iron but with gold.Power is not coercion, it creates. Norm is not
restriction, it produces.Secondly, and even more importantly, the
object of the disciplinary society isnot a disproportionate
instrumental rationality which, step by step, prevailsover the world
of values; but rather reflects the negated spirit of thosespecialists
and the negated hearts of the sensualists referred in Weber's
text.Finally, and crucially, it is in the cage where the soul is
produced, through apermanent work over the body: It would be
wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideologicaleffect. On
the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced
permanentlyaround, on, within the body by the functioning of a power
that is exercised onthose punished - and, in more general way, on
those one supervises, trains andcorrects, over madmen, children at
home and at school, the colonized, over thosewho are stuck at a
machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. (Foucault,
1975: 29). Disciplinary
society is an enormous device to produce subjectivities,discipline
working upon the body to produce them. In summary, Foucault locatesthe
limits of our immediate past and the limits of our mediate present in
theschema prefigured by this disciplinary society. Why
discipline?
From Foucault's
point of view, the arrival of modernity, the limits of ourpresent, is
characterised by three features. Firstly, discipline is not any morea
mere anecdotal constriction, it becomes a device: "...thediscipline-mechanism:
a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise ofpower by
making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of
subtlecoercion for a society to come" (Foucault, 1975: 209).
There is, here, amove from a discipline as a blocking practice, wholly
centred upon its negativefunctions (to stop evil, to fix dis-functional
or disturbed collectivities, tobreak off communications) towards a
discipline as a mechanism that plays apositive role, and that improves
the possible utility of individuals. Secondly,it appears an ubiquity
of disciplines. Disciplinary institutions increase, leavetheir
marginal site and begin to occupy a more and more extensive surface.
Thatwhich was a singular metric, an incidental pattern, is going to
become a generalformula: "Hence,
too, the double tendency one sees developing throughout theeighteenth
century to increase the number of disciplinary institutions and
todiscipline the existing apparatuses" (Foucault,
1975: 211). In other words,
discipline everywhere and for everybody. Disciplines areorientated not
only towards those who are punished, stopping evil is not thesole or
even the main goal of disciplinary practices; disciplines proceed to
bein the service of good, good for everybody. They make no distinction.
Thirdly,there is a nationalisation of the mechanisms of discipline.
State institutionstake control of that discipline which was before a
punctual practice in theProtestant armies, the Jesuitical schools or
the maritime hospitals. Stateappropriates discipline. Organising a
centralised police with the mission ofexercising "a permanent,
exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable ofmaking all
visible..." (Foucault, 1975: 214), is the definitive step for
awidening of disciplines that now reach out to the boundaries of the
State. Why society?
Our attention
here is upon "the gradual extension of the mechanism ofdiscipline
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their
spreadthroughout the whole social body, the formation of what may be
called in generalthe disciplinary society" (Foucault, 1975: 209).
We think that what isrelevant and new, and at the same time that which
has been less appreciated, inthe Foucauldian expression, "disciplinary
society ", is precisely theterm " society ". As Ewald
(1990) maintains, the main conclusion todraw from Discipline and
Punish is that we do not have to see prison assomething possible
because of the generalisation of the disciplinary techniques,instead
we have to see prison itself as the institution which offers to
modernsociety its authentic image. "Is it surprising that prisons
resemblefactories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble
prisons?"(Foucault, 1975: 228). "Disciplinary society "
not refers to ageneralised enclosure, only to a generalised diffusion
of disciplines. What is the
logic of such a society? Deleuze (1995) has summarized it verywell
when he sees the different centres of enclosure as independent
variables.The individual successively moves from a closed circle to
another. Each onethese circles has its own laws, its own logic. For
the individual, there arealways laws to be learnt, a logic that has to
be internalised and so on. It is anever ending beginning, after
schooling, the barracks begins, after this comesthe factory: these are
some of the circles of this tour. Every enclosure is abeginning from
zero, a new production of subjectivity. It is not, however, thelogic
or the genealogy of this disciplinary society the object of our
paper.Rather, what we now go no to propose in the following section is
a morphology ofdisciplinary society. Topography of
the disciplinary society
The
disciplinary society is mainly a definition of a metric
space(specifically an Euclidean space with a linear time). This metric
space is ahomogenising space. It concentrates and/or distributes in an
ordering manner theelements gathered in it. The diffusion of the
disciplines does not entail anydivision or isolation. On the contrary,
it implies the creation of an identicalspace all over its parts.
Disciplines generate a society with a single languagethat permits
communication between all its institutions, that permits aninstitution
to be translated to another. This common language for
everydisciplinary institution is the norm or that which is normative.
Norming jointsup disciplinary institutions and allows translation and
communication betweenthem. It enables a society made up of closed
circles to be homogeneous by virtueof a full communicability between
its elements. It generates an unified socialspace, homogeneous and
redundant in all its parts. Ewald expresses very well howsuch norms
work: "ordering multiplicities, articulating the whole with
itsparts and relating any part with each other" (Ewald, 1989:
165). A distinction
has to be made, however, between norm and discipline. The normis a
measure and a way to produce a common standard. Discipline is a
practicethat concerns the body and its training, and it is not
necessarily normative. Itis the normalisation of the discipline that
becomes a characteristic ofmodernity. We are faced with the Rousseau-esque
dream: a transparent andhomogeneous society. Now we want to
pay attention to the cornerstone of the disciplinary societynamely,
institutions. Whether one thinks of total institutions (Goffman,
1961),or enclosure institutions (Foucault, 1975), it is their
architecture thatmatters. Speaking of institutions is equivalent to
speaking of buildings.Institution is an ancient term that
"denotes and describes a stable balanceon or over a square. The
institution has its seat in a building: temple,cathedral, town hall,
prison, school, workshop" (Serres, 1995:182). And, ifSerres is
right, we can not understand the institution without its plan. Thatis,
we can not understand it without looking at it as an architectural
space, asa metric space. The building has stable foundations, immobile
walls, visibleroofs, corridors to walk along, places to stop at or
take a break. Thisgeometric, stable, layout translates the movements
of those who are inside intoan inhabiting. We inhabit in geometry (Serres,
1995). We have inhabited theschool, the workshop, the barracks, the
factory, the family house and in sodoing, we have been inhabiting
institutions. Institutions,
because they are seated in a building, in a plan, in ageometric
distribution, evoke, thereby a language of what is closed :
avocabulary of the moulds: norms, powers, adjustment, socialisation,
history.Defined, planned, built on a metric space, institutions have
the capacity togive stability to collectivities and to slow down their
history. Architectureallows individuals to be gathered, topography
permits their locate on a map, thebuilding bounds time between its
walls. The institution makes possible varioushabits to be generated,
habits that will survive collectivities. In short,architecture creates
a spatio-temporal niche that allows collectivities to begathered
around a number of habits. Institutionalising,
that is, is to create conditions to inhabit. It is togeometrize space
and time, it is the action of producing a spatio-temporal nichethat
can absorb heterogeneous matter and purify it. Institutionalising,
refersto a model, or better, to a propellant force towards the inside,
one that isperfectly reflected in the prefix "in" of the
word "institution".It is not surprising, then, that Foucault
has so stressed the importance of themanagement of space in order to
produce disciplined individuals: "Disciplinary
space tends to be divided into as many sections asthere are bodies or
elements to be distributed. One must eliminate the effectsof imprecise
distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals,
theirdiffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation; it
was a tacticof anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration.
Its aim was toestablish presences and absences, to know where and how
to locate individuals,to set up useful communications, to interrupt
others, to be able at each momentto supervise the conduct of each
individual, to asses it, to judge it, tocalculate its qualities or
merits" (Foucault,
1975:143). From
Institutions to Extitutions
We have talked
about institutions as buildings, centring our scope in theprocesses
related with enclosure and inhabiting. Institutions have always
beenpresent in archeologies, genealogies, histories, and always with a
central role.Our thesis is that now they have to share it with other
kind of entities. Thesenew entities can resemble the old institutions
)- actually, sometimes they havethe same name ) but they need a new
vocabulary to conceptualise them. We have tothink of them apart from
the building, that is, not as something closed bus assomething open;
not as something to inhabit but something to haunt: "For ahouse,
habiter (to inhabit); for a forest, hanter (to haunt), to frequent,
tohang about: two different states for a similar vital use" (Serres,1994:70).
We are going to call these entities, following Serres, ex-titutions.In
order to introduce you to them we are going to explain to you how we
arrivedat them. The space of the laboratory has allowed us to
conceptualiseextitutions. Everything
starts one specific morning. We were in a laboratory of biologyin
Barcelona, beginning an ethnographic study. That day everybody was
waitingfor the arrival of a very important new machine: a mass
spectrometer. When thevan reached the lab. something unexpected
happened. They could not get themachine inside. They knew, of course,
the machine was very big and heavy. Thatwas the reason why they had
asked the supplier to send it in small parcels. Butnobody thought that
these small parcels would arrive packed all together in asingle big
box. The problem was that the door was not big enough and
furthermorethe laboratory lacked a crane to move the box. Some of the
researchers that werewatching the scene complained about the architect
who had designed the building:"architects don't know how to build
a laboratory". That statementposed an interesting question: how
should laboratories be built? What was thematter with the space of the
laboratory? At that moment, it seemed that thelaboratory was not open
enough. Should it always be an open space? That week theethnographic
team discussed the nature of the space of the laboratory and
itsrelation with the architecture of a building. We actually were
taking up again adebate that is central in the birth of the laboratory.
We are referring to thepolemic between Hobbes and Boyle that Shapin
& Shaffer (1985) summarise soskilfully. As these
authors point out: "What little we do know about
Englishexperimental spaces in the middle part of the seventeenth
century indicates thattheir status as private or public was intensely
debated" (Shapin &Shaffer, 1985:335). We can say, then, that
the laboratory is born accompanied bya deep argument about the nature
of its space. Whether it was public or privatewas intensely debated.
As Shapin and Shaffer(1985) remind us, the firstexperimentalists
insisted upon the public nature of their activity. And this isone of
the reasons to vindicate the laboratory as a space for
experimentation.The laboratory is supposed to be the counterpart of
the private, hiddenalchemist's closet. The laboratory is presented by
the experimentalist as thespace were matters of fact can be produced.
And this is so because it is therethat experimentalists can work with
others. The laboratory had to be a placewhere experiments could be
performed and where it had to be possible to witnessthem collectively.
The presence of witnesses was a crucial aspect of Boyle'sphilosophy.
Effectively, it is the testimony of the relevant community
whichassures the category of matter of fact to the performed
experiments. And "witnessingwas to be a collective act" (Shapin
& Shaffer, 1985:56). But Hobbes
pointed out the restriction imposed to the laboratory. From thepoint
of view of this philosopher, the laboratory was not that public
spaceexperimentalists pretended it was. Hobbes explains that not
everyone could enterat Gresham College where the members of the Royal
Society came together in orderto perform their experiments. His
argument is based on the presence of a "master",a master who
decides who could come in and who could not: "Thus
Hobbes disputed the social character of the space theGreshamites said
they had created. He said they had a `master' who exercised
hisauthority in the constitution of their knowledge; they said they
were free andequal men, whose matters of fact mirrored the structure
of reality" (Shapin &
Shaffer, 1985:114). What is, then,
the conclusion that Shapin and Shaffer (1985) draw from thedebate
between Hobbes and Boyle? From their point of view, the
nascentlaboratory is a "public space with restricted access"
: "The
Royal Society advertised itself as a `union of eyes, andhands'; the
space in which it produced its experimental knowledge was stipulatedto
be a public space. It was public in a very precisely defined and
veryrigorously policed sense: not everybody could come in; not
everybody's testimonywas of equal worth; not everybody was equally
able to influence theinstitutional consensus. Nevertheless, what Boyle
was proposing, and what RoyalSociety was endorsing, was a crucially
important move towards the publicconstitution and validation of
knowledge. The contrast was, on the one hand,with the private work of
the alchemists, and, on the other, with the individualdictates of the
systematic philosopher" (Shapin &
Shaffer, 1985:78). They clearly
believe that Hobbes was right. They even think that this wouldbe a
good prescription for present-day laboratories: "many
laboratorieshave no legal sanction against a public entry, but they
are, as a practicalmatter, open only to 'authorized personnel'" (Shapin
and Shaffer,1985:336). From our point
of view, though, both, Hobbes and Boyle, were right, and thisis so
because they were talking about two, related, yet different
things.Hobbes based his argument in a physical conception of the
laboratory. Hobbes wasthinking of a building, something to be closed,
an institution. Boyle wasconceptualising something that was beyond a
building, he was concerned with acommunity that did not need to be
assembled in the same building to act as such.Shapin and Shaffer put
us the right track when they say: "Matters
of fact were to be produced in a public space: aparticular physical
space in which experiments were collectively performed anddirectly
witnessed and an abstract space constituted through virtual witnessing." (Shapin &
Shaffer, 1985:69) That's right!
Boyle was defining the laboratory as an extitution. First,
thelaboratory is a virtual space from which everybody can witness an
experiment. Itis not just the building, it is a concept that describes
an assembly ofheterogeneous elements to produce knowledge. Secondly,
the very virtuality ofthis space gives to it the condition of openness
and this is why Boyle stressesthe public nature of it. And thirdly,
this space, in fact, is a multitude ofspaces. It is a network of
laboratories that scientists haunt. As Shapin &Shaffer (1985) show
very well in their work, in order to understand theevolution of the
air-pump we have to follow experimentalists (Boyle, Huygens,Schott
etc.), machines and letters travelling around London, Paris, The
Hague,Magdeburg and so on from one centre of pneumatic experimentation
to another.It's a continuous haunting describing several single paths.
We do not find,then, the habit production we found in institutions. It
is impossible to findtwo identical journeys, two identical machines (and
that seems to be a bigproblem), two identical experiments. Directions,
points of reference, everything is in a continuous change; thereis no
single map to grasp experimentalists' extitutional activities as there
wasa single plan to grasp the architecture of the institution. Thus,
extitutions gobeyond formal geometry, they need topological thought in
order to grasp them. "Ingeometry, I inhabit; topology haunts
me" (Serres, 1994, 71). We can say,then, that the laboratory is a
tensional space, a battlefield between theinstitutional and the
extitutional. This is why we think that both Boyle andHobbes are right,
each one of them in one side of the fight. A fight which isstill going
on as we could see in the ethnographic story we explained
above.Science practice requires buildings such as our laboratory )- a
building with aplan, of course )- but these buildings need to be
supplemented, to have plentyof holes of different sizes (sometimes
very big), as well as bridges,connections and so on. They cannot be
those closed circles Deleuze talked aboutto explain institutions. They
are knots, nodes, links, bonds, ties, a family ofsynonymous words
required to describe and, perhaps, explain a topologicalnature. Probably some
of you will say, after reading this last paragraph, that wealso are
taking sides in this struggle. You are right. For us, laboratories
cannot be closed spaces. They are closer to extitutions than to
institutions. Inthe next section we seek to show you what we consider
two other examples ofextitutions. How
extitutions work
In order to
illustrate some of the features of an extitution we are going totake
as a first example a project for mental health that is about to
beimplemented in Catalonia for the Public Health Service. This project
is calledPLA DE SERVEIS INDIVIDUALITZAT (PSI), which in English would
be something like: Individualised Plan of Services. The PSI is a
proposal to organise the processof management of what is called Severe
Mental Disorder (SMD) and is born in aclimate of crisis for the
conventional attendance system. This is seen as highlyproblematic in
terms of the social consequences it involves )- not to
mentionbudgetary considerations. If we explore one of the documents
elaborated todevelop the project, we can learn that the main goal of
the plan is "toadapt the health and social services to the
concrete needs of each patient asnearly as possible to their natural
pattern, in order to strengthen thecontinuity of attendance". When the
document explains how the necessity for a PSI arose, it states thatit
is as a consequence of the move in Catalonia from an Institutional
Psychiatryto a Communitarian one in Catalonia, a move that has created
an AttendanceNetwork that, for several reasons, is giving a limited
answer to the problems ofpatients and their families. So, the document
says, "patients that are lesscapable or less prone to ask for
help are in risk of remaining out of the system".It is clear,
then, that a priority target of the Plan is to avoid a person witha
SMD remaining out of the system. The institutional way of guaranteeing
this isin process of being dismantled, and what appears instead is a
new system, anextitutional one, which takes as a goal this very
important characteristic: donot leave a person out of the system. Very indicative
here is the table the document uses to explain the changeimplied by
the PSI:
Who are the
targets of the plan? This is very well defined in the document.A
distinction is traced between clinical criteria and social criteria. Clinical
criteria
First, there is
a definition of the kind of problems that would be
treated:schizophrenic disorder, bipolar disorder, paranoid states,
deep depression,obsessive-compulsive disorder, serious personality
disorders. Secondly, those tobe targeted should have the following
clinical characteristics: a) clinicalseriousness: reality distortion
and risk behaviours (auto- or hetero-aggressivity); b) at least two
years with these symptoms. Social
criteria
Among the
social problematics considered as implicating an interventionthrough
the plan, the document cites: a) malfunction; b) functional
incapacity(inability to perform a social role); c) dependency; d)
manifest familial burdenor absence of family; e) absence of a social
network. There is a furtherimportant feature to which to pay attention.
The targets of the plan will bethose which have previously used one or
more services in a reiterative orextended way. In other words, we can
say that the targets are those whopreviously would have been the
clients of the institutional enclosure device.The plan is based in
which is called "case management". That is,every client is a
single case and deserves singular management. There arespecific
practice principles for such case management:
Programmes have
to get the maximum of individualisation by:
As you can
imagine, this programme is presented as a profound cultural
andorganisational change. Instead of traditional arrangement of
attendance basedin institutional structures and spaces, the PSI poses
a processual model whereevery individual case can be seen as a process
that passes through each one ofthe institutions involved in the
programme. As the document says: "theproposed programmes and
their correspondent Individualised Projects can bediagrammed,
including the spaces and structures of the service-providers (thename
given to hospitals, centres of work, families, centres of
rehabilitation,etc.), as ordering horizontal processes which crosses
them over from left toright" . There has to be
a person that works as a co-ordinator of each individualisedproject. A
co-ordinator covers 20 clients/patients. This person can be a "casemanager"
(if is a person independent of the service-providers) or a "keyworker"
(if this person occupies a place in one of them). It is veryimportant
to note here that this person is not there to impose her/his
owncriteria but is charged to get a consensus with the patient and the
family. Having
explained the main features of the PSI we think we can assert that
weare faced with an extitution. It remains to comment upon what we
consider themost salient aspects of it: 1.There
is no central building to refer to. The PSI crosses overmany buildings
) Day Hospital, City Council, School, Home, Psychiatric
Hospital,Factories, Social Centres ) but it is not in any of them. It
is not possibleinhabit in the PSI. Instead of this, we can see how its
different elementshaunt, frequent, hang about and are dispersed in an
open space. 2.The
PSI takes the configuration of a network. In this sense, theconcept of
extitutions fits into the framework of Actor-Network Theory
analysis.Extitutions are networks simultaneously real, like nature,
narrated, likediscourse, and collective, like society (Latour, 1991).
Any kind of entity canbe enrolled in the PSI which, at the end, takes
the aspect of a heterogeneousconglomeration. There are clients,
families, diagnosis, medicaments, hospitals,diseases, social policies,
documents like the one we have used, and so on. 3.There
is no difference between the inside/outside the PSI. Once wehave
accepted that PSI is a network it is nonsensical to look for the
inside orthe outside of it (Latour, 1997). Institutions, buildings,
have an inside and anoutside, and a boundary. Extitutions, networks,
don't have an inside and anoutside, they are only boundary. There is
no inside or outside the PSI, thereare only elements that can or
cannot be connected with it. Connected with thePSI you can appear as a
client, a case manager, a familial, a boss, a diagnosis,an
intelligence coefficient. PSI is not a surface capable of
geometrisation,rather it is an amalgam of changing connections and
associations. What mattersare positions, neighbourhoods, proximities,
distances, adherences oraccumulational relationships (Serres, 1994). Its very
existence depends on the work of very specialised figures. We aregoing
to call them, following Serres, angels. Effectively, the co-ordinator
isan angel that, through his/her movement, haunting, hanging around,
connects thedifferent elements of the PSI. Remember one of the
coordinator'scharacteristics we cited above: flexibility in the
frequency, length of time andplace for the contacts. That is, these
angels move in a very unpredictable anddiscontinuous way. Maybe they
are going to see a client and, then, in their carthe phone rings and
they have to stop and change direction, there is somethingmore
important to do: to visit another client, to see the boss. With
theirmovements, they weave the local and the global in a kind of
entangled knot.Their paths are easier to practice than to describe (Serres,
1994). We still have
one more story. Now we are going to talk about anotherextitution: the
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), which literally meansOpen
University of Catalonia, though it is not exactly an equivalent of
theBritish Open University. What makes it particularly interesting is
its virtualnature. UOC is a University created around what is called
"virtual campus",a campus that is in this virtual space
called Internet. As you can read in theinformation located in http://www.uoc.es,
the virtual campus is a "set offunctionalities that make possible
the interaction between the collectivitiesthat compound the University
(students, teachers, managerial staff) without thenecessity to meet in
space or time". What we want to stress from thatcitation is its
end, "without necessity to meet in space or time".This means
that the virtual campus allows every member of the virtual
communityremain in its own space and time, forming, thereby, a
collectivity that is notonly materially but also spatio-temporally
heterogeneous. The virtual campusweaves a fold where different spaces
and times are tied together. It is, at thesame time, the maximum of
individualisation and the minimum, it, likewise,offers the maximum of
globality and the minimum. From their houses, studentscan study with
no timetable. At any moment, day or night, students,
teachers,consultants, tutors, managerial staff, everybody from their
own computer canconnect with the virtual campus. There, they can meet
in the virtual bar, theycan read the newspaper, they can participate
in discussions, they can askquestions, they can consult books, they
can engage in virtual forums of work ordebate and have the opportunity
to enter in contact with "a world-wide theworld universitarian,
scientific and cultural community". Everybody isaccessible. You
can send a message to everybody and everybody can send you amessage. Contrast UOC
with a classical school or university, that is, with aninstitution. We
find fluidity rather than stability, topology rather thantopography,
dispersion rather than front of concentration, a unified space/timerather
than a multiplicity of spaces and times: "A
classical classroom is more or less stable, because it assemblesa
given number of people in a place; built with hard matter, as the
school, itis an institution, whereas if it is virtual, it fluctuates
its spatial figureand the number of people which assembles, in such a
way that its plan, alwaysdifferent, is still the same in spite of
everything: it is like Teseo's vessel,stable but always new." (Serres, 1994:
186) As Serres
(1994) observes no architect is needed now, only "designersof
circuits, of small and big networks of communication by which
associationsare made and unmade" (Serres, 1994:184). Computers
and telematic networksare the nature of the system, a "diversified,
soft and open system". Conclusion:
Societies of Control
What have we
seen with aid of our two examples? From our point of view, bothof them
exemplify how, by affecting, locally, each individual, and by
tracingseveral direct and inverse paths, from local to global, these
networkconfigurations tend to replace the large, old, institutions
that wereresponsible for global regulation: Schools, Factories, State
and so on (Serres,1994) If Serres is right and, furthermore, if we
accept the oft-pronouncedcrises of institutionalisation, then we have
also to admit also that Deleuzetoo(1995) is right when he talks about
the disciplinary society, so well drawnby Foucault, as something we
must locate in our past. It is probably
premature to risk a new label to describe our emergentpresent.
Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to propose that we can find, in
ourpresent, a mixture of entities, some of them resembling the old
institutions andsome others nearer of what we have called extitutions.
And when we pay attentionto these new entities, we can see that some
of their characteristics (asdescribed above) would fit very well in
the scenario drawn by Deleuze (1995)when he suggests the name "societies
of control" to refer our present.Summing up, such societies
present the following features:
Taken as a
whole we can contemplate extitutions as closer to societies ofcontrol
than to a disciplinary society. In the extitutions there is
nodiscipline, there are no buildings to enclose, there are no specific
moulds toproduce subjects. Instead of this we have seen mechanisms of
control, open andchanging systems, modulation activity, and local and
short term practices in acontinuous weaving of the global. E-mail: ilps9@cc.uab.esReferencesDeleuze, G. (1995) Conversaciones. Valencia:
Pre-Textos Foucault, M.
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