ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Gilles Deleuze's framework about the society of control. He proposes a new phase of power that allows us to examine how the Foucauldian disciplinary regime has been reorganised into our present social state. In moving beyond Michel Foucault, Deleuze speaks of a generalised form of neoliberal control which does not destroy but rather sustains and regulates life in its productive new capacities. Neoliberalism constitutes a governance of free-floating control that works in conjunction with disciplinary panopticism. Moreover, it is a mode of governance which is made possible through the expansion of the market, and the shift from industrial to post-industrial modes of production. The chapter discusses cynicism as the main affect that pertains to neoliberal capitalism, arguing that cynicism reinforces and produces individuals motivated by self-interest. It discusses debt as a mode of governance which has become an almost ontological condition of neoliberal capitalism. The chapter conceptualises pre-emptive biopolitics, which attempts to prevent potential events from occurring.
