ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will outline some emerging features of contemporary social control, and try to interpret them in the light of the transition toward a post-Fordist economic order. As I argued in Chapter 1, my points of reference are, on the one hand, the political economy of punishment (as originally developed by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer and later by Ian Jankovic, David F. Greenberg and many other materialist criminologists) and, on the other hand, the Foucauldian hypotheses about discipline and the disciplinary society. My analysis will start from the emergence of what I described earlier as a ‘post-Fordist surplus’, and the basic idea will be that ‘post-disciplinary’ technologies for the social control of the contemporary labour force – the ‘post-Fordist multitude’ – are converging toward a new confi guration of control which I would defi ne as the ‘government of surplus’. This argument is based on the one hand on the exhaustion of the productive role of capitalist management observable in the fi eld of production (as was suggested in Chapter 2) and on the other hand, on the hypothesis that a similar process can be detected also in the fi eld of social control. In other words, if at the level of production we are witnessing the withering away of a ‘disciplinary’ capitalist organisation of the labour force – together with a dramatic crisis of the mechanisms of social regulation attached to it, especially the welfare state – it is possible to argue that also the strategies of social control are shifting to the ‘outside’ of the post-Fordist multitude, confi guring a ‘postdisciplinary order’.
