Post-script on control societies

Abstract

The central thesis in this article says that the disciplinary “confinement centers” described by Foucault: “jail, hospital, factory, school, family, are going trough a generalized crisis”. We are living the decline of the “disciplinary society”, which was “the succesor of the sovereign societies”, whose ends and functions were completely different. These emerged on the XVII y XVIII centuries, until the half part of the XXth., and were the main sinterest of Foucault’s investigations. The current society is denominated as “control society”, control which is exercized fluedly on open spaces, in a deterritorialized manner, through the psycho-pharmaceutics, television adiction, marketing, private debt and consume, among other modalities. What is essential to them are the fluctuating and interchangeable figures as those who represent value of one currency expressed on another, the perpetuum surfing which substitutes slow and strategic-like sports such as boxing. The factories are replaced by the enterprises, which are ductileand changeable formations, the simple machines for computarized systems of producton and control. The in-dividuality is substituted by external “dividualities”, informatizade and informatizables,  who travel in a virtual space.