Society of Control: What Deleuze Saw Coming After Foucault’s Panopticon

Last updated: October 19, 2026

A society of control, in Gilles Deleuze’s sense, is a society that no longer needs to lock people up in order to shape them, because it can track, score and adjust them continuously wherever they are. Deleuze set out the idea in a short essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, first published in L’Autre Journal in May 1990 and translated in the journal October in 1992 on pages 3 to 7, as the Purdue Deleuze archive records. His claim was that the “disciplinary societies” described by Michel Foucault, built around prisons, schools, factories and barracks, were giving way to something more flexible and harder to see.

The meme puts the classic “they don’t know” party loner in the guard tower of a panopticon, smugly watching the prisoners who have no idea they are being observed. As a joke about Foucault it gets one thing exactly wrong, and that mistake is the best way into Deleuze.

The Prisoners Were Supposed to Know

In Foucault’s account of the panopticon, the prisoners know they might be watched at any moment, and that knowledge is what makes the design work. A prisoner who does not know he is visible has no reason to start policing himself.

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was a circular prison with a central tower from which a single guard could see into every cell without being seen. Foucault took it as the diagram of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish (1975). In Alan Sheridan’s translation of the chapter “Panopticism”, the major effect of the design is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility”. The guard does not even have to be in the tower. The inmate who knows he may be observed starts watching himself, and, in Foucault’s phrase, “becomes the principle of his own subjection”. Schools with timetables and exams, factories with clocks and foremen, barracks with drills: Foucault saw the same logic of visible, measured, enclosed bodies across the institutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We have a separate post on the panopticon and what it explains about surveillance today.

So the meme’s guard has misunderstood his own job. His prisoners dancing in the yard, unaware of being watched, are exactly the prisoners the panopticon cannot discipline. What makes the meme more interesting than a mistake is that Deleuze describes a world in which it matters much less whether the prisoners feel watched, because power works through access, scores and debt rather than through a gaze from a tower.

Five Pages, Three Sections, One Monster

Deleuze’s postscript argues that disciplinary society was already passing when Foucault described it, something Foucault himself recognised, and that a new form of power was replacing it.

The essay opens by noting that Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with their height at the beginning of the twentieth. Deleuze then announces “a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure”: prison, hospital, factory, school and family. Everyone talks about reforming these institutions, he says, but the reforms are a way of managing their slow death while new forces arrive. He borrowed the name from a novelist. “Control”, Deleuze writes, is the name William Burroughs proposed for “the new monster”, one that, according to Deleuze, Foucault recognised as our immediate future. The essay is short, written in three compressed sections titled “Historical”, “Logic” and “Program”, and it reads more like a sketch than a finished argument. That compression probably helps it travel: you can lift a single term out of it without signing up for the rest of Deleuze.

From the Mould to the Self-Deforming Cast

The core difference between a disciplinary society and a society of control is the difference between a fixed mould and a cast that keeps changing shape. Discipline hands you from one closed institution to the next, while control keeps tracking you as you move between them.

Deleuze puts it in a single contrast: “Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation”, like a self-deforming cast that changes from one moment to the next. In the disciplinary model, you pass from the family to the school, from the school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory, and each time you start again under new rules and a new supervisor. In a society of control, Deleuze writes, “one is never finished with anything”. The corporation, the education system and the armed services become stations in a single continuous process. His examples describe trends already under way in 1990: “perpetual training tends to replace the school”, continuous control replaces the exam, and the principle of “salary according to merit” spreads even into state education, turning colleagues into competitors in a permanent contest. Anyone who has completed a mandatory online course, collected certificates for a professional profile, or sat through a quarterly performance review will recognise the shape, even if Deleuze never saw any of those particular tools.

You Are Not an Individual Anymore, You Are a Data Set

The essay’s best-known term is “dividual”, a word Deleuze had already used in his book on cinema and gives a new, political sense here. In a society of control, people are treated less as whole individuals and more as bundles of data that can be split, sorted and recombined.

The sentence is short: “Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’” and masses have become “samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’” Discipline had two poles, the signature that identifies a person and the number that marks their place in a mass. Control dissolves both into codes that grant or deny access. Deleuze illustrates this with a thought experiment he credits to Félix Guattari: a city where you can leave your flat, your street and your neighbourhood thanks to an electronic card that opens a barrier, but where the same card might be refused on a certain day or between certain hours. What matters, Deleuze comments, is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position.

Read in 2026, the passage sounds less like science fiction than like a description of a building pass, a transit app or a credit check. That resemblance is our reading, not his prophecy. Deleuze had no transit apps in mind, only the logic of a gate that asks a computer whether you, today, at this hour, may pass.

The Corporation Is a Gas, and You Are in Debt

For Deleuze, the corporation replaces the factory, marketing becomes the instrument of control, and the typical subject is someone in debt rather than someone locked up.

The factory, in his description, treated workers as a single body: the boss could watch each element, and the union could mobilise them all together. The corporation works differently. Deleuze calls it “a spirit, a gas”, adjusting each salary through challenges, contests and what he calls “highly comic group sessions”, which set each worker against the others. He adds that we are now taught corporations have a soul, “the most terrifying news in the world”, and that marketing, rendered in the October translation as “the operation of markets”, has become the instrument of social control. The summary line is one of the sharpest in the essay: “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”

Deleuze immediately adds a qualification that is easy to skip. Capitalism, he writes, has kept three-quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, “too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement”, and control will have to deal with them through other means, including the explosion of shanty towns and ghettos. So the comfortable are managed through debt and access codes, while the rest, too many to lock up, are handled at borders and in shanty towns and ghettos.

The Inbox That Follows You on Holiday

Remote work is a useful test of Deleuze’s ideas. It promised freedom from the office, and for many people it also brought a new kind of availability.

In disciplinary terms, the office is an enclosure: you arrive at nine, you are supervised, you leave at five, and when you leave you are done. In Deleuze’s terms, the laptop and the phone make you “never finished with anything”. No one forces you to answer emails on the train or on the beach, which is exactly why the comparison with Foucault is instructive. Bentham’s tower needed the inmate to feel watched; your inbox gets the same result from the vague sense that you might be falling behind. Deleuze did not write about email, but the framework fits. Whether remote work on balance increases or reduces freedom is an empirical question that depends on the job, the employer and the person. Deleuze’s terms at least stop you from mistaking a missing office for a missing boss.

Was Deleuze Right?

Partly, yes: much of the tracking, scoring and access control he described is now routine. But discipline did not go away, and the essay predicts a logic, not particular gadgets.

The strongest case for the essay is how much later work it anticipated. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) analyses business models built on predicting and shaping behaviour from data, which is close to what Deleuze meant by the market as an instrument of control, although Zuboff builds her own framework rather than his. The objections are just as obvious. Prisons, schools and factories still exist, and disciplinary and control mechanisms run side by side in a way the postscript’s language of replacement tends to understate. And a five-page postscript cannot settle how these mechanisms interact in a particular country or sector, which is work for sociologists, historians and economists rather than for a philosopher’s notebook. For notes written more than a year before Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web software outside CERN in August 1991, the terms have aged well, even if nobody can test them line by line.

No Need to Fear or Hope

Deleuze ends the postscript with a call to look for weapons, which is an odd thing to write if you think the system is closed.

The line usually quoted from it is “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Deleuze means that each regime of power has its own liberations and its own constraints. His own example is the hospital in crisis: neighbourhood clinics, hospices and day care could at first express new freedom, but could also become part of mechanisms of control “equal to the harshest of confinements”. In his last paragraph he observes that many young people “strangely boast of being ‘motivated’” and keep asking for apprenticeships and permanent training, and that it is up to them to discover what they are being made to serve.

Read that way, the postscript works as a checklist: where am I being scored, who can switch my access off, and where is debt doing the work that walls used to do? The meme’s prisoners are dancing because they think no one is watching. The postscript’s advice to them is closer to its last line on young people: find out what the party is being made to serve.

For the other half of this story, read The Modern Panopticon: How Foucault’s Prison Theory Explains Today’s Surveillance Society.