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

Last updated: November 3, 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.

Disciplinary Society vs Society of Control

The quickest way to understand Deleuze’s essay is to put his two models side by side. The table summarises the contrasts he draws in the Postscript, using his own examples where possible. Read it from top to bottom and you have the essay in miniature.

The deepest difference is about time and space. Discipline, as Foucault described it, moulds people inside enclosed institutions, one after another: family, school, army, factory, sometimes hospital or prison. Each has a beginning and an end. Control, Deleuze argued, works like a modulation that never stops. You are never finished with anything, he writes; the corporation, the training programme and the service relationship are, in his image, metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation.

Deleuze did not present this as a correction of Foucault but as a continuation. In the Postscript he notes that Foucault himself knew how short-lived the disciplinary model was, and that it had already succeeded an older model of sovereignty, in which power meant taxing and taking life rather than organising it. Foucault’s late lectures on security and the government of populations already point in Deleuze’s direction. The difference is one of emphasis: Foucault spent most of his energy on the history of enclosure, Deleuze on what comes after it.

Everyday examples are easy to find once you look. A school report card is disciplinary; a learning app that tracks your streak every day and adjusts its exercises is control. A factory clock-in is disciplinary; a delivery app that rates each trip and changes your access to work accordingly is control. A prison is disciplinary; an electronic ankle tag that lets a person live at home while every movement is recorded is control. Deleuze himself borrowed an image from Guattari: a city in which an electronic card lets you leave your apartment, your street and your neighbourhood by raising a barrier, but which could just as easily be rejected on a given day. What matters, he wrote, is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position, licit or illicit, and effects a universal modulation.

Deleuze even changed the sporting metaphor. The old sports, he noted, were about energy and resistance, the athlete against a fixed course. The new ones, like surfing, are about inserting yourself into an existing wave, riding a movement that you do not control. It is a precise image for life inside a stream of notifications, metrics and incentives. His famous closing animal sums it up: the coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.

A more recent heir of the argument is Byung-Chul Han, who calls the present form of power psychopolitics. In his account, today’s control does not even need to modulate people from outside, because they optimise, track and expose themselves voluntarily in the name of freedom and self-improvement. Han’s view is darker than Deleuze’s in one respect: where Deleuze still looked for new weapons, Han suspects that the exhausted achievement subject has little energy left for resistance. We discuss his diagnosis in Byung-Chul Han and the Burnout Society.

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.

Who Was Gilles Deleuze?

Gilles Deleuze (1925 to 1995) was one of the most original and difficult French philosophers of the twentieth century. He began as a historian of philosophy, writing unusual studies of Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson and Spinoza, and then developed his own philosophy in Difference and Repetition (1968), which tries to think difference not as a gap between identical things but as something primary. For most of his career he taught at the experimental university of Vincennes, later Paris VIII, founded after the upheavals of May 1968.

His best-known works were written with the psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus (1972) attacked psychoanalysis and capitalism together, describing desire as a productive force rather than a lack. A Thousand Plateaus (1980) introduced the image of the rhizome, a root system without centre or hierarchy, which later became a favourite metaphor for the internet itself. Both books are famously hard to read, and both remain heavily cited across the humanities.

He also wrote two influential books on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), and a celebrated short study of Spinoza, whose philosophy of bodies, affects and powers runs quietly through the Postscript. For Deleuze, the question was never only what power forbids, but what bodies can do and how their capacities are captured or set free.

Deleuze and Foucault were close friends and allies for years. Reviewing two of Deleuze’s books in 1970, Foucault wrote that perhaps one day this century would be known as Deleuzian, a line usually quoted with the caveat that Deleuze himself took it as a friendly joke. In the late 1970s the two drifted apart, partly over political disagreements and partly, as Deleuze later explained, over philosophical differences about desire and pleasure. The Postscript of 1990, written six years after Foucault’s death, can be read as a last conversation with him: an extension of his analysis to a world he did not live to see.

In their last joint book, What Is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Guattari defined philosophy as the art of creating concepts. The Postscript is a small example of that art. In five pages Deleuze coined or sharpened concepts, the dividual, modulation, the society of control, that readers have been using for three decades to describe credit scores, recommendation algorithms and workplace analytics. Whatever one thinks of the rest of his work, few short texts in recent philosophy have travelled so far, or been quoted so often by people who have never read anything else he wrote.

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.