The Revenge of Insides: (Re-)Historicising Societies of Control - Neil Vallelly, University of Otago

Join the School of Humanities & Languages for a Critique Now occasional seminar with Neil Vallelly of the University of Otago.

The Revenge of Insides: (Re-)Historicising Societies of Control 
When Gilles Deleuze published his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ in French in 1990, translated into English two years later, he stood at the threshold of a new global order, one that was supposedly characterised by unfettered globalisation and the collapsing of boundaries. At the turn of the century, Micheal Hardt claimed, for instance, that societies of control entailed the end of ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’. This paper re-historicises Deleuze’s ‘Postscript’ by situating it within an alternative history that was simultaneously emerging in the 1990s, one in which new insides and outsides were continually in germ. New countries and territories sprung out of crumbling mega-states, thousands of miles of border walls were erected across the Global North, economic sanctions reinstated sharp hierarchies between nations, and the rise of special economic zones equipped capital with extra-territorial and extra-legal spaces of accumulation. I argue that societies of control never fully dispensed with insides and outsides, but instead, insides and outsides have taken on different guises from older forms of sovereign power. The paper finishes by arguing that the Right have been much more effective than the Left in reacting to this alternative historical trajectory, and in doing so, have enabled insides to take revenge on outsides within societies of control. 

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