TELEPHONIC INTERVENTIONS IN A SMARTPHONE-CENTRIC HISTORY OF DELEUZE'S CONTROL SOCIETY

Abstract

Discussions on Deleuze’s concept of the Control Society overlook the fact that smartphones, not computers, have become the defining technology of the 21st century. That scholarship has understood smartphone control in terms of its computing elements underscores the paucity of understanding for the smartphone as a phone. Retracing the history of control, this essay resuscitates the figure of the smartphone that has thus far been overlooked in studies of the contemporary 21st century control society. In the process, I argue that the smartphone is in fact central to the rise of the control society. In particular, the phonic aspect of the smartphone succeeds where the personal computer had failed; I demonstrate that it is through the figure of the phone that the computer, the source of control, is brought into direct contact with individuals. The phonic elements of the smartphone enable an intense execution of modulating and psychological control, producing an alienated, isolated subjectivity Deleuze terms the “dividual,” the subject of the control society. However, the smartphone preserves the telephonic function that potentially suspends the conditions of isolating control, gesturing towards a telecommunicative solidarity that is founded upon an ethics of distance. This essay thus argues that the phone in the smartphone is at once the enabler of control, as well as its limit. Through the telephone, a resistive politics of solidarity-without-community can be articulated in response to the regime of control.