Postscript on the empire of control

Abstract

This paper maps Hardt and Negri’s use of Deleuze (and Guattari’s) philosophical commitment to the control society as a temporal phenomena in the context of education. Education is important because it is pushed and pulled by those vectors that Hardt and Negri see as central tensions in late capitalism: localism vs globalisation, discipline vs control, codes vs axioms, metrics vs expertise and so on. In Empire, Hardt and Negri represent Empire as a form of governance that responds to the passing from disciplinary societies to societies of control. The societies of control (and Foucault’s theorisation on biopower) are central to their concept of Empire defined “as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization” (p. 46). Empire, then, is a macropolitics that produces, or infiltrates, subjectivation as a means to affect the self within globalising and localising regimes. This paper takes up Hardt and Negri’s challenge in two areas. First concerns what appears to be the collapse of the ideal of publicness within public school systems. The second provocation concerns the digital, or presumptive, economy of online and adaptive learning systems.