Abstract
Seb Franklin’s Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic is a welcome addition to a growing conversation on the contours of power and capital in contemporary digital, networked societies. Franklin’s contribution complicates the dominant periodization, in which the contemporary cultural logic arrives with the digital computer, bringing with it, variously, “the postindustrial society,” “the information economy,” late capitalism,” post-Fordism,” or “Empire” (p. xii). Franklin suggests that the logic of digitality can be studied separately from the devices of contemporary networked media. Digitality as a control logic, the “episteme” we are in now, Franklin argues, is a diffusion and intensification of elements already present in capital in the 19th century and later cultivated in cybernetic theories as these theories spread and are applied to social relations. The main contours of this episteme are enacted through “the nested concepts of biology, psychology, markets, and society as a self-regulating system premised on data processing” (p. 83). To understand the current state of power, Franklin claims, especially as it relates technical devices to social actors, analysis must take into account not only the material developments of technology—either in a historical materialist (Marxist) key or in the key of contemporary media theory—but also the diffusion of the logic of digitality into all areas of cultural production and activity.
Although there are many conceptual and critical components to this book, two main concepts undergird Franklin’s argument here: control and digitality, which appear as related but separate logics that subtend the current moment. The concept of control in this context comes from Deleuze’s (1997) oft-cited texts on “control societies,” which serve as conceptual starting points for Franklin’s argument. Control takes a different, but complementary, path out from Deleuze’s control than Galloway (2006) does in Protocol and Chun (2008) does in Control and Freedom. Readers familiar with those works will find a provocative addition to the conversation. Franklin defines control as “the logic under which social worlds are reconceptualized as information-processing systems” (p. xv). Franklin advances this theory through a complex argument, articulating the many different ways the “control episteme” is diffused and thus reshapes social relations in its image. Despite the complexity and the range of texts and objects he uses in building his argument, Franklin identifies a unifying thread in the control episteme—the remaking of human agents as data (or information) processing sites, either metaphorically or, at least in the narrative films he analyzes in the final chapter, literally.
Digitality, the other key concept in his theory, is the process of discretization through which the continuous flow of reality is made into representable, discrete elements that can be presented and processed as binary states—on or off. Digitality is the underlying logic on which the control episteme rests and is central to reshaping social agents, labor, and subjects as programmable information-processing sites.
As Franklin argues it, there are deep implications resulting from the diffusion of these logics, which to even glimpse, we must use an analytical and critical method that requires us to set aside two tendencies common in the study of the politics of digital culture now. First, as noted, is the tendency to resist a simple periodization that depends on, and is reducible to, changes in particular technologies, such as the computer. For Franklin, the computer is both an actual device in the current phase of production and a universal metaphor that has real consequences outside the active range of the actual device. Second, and perhaps more provocative, is a resistance to the materialist media theory that sets aside what media theorist Geert Lovink (2004) has called “vapor theory,” or accounts of media and technology that ignore the materiality of technical objects. Franklin argues in the introduction that as long as “vapor” thinking is pervasive in the world, scholars cannot effectively bracket analysis of underlying cultural logics in preferring materialist and technological analyses. Franklin attempts a different method, one that conducts “synthetic engagement with both vague metaphor and materialist analysis” (p. xxi). The many strengths of Control, though, rest with Franklin’s deft attention to the former, to the diffusion of technical metaphors into all areas of contemporary life. He is less engaged in the materialist analysis that he promises in the introduction, though this too appears to be a wise choice, as the book’s argument is already incredibly complex.
Structurally, the book consists of two parts and a total of five chapters, after an introduction. The first part, the book’s conceptual bulk, deals with “digitality without computers” in two chapters, the first on the precomputer roots of the logic of digitality and the second on the diffusion of that logic through the spread of the cybernetic worldview in the postwar period. The book’s second part traces “digitality as cultural logic” through the reading of a disparate array of cultural texts, including films and the writings of Samuel Beckett. The paragraphs that follow will present each chapter’s argument and chief contributions to wider debates while situating them in the course of the book’s argument. Though a short book, it is dense, and many of the argument’s subtler contours will not make it through to these brief capsules.
Chapter 1, “Control,” articulates the general logic of control as a conceptual intensification of tendencies already existing within capitalism prior to the advent of the digital computer. Digitality, in Franklin’s argument here, logically precedes the existence of actual computers. This chapter offers readings of Babbage and Marx that might interest scholars working on aspects of digital culture related to labor and value. Beginning with Deleuze’s notion of control, Franklin argues that control represents an “episteme,” echoing Foucault. Readers familiar with those two thinkers might wish for closer engagement with both of them, as there are aspects of Franklin’s argument that would be complicated by such contact. For instance, in resisting periodization, Franklin misses an opportunity to grapple with both Foucault’s insights into biopolitics, especially its 19th-century emergence (Franklin’s historical concern in this chapter), and with what Deleuze’s society of control has to say about mutations in power’s relationship to life. On Franklin’s take, it is capital’s segmentation of work extended out from the factory to all of “life” that distinguishes control in its particularity as a mutation of capitalism. Franklin finds an epistemic continuum between contemporary digital labor and Herman Hollerith’s 1890 efforts for the U.S. Census (Hollerith’s company would, after several mergers and name changes, become IBM).
In Chapter 2, “Cybernetics, or the Digitization of the Social,” Franklin maps the diffusion of cybernetic ideas into realms of human activity that early theorists like Norbert Wiener resisted. Franklin notes that one tension in the early development of cybernetics concerned whether cybernetic principles could be applied to general social relations, marshaling Wiener, Bateson, and even avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren as opponents of that expansion. Franklin’s claim here is that despite that tension, the “conceptual frames developed in relation to specific scientific, technological, and military practices can slip into nominally unrelated fields of social and political organization” (p. 40). The lengthiest of the book’s five chapters, this one maps that slippage through reading a wide range of documents from the postwar decades in which cybernetics emerged: from the tensions in cybernetic theory over whether the mathematical principles of game theory could apply to social phenomena, to a “computer–human metaphor” that comes to serve as the conceptual and “epistemic ground of control-era capitalism,” to a surprising thread connecting the cybernetic worldview and Lacan’s psychoanalytic philosophy of the subject. The last part, on Lacan, will interest readers concerned with his influence on Friedrich Kittler’s thinking. In the end, Franklin presents a compelling case for his argument that the cybernetic worldview holds society as a dynamic but ultimately mappable information-processing network, populated by discrete units, characterized by input and output processing. Under this worldview, there is little need for attending to what happens inside those units, and through the metaphor of the “black box,” the possibilities of a qualitative understanding of social actors are excluded.
Central to Chapter 3, “On Representation,” is an argument about the connections between the black-box metaphor and the worldview that subtends the control episteme. To Franklin, the diffusion of black-box thinking enacts and exemplifies a logic of exclusion that is necessary to the control episteme. Franklin argues for a resonance between the exclusion of the inside processes of data processors, black boxes, and the exclusion of whole swaths of the world’s human population from economic and cultural development. That is, an underlying logic that hinges on excluding the “superfluous” goings-on inside a black box subtends the episteme of control era capital in which whole populations of workers are excluded as themselves superfluous. To Franklin, what is or is not representable in control-era capital is not simply an aesthetic question but one that reveals logics of exclusion necessary to the functioning of control as an episteme—of things and processes whose functions exceed the representational schemata at work in digitality. Franklin argues, then, that methods of analysis need to include the “cultural” and “technical” layers if the logics of control and digitality are to be understood. The last two chapters in the book develop one version of that method.
In Chapter 4, “Text before Images, or the Logic of Digital Worlds,” Franklin reads Samuel Beckett alongside the contemporaneous emergence of computing in order to reveal “the cultural political terms that define the present age of control as ubiquitous cybernetic logic” (p. 118). In other words, lines of thinking that resonate with cybernetic logics are visible in Beckett’s work, which is itself not necessarily influenced by cybernetic theory but rather reveals logics that are pervasive and have diffused into all areas of cultural production. Informing his reading of Beckett is a reading of a rarely cited Deleuze essay on Beckett, in which he, Deleuze, identifies three “languages,” or three modes of circulating signs and affects. Readers of Deleuze who are not familiar with this text will find Franklin’s use and explication of it especially useful. Those unfamiliar with Deleuze will also find it accessible and a helpful frame for Franklin’s argument here.
In Chapter 5, “From Narrated Subject to Programmable Objects,” Franklin analyzes several films—the Bourne films and the 1974 film Parallax View—for the presence of the “programmable object” that replaces the subject of narrative texts. That is, instead of a subject of actions, whose behaviors are legible over the course of narrative time, the programmable subject–object executes a script. All of these films have a narrative of a programmable spy. In addition to interesting detours through the pseudoscience Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the work of psychoanalyst and cybernetician Lawrence Kubie, Franklin draws mainly on Kittler here, building on the initial deployments of Kittler’s work in earlier chapters. All of these elements well support Franklin’s argument that “the political unconscious of control turns out to be paradoxically centered on the reformulation of the unconscious as an information processor” (p. 162). Or, to simplify, the total extension of cybernetic logic to the subject and social actors extends the computer–human metaphor to its logical extreme, in which we can only conceptualize life in terms of programmable, discrete, digital actions that can be scripted, represented digitally, allowing us to black box away and exclude elements of the constant flow of reality that exceed such a system. This means, to Franklin, a pervasive transformation of exploitation that is not just the advent of the computer and its transformation of production. It is also, necessarily, the expanding web of control logic that increasingly forecloses even thinking otherwise.
Control thus offers a valuable contribution to conversations on the politics of networked digital culture, neoliberalism, and transnational capital. Readers who are more interested in arguments that avoid “vapor theory,” as Lovink (2004) has called it, might be persuaded by Franklin’s text that attention to the “cultural layer” of the control era will be useful for their own work. Most of all, readers interested in debates about the nature of power now will find substantive and novel arguments in Control.