Reading Response: Postscript on the Societies of Control by Gilles Deleuze

For me, this was the most difficult of the readings this week. Difficult to understand, and also difficult because what I DID understand was, well, kind of grim. Indeed, having worked in marketing before, the line that describes how marketing has become the ‘soul’ of the corporation and that, “We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world,” hit me like a sack of bricks. This has felt especially evident in the past several years, as companies created ad campaigns to show their support for various social movements, to prove that they have a ‘soul,’ in other words. It always feels kind of grimy, because in my mind it it seems that there is always someone at the company that has tactfully thought about how this ad campaign, how showing their soul might help increase their revenue. Such is one of the many curses of capitalism, indeed, it is a form of control: “…capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.”

Like I said, kind of depressing to see it laid out this way, though perhaps subconsciously I knew this or at least had a hint of it.