Tuesday, February 19, 2008

as usual, its more of a spectrum

Deleuze seems to frame a trend of the augmentation of the basic unit for social and life grouping as a negative. He thinks that we will move to a society in which even larger entities that understand even less will regulate our life experience. Humans, as ants, will now have to report back to an even larger, more all encompassing hive, as opposed to the more localized colonies we would have been a part of in “discipline based society.” However, the implications of this broadening of the major societal groups are not all negative. While it is scary to imagine a world like the one imagined by Guattari in which our access would be constantly controlled by remote electronic processes, these are unlikely results of a culture which demands more and more to choose its own interface to reality. The ability to personalize is more and more available with digital technology, and how we are governed by so called “controlling” bodies will also fall into this mold of personalization.

As to the idea that control would come to replace “interior” spaces such as the family and workplace, it seems that what is really occurring is more of a shift in the focus of our positions in the planet. While before we might have seen ourselves more as a part of a work group, etc. we can now much more clearly (with the internet, etc.) visualize ourselves as members of a much larger entity. The desire to be involved in mid-sized groups like schools, prisons, etc. will not disappear, we will just have the option to focus on our identity in the context in which we most desire to. Maybe with new weapons we can even become kings of our own colonies.

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