Discipline and controlTor Lindstrand

Society of Discipline

Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)

Social control in modern, disciplinary societies rests on an extended array of enclosed, disciplinary spaces: clin-ics, prisons, schools, factories, workhouses, barracks, family

Panopticon as design principle

The power of visibility and gaze

Society of public institutions: pre-school, library, civic centre, museum, student housing, mental asylum

In society of discipline, public space is a mechanism of executing control over the individual by referring to the needs of the greater population.

Society of Control

Gilles Deleuze Postscript on Societies of Control (1988)

Shift away from physical, panoptic design to embedded technological sensors spread through society

Continues, interconnecting, automated surveillance operating on many scales. Body and globe. Public rela-tions, marketing, consumer behaviour.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again, in the societies of control one is never finished withanything.

The corporation, the educational system, the family be-ing metastable states coexisting like a universal system of deformation.

In society of control, public space is up for grabs or rather undergoing the same transformation as the fam-ily, the school, the barrack and the factory.

“Protect the new generation, do not let them grow up into emptiness and nothingness, to the avoidance of good hard work, to introspection and analyzation without deeds, or to mechanical actions without thought and consideration. Guide the young away from the harmful chase after outer things and the damaging passion for distraction.”

“The most important issue is to meet the need of the business world for skilled labour and improved communications. Another priority task is to promote and develop Stockholm as a good city with a high quality of life, so that the workers of the future will want to live and work here. In an increasingly internationalised world, a people-friendly urban environment, a rich variety of housing and workplaces, well-developed services and a broad range of culture and entertainment are becoming ever more important in gaining a competitive advantage. Through this, the attractive metropolis of Stockholm could become an even stronger brand.”

from the Comprehensive Plan for Stockholm, 2010

“…the neoliberal ideology do not want to seize the treasures of the existing world, but rather those of a possible world. They conquer neither political nor social spaces, but rather a dimension, specifically that of social and political creativity and of the subject of this creativity, the dimension of critique…Utopia did not simply collapse in 1989 with Real Socialism, nor did it vanish into thin air. We are not living, as it is often said, in a post-utopian world, but rather in a world, in which utopia now only occurs in its neoliberal translation.”

Boris Buden 2007

”If the goal of society was that we would all work as much as possible, we would be insane. The goal is to liberate man to be as creative as possible. Dance. Paint. Sing. Cook. Yes whatever you want. Freedom.”

Ernst Wigforss (S), Minister for Finance 1925-1949

“We first begin to understand and fight neoliberal hegemony with the certainty that a clear and normatively unambiguous distinction between the public and the private is no longer possible, or with the certainty that the real power of this hegemony lies specifically in the epochal blurring of a clear boundary between the public and the private and their normative attributes.”

Boris Buden 2007

“To speak of utopia is always to speak of the present intolerable arrangements.”

Pietr Kropotkin – the anarchist formerly known as Prince