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.

Keywords:

• Control society
• empire
• education
• Deleuze

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Greg Thompson

Greg Thompson is Associate Professor of Education Research at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Prior to entering academia he spent 13 years as a high school teacher in Western Australia. Thompson’s research focuses on educational theory, education policy, and the philosophy/sociology of education assessment, accountability and measurement with a particular emphasis on large-scale testing. Recent books include The Global Education Race: Taking the Measure of PISA and International Testing (Brush Education), National Testing in Schools: An Australian Assessment (Routledge) and The Education Assemblage (Routledge).