Editing Gilles Deleuze (section)

=== Values<!--'Control society', 'Society of control', 'Societies of control' and 'Socius (philosophy)' redirect here--> ===
{{redirect|Control society|the broader social-scientific concept|Social control}}
In ethics and politics Deleuze again echoes Spinoza, albeit in a sharply Nietzschean key. Following his rejection of any metaphysics based on identity, Deleuze criticizes the notion of an individual as an arresting or halting of differentiation (as the etymology of the word "individual" suggests{{clarify|how so? differentiation is not not dividing|date=February 2025}}). Guided by the [[Ethical naturalism|naturalistic ethics]] of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze instead seeks to understand individuals and their moralities as products of the organization of pre-individual desires and powers.<ref>{{Citation | title= Love's Lessons: Intimacy, Pedagogy and Political Community| first1= Timothy | last1= Laurie | first2= Hannah | last2= Stark | journal=[[Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities]] | volume= 22 | issue= 4 | pages= 69–79 | year= 2017 | url = https://www.academia.edu/35349930}}</ref> 

In the two volumes of ''[[Capitalism and Schizophrenia]]'', ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]'' (1972) and ''[[A Thousand Plateaus]]'' (1980), Deleuze and Guattari describe history as a congealing and regimentation of "[[desiring-production]]" (a concept combining features of [[Sigmund Freud|Freudian]] drives and [[Marxism|Marxist]] [[Labour economics|labor]]) into the modern individual (typically neurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society of continuous control), and [[capitalism]] (an anarchy domesticated into infantilizing commodification). Deleuze, following [[Karl Marx]], welcomes capitalism's destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating but inveighs against its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market.

The first part of ''Capitalism and Schizophrenia'' undertakes a [[Universal history (genre)|universal history]] and posits the existence of a separate '''socius'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> (the social body that takes credit for [[Production (economics)|production]]) for each [[mode of production]]: the earth for the [[tribe]], the body of the [[Despotism|despot]] for the [[empire]], and [[Capital (economics)|capital]] for [[capitalism]]."<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|title=Gilles Deleuze|url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/|encyclopedia=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|access-date=1 July 2018}}).</ref><ref>[[Daniel W. Smith (philosopher)|Daniel W. Smith]], Henry Somers-Hall (eds.), ''The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze'', Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 137.</ref>

In his 1990 essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" ("Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle"), Deleuze builds on Foucault's notion of the society of discipline to argue that society is undergoing a shift in structure and control. Where societies of discipline were characterized by discrete physical enclosures (such as schools, factories, prisons, office buildings, etc.), institutions and technologies introduced since World War II have dissolved the boundaries between these enclosures. As a result, social coercion and discipline have moved into the lives of individuals considered as "masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'." The mechanisms of modern '''societies of control'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> are described as continuous, following and tracking individuals throughout their existence via transaction records, mobile location tracking, and other [[personally identifiable information]].<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Deleuze|first1=Gilles|title=Postscript on the Societies of Control|journal= October|date=October 1992|volume=59|pages=3–7|jstor=778828}}</ref>

But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses with his ethical naturalism? Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or [[Immanence|immanent]]: to live well is to fully express one's power, to go to the limits of one's potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates people from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, established identities must be overturned and so become all that they can become—though exactly what cannot be known in advance. The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary, because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?"<ref>''Essays Critical and Clinical'', p. 135.</ref>