Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security

From Radical Philosophy :

by Maurizio Lazzarato

According to Michel Foucault, for some time we have been leaving disciplinary societies in order to enter into societies of security that, unlike the former, 'tolerate a whole host of behaviours that are different, varied, or even deviant and antagonistic toward one another'.1 These societies lead us beyond disciplines, because they put in place policies regarding the government of conducts that are exercised through the management of heterogeneities and the 'optimization of systems of differences' – that is, through the differential administration of inequalities (disparities in situation, income, status, knowledge, and so on).

Again according to Foucault, in societies of security the function of liberal policies regarding the government of conducts is 'to produce, instigate and enhance freedoms', 'to introduce a surplus of freedom', but to do so 'through a surplus of control and intervention'. The government of conducts, Foucault says, 'produces freedom, but, in the same gesture, implies that limitations, controls, and coercions are set in place'. Following Félix Guattari, we can make these statements more precise. While contemporary capitalism produces a 'generalized control, it is nevertheless forced to preserve a minimum of degrees of freedom, creativity, and inventiveness in the domain of the sciences, technologies and the arts, without which the system would collapse in a kind of entropic inertia'.2 Just like the production of disparities or inequalities, the production of freedom is differential. Depending on the situations, activities, social groups and balance of forces at stake, there will be what Guattari defines as absolutely heterogeneous 'coefficients of freedom'. The government of conducts will then be exercised through a modulation of coefficients of heterogeneity and coefficients of freedom.

In order to grasp these modalities of the government of contemporary capitalism, it is perhaps useful to analyse what modernity regarded as the very paradigm of freedom, heterogeneity, difference and deviance: art and the artist. To the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of security there corresponds a transformation in artistic practices and techniques, in the conception and function of art, artists and publics, in the relationship that the latter entertain with society, the economy and politics. In order to analyse this passage we will make use of Jacques Rancière's 'aesthetic regime of the arts' – which in my view makes perfectly explicit what we no longer are – alongside the work of Marcel Duchamp, and freely interpret a novella by Kafka, which will allow us to grasp what we are in the process of becoming.

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