The following article is a very rough draft of something that may turn into an actual article, but I decided to go ahead and prematurely publish it anyway in an attempt to get some feedback.

The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, in which capitalism “con­stantly overcom[es] its own limitations,” has shown itself to be accurate in describing capitalism’s adaptation to and emergence of an information society.

Their concepts of the “rhizome” and the “tree” have even been popularized in variety of popular books on network theory. Notable among these is a book that, although may not reference Deleuze and Guattari directly, surely makes use of similar concepts. Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, in their book The Starfish And the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, under the influence of thinkers in the field of management, perhaps unwittingly, tout the advantages of rhizome-tree-hybrid business organizations. The point of this is not to get into a chicken or the egg debate, but to show that Deleuze and Guattari’s toolbox of theories and strategies, like capitalism itself, can be used in a variety of contexts.

Deleuze’s concept of a control society is based on the strategies of constant communication and extracting market research from self-organizing groups. It is no wonder then that those in the field of marketing are familiar with concept of decentralized organization. Business strategists would have to be aware of these concepts, as they are features of capitalism that Deleuze noticed the emergence of almost twenty years ago. “Viral marketing” and “crowdsourcing” are the new buzzwords for the profiteering of decentralization.

Web 2.0 almost seems to go beyond societies of control, by not only creating a system in which marketing data can constantly be gathered by a decentralized group of consumers, but by turning that activity into a game. Public self-expression becomes less about exercising free speech and more about creating valuable data. With “microblogging,” we willingly publicize our movements in self-generated surveillance. The “challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions” that Deleuze locates within the corporate work environment have dissolved even further into our leisure time, which follows from the permeation of the barriers between work-time, education-time, and leisure time that he describes. Furthermore, these games and jokes are more and more culled from the decentralized culture of the internet and placed into a system in which ads can be customized and delivered to target markets on both group and individual levels.

These concepts are not necessarily restricted to the private sector. If the increasing diffusion of these strategies is immanent, then it should not surprise us that they have been picked up by the state. Military transformation and Network-centric warfare have been attempted in the U.S. after network theory caught on in the RAND Institute and the Department of Defense. Furthermore, Israeli military strategists have directly referenced Deleuze and Guattari (as well as Debord) as an influence. Slavoj Zizek has picked up on this,

So what does it follow from all this? Not, of course, the nonsensical accusation of Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of militaristic colonization - but the conclusion that the conceptual machine articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, far from being simply “subversive,” also fits the (military, economic, and ideologico-political) operational mode of today’s capitalism. - How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing?

In another article, Zizek rejects the idea that Deleuze should be held accountable for the spread of Deleuzianism as a philosophical justification for the 21st century style of capitalism.

At this point, one should introduce the difference between the works of Deleuze himself and the popular field of Deleuzianism: which of the two is the true target of our critique? The primary target is the popular version of “Deleuzianism” because it goes without saying that Deleuze’s thought is ridiculously simplified in its popular acceptance, so that it is easy to play the game of “things are much more complex in Deleuze”; however, if there is something to be learned from the history of thought, from Christianity to Marx and Heidegger, it is that the roots of misappropriations are to be sought in the “original” thinker himself.

What is now emerging is an even tighter marriage of capitalism, the state, and decentralized control, as Rod Beckstrom, co-author of The Starfish and the Spider has been touched by the Department of Homeland Security to head its cyber-security interagency group. The rhetoric behind this move suggests that cyberterrorism is a real threat, just as real as physical terrorism.

This collaboration marks an erasure of boundaries that has not yet been seen in control society. To make a rough periodization, the 20th century saw the formation of a military-industrial complex, the dangers of which we have already seen, and the 21st century features the birth of a security-information complex, the outcome of which we can barely imagine. As Brafman and Beckstrom, themselves, aptly write, “The rules of the game have changed.”

Online Bibliography

Postscript on the Societies of Control

Control and Becoming: Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri

The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord and the Israeli Defense Force

The Ongoing “Soft Revolution”

Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule

The Starfish and the Spider

Cyber risk ‘equals 9/11 impact’

New Interagency Group to Oversee Cyberattack Defense

Can small businesses help win the war?

Who trumps bin Laden as a cyberthreat? Look in the mirror