PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Contemporary society can be described as a “control society” and the example of legal algorithms is a particularly good illustration of this. This thesis has the ring of a sequel to Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” I will draw on another aspect of Deleuze’s control society in order to interpret this diagnosis differently. He speaks of a “crisis of the institutions” that accompanies the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination – the control society. The reference to something scattered allows to specify control society with René Marcic as the increase of controllers as well as of controlled. This would outline the first part of the revision of the control society to be proposed here. Beyond this expansion of the spectrum of control, the example of a legal algorithm – the Public Safety Assessment (PSA) – shows that not only the number of controllers and controlled is increasing, but also that controlling is becoming reflexive. Not leaving others (persons, processes, things, etc.) to themselves has become a controlled operation. These two aspects characterize the revision of the control society proposed here.