Control

The digital computer: machine or metaphor? Examining both the technical and cultural aspects of computation, Franklin offers a masterful critique of control society, including cybernetics, digitality, capture, and management. From the research labs that appeared after World War II to contemporary films and games, the digital computer appears here not simply as the result of specific technical inventions but as the product of an entirely new way of thinking.

Alexander R. Galloway, author of The Interface Effect

Through a Jameson-inflected analysis of connections between aesthetic form and technical-informatic conditions of possibility across multiple genres, Control advances Deleuze and Guattari's work on societies of control, and really the whole historical movement from the psychological to the cybernetic. Provocatively and with great urgency, it demonstrates that the principles of control developed by cybernetics and information theory were not only fundamental to the development of capitalism but remain paradigmatic.

Jonathan Beller, Director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute; author of The Cinematic Mode of Production

Seb Franklin has set control loose—onto literature, film, psychoanalysis, and Marx—to expose its imbricated logics far below and before the digital became known as such. This generative work completely upends the stale teleological, periodizing, and geographical assumptions driving contemporary theorizations of societies of control, opening up fascinating research agendas. It will surely become a definitive text, far beyond the usual suspects, for anyone thinking about aesthetics, capitalism, and power.

Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times