Control argument and false freedom
Another guiding idea of the thesis, therefore, is the notion of control. It is important to understand that this control is linked to an idea of freedom, or of the illusion of freedom, held by the person being controlled. It is not coercive, but “has a feel of the free outdoors to it”. “Control is always more powerful when it is based on the freely given consent of a person,” the researcher says. Control does not mean that one person pulls the strings, and everybody else is a puppet. It is more abstract than that. It has to do with every one of us, it is inside us, throughout us, and constant, in our acceptance of a system, a ‘machine’ of which we are the agents, the vectors toward other individuals. So, it is a form of voluntary servitude. The interiorisation of such constraints by means of control, with an illusion of freedom, rules and reduces the field of its actions to possibilities that have already been previewed or put into a scenario.
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This ‘control argument’ thus leads to a very deterministic vision of the world. Everything that free individuals do according to their own desires is in reality nothing but the accomplishment of a desire that someone else, or the system, gave them. Desire becomes a fiction created by an entity which is not us. ‘Power as a narrative.’ Whatever individuals do, it has already been foreseen, and put into the context of a scenario by the society of control. Whatever individuals choose, a scenario is already there. The system is always several steps ahead of the individual parts. In describing capitalism in these terms, Boltanski and Chiapello wrote that “everything is always already ‘recuperated’ by the ‘system.’”(4) Even resistance and revolutions are foreseen and definitely serve the controlling system, which ‘recuperates’ them, that is, re-incorporates them into the system itself, and neutralises their ability to pose a threat. Freedom and autonomy are constitutive parts of this idea of control, but they are also illusory. Such a vision runs counter to conspiracy theories because the persons who ‘pull the strings’ also adopt a field of action that conforms to what the system expects from them. In some ways they are the persons over whom the most stringent control is exercised. Another important point is that this control, though it foresees resistance to itself, is total, and there is no way to get outside the control in order to escape it.
We can see easily enough, in the context of this control, how the analogy to an addiction to heroin could be worked out. The product does not have to appeal to the consumer in order to be consumed. The addict needs it, and so enters into a sort of acquiescence with his own instrument of control. Burroughs is “sensitive to all the processes that make us accomplices in our own enslavement,”(5) Claisse writes. Of course, drugs are still a metaphor for society. By pushing his reflection beyond his addiction Burroughs, like Deleuze after him along with other philosophers having dealt with the question, all see in the emergence of technologies of communication and information ideal instruments of control. For the writer, language is the most effective form of control. “The word is a virus,” he says. For Burroughs, “we have been poisoned by instructions that colonize our consciousness and use us as carriers to move from one body to another,” Claisse explains. “It has become impossible to think without a word. Silence is impossible. Imagination itself is impossible without words.”
Although this vision of the world appears to be desperately deterministic, although our freedom is only a fiction about someone else, already written for us, Burroughs offers points of attachment, points at which exteriority may be grasped in an effort to pull oneself free from the control, to be able to face it standing up. For this to happen, one must use and re-purpose the instruments it uses in order to unplug the scenarios already prepared for us.
