Volume 28, Numbers 1-2

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This issue examines how control modulates conditions of permanent crisis, endless environmental degradation, and creative destruction making every aspect of society less habitable and more insufferable. From the increasing financialization of everyday life to the growing administration and automation of social processes, control has come to take on an expanding and expansive role in the contemporary world—one that is neither ontologized nor automated but rather engineered for polarization and the increasing transfer of wealth upwards. Still, whether the present cultural and political moment calls for a move beyond the conceits of Deleuze and other twentieth-century speculation on control is the central topic of this issue.

Focus Editor: Robin Truth Goodman & Aaron Jaffe

Contents

robin truth goodman

Control, Again: Further Thoughts From The Pandemic

Aaron Jaffe

Gestures of Control

aaron jaffe with cristina iuli

 “I Live in Dystopia”

frida beckman

The Paranoid Style in Postcritique

kenneth j. saltman

Salvational Super-Agents and Conspiratorial Secret Agents: Conspiracy, Theory, and Fantasies of Control

s. e. gontarski

The “Limits of Control”: Burroughs through Deleuze

marc kohlbry

Digital Index: Control Poetics in Die Maschine

jessica hurley

Infrastructure Beyond Control: Clowning the Nuclear Age

andrew culp

Control after Cybernetics: Governmentality as Navigation by Homeostasis and Chaos

cristina iuli

What Society? Invisible Machines, Control, and Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Society

michael f. miller

Platforms of Control: Social Media and the Limits of Theoretical Pluralism

rita raley

Out of Control