The Revenge of Insides against Outsides: (Re-)Historicising Societies of Control

The historicisation of Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ often rests upon a particular reading of the 1990s and the turn of the twenty-first century as a period of unfettered globalisation and the collapsing of boundaries, with Michel Hardt claiming, for instance, that societies of control entailed the end of ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’. This article re-historicises Deleuze’s ‘Postscript’ by situating it within an alternative history that was simultaneously emerging in the 1990s, one in which new insides and outsides were continually being created. New countries and territories sprung out of crumbling mega-states, border walls were erected across the Global North, and the rise of special economic zones equipped capital with extra-territorial and extra-legal spaces of accumulation. The article argues that societies of control never dispensed with insides and outsides, but, instead, insides and outsides have taken on different guises from older forms of sovereign power. Since the 2008 financial crisis, and especially in the last decade, insides and outsides have returned to dominate the political imagination, especially with the rise of anti-immigrant populisms and the return of competitive geopolitics. The article finishes by arguing that the right has been much more effective than the left in reacting to this alternative historical trajectory, and, in doing so, has enabled insides to take revenge on outsides.