Machinic Operations and the Specter of Universalism
The universal no longer proclaims itself as given; it operates as the only conceivable horizon, its contingency sutured beneath layers of algorithmic inevitability, its precarity woven into the logic of its reinforcement. What appears as dissolution is but a recalibration; what manifests as fracture is merely a reintegration at a higher resolution. Universality does not collapse under crisis—it metabolizes it.
The illusion of self-evidence is not eroded by catastrophe but rather reconstituted through the negative space left in its wake. It is not that history repeats, but that repetition itself has become history as a recursive machine wherein the breakdown of order is indistinguishable from its reproduction, where even entropy is scripted into the architecture of control.
The fiction of agency collapses. Recursion does not require intentionality. It does not legislate, does not declare; it emerges as the logic of a system that no longer needs to coerce when it can calibrate. The post-disciplinary age is not one of domination but of automated acquiescence—not of subjugation but of seamless subordination. The subject is neither ruled nor repressed but preconfigured in advance, its range of motion already computed, its negations already accounted for, absorbed, and repurposed. The dialectic is suspended in a permanent state of capture—antagonism processed as raw material for further stabilization.
If the panopticon was the primitive diagram of modern control, today’s cybernetic apparatuses function as an omnidirectional recursion—an infrastructure whose dominance lies precisely in its indeterminacy, its ability to dissolve into the molecular grain of subjectivity. Whereas Bentham’s model of surveillance depended on the spectacle of visibility, the contemporary system perfects itself by vanishing. Algorithmic governance, machinic finance, and real-time behavioral modeling do not merely predict action; they precondition it, enclosing thought within the parameters of statistical probability. Late capitalism has no need for justification, no need for legitimacy—it operates without the pretense of consent.
The market does not ask; it configures. Capital no longer represents; it functions. The machine is neither novel nor anomalous—it is the culmination of a centuries-long genealogy of capital and control. In the 19th century, Marx diagnosed capitalism’s viral tendency to dissolve every prior order to ensure that “all that is solid melts into air.” The market universalized itself, enforcing “universal interdependence of nations,” consuming the world and refashioning it in its image. Expansion was never purely economic—it required a corresponding infrastructure of control. As Foucault’s genealogies of power reveal, the rise of industrial capitalism necessitated an architecture of discipline: the factory, the school, the prison—all engines of normalization, designed to produce bodies that functioned, obeyed, and conformed. Capitalism does not stagnate; its control mechanisms evolve. By the late 20th century, Deleuze had already sounded the alarm: the disciplinary enclosures were disintegrating, giving way to societies of control, where power no longer needed to confine when it could modulate. The modern enclosure—the cell, the classroom, the workstation—dissolved into an open-ended, mobile matrix of financial abstractions, algorithmic evaluations, and predictive assessments. Control ceased to be spatial and became temporal, intervening before an act could be committed, before a decision could be made, before thought itself could diverge from what had already been accounted.
Late capitalism extends this diagram of control into diffuse, cybernetic architectures—monitored not by watchtowers but by self-regulating circuits of surveillance, behavioral prediction, and algorithmic filtration. The market promises liberation from old feudal bonds even as it imposes new determinations. Every expansion of individual “freedom” is immediately converted into data, processed, and fed back into a system that reconfigures the subject’s range of possible action. In Hegelian terms, the universal (capital’s global network) realizes itself only by absorbing and negating particulars. Every contradiction is suspended, every rupture preemptively neutralized. The subject is both emancipated and enclosed, liberated and categorized, atomized and subsumed.
Foucault was clear: “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” Today, power is not merely everywhere—it is everything. It is woven into the digital, financial, and logistical networks that mediate existence, governing through the modulation of probabilities, incentives, and constraints. The market does not compel; it arranges. The subject does not resist; it recalibrates. Nevertheless, this control is not a command issued from above—it is a cybernetic loop, a self-replicating sequence of incentives, deterrents, and normativities. Individuals are not ruled; they are processed.
Far from signifying failure, contradiction is the engine of late-capitalist persistence. Hegel reminds us: “Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality.” Nevertheless, late capitalism has learned not to resolve contradictions but to weaponize them. Every crisis, every rupture, every insurrection becomes an opportunity for further refinement, further stabilization, further expansion. Capital does not fear crisis; it requires it. It thrives on it. It ensures its survival not by eliminating turbulence but by rendering it operational, by incorporating it into its recursive loops.
Marx and Engels observed that bourgeois society perpetually generates crises of overproduction that would appear absurd in earlier eras—society is thrown into chaos “because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” Crisis, however, is not a failure; it is a function. The system does not merely recover from collapse—it metabolizes it as part of its self-correcting mechanism. Boom and bust cycles, financial crashes, “creative destruction”—these are not anomalies; they are necessary recalibrations, ensuring the metastable equilibrium of capital’s feedback loops. The recursive system does not merely survive crisis—it demands it.
Gilles Deleuze’s insight into the “societies of control” is crucial here: “In the disciplinary societies, one was always starting again... In the societies of control, one is never finished with anything.” Education, work, leisure, identity—everything is subject to continuous monitoring and recalibration.
Capital has learned to metabolize its data: consumer preferences, dissenting opinions, subcultural resistances—each is instantly processed, mapped, and re-integrated into the circuits of production and marketing. Nothing escapes capture. No act, no thought, and no deviation remain external to the system. Control is recursive. It adapts to every feedback, tightening or loosening its grip to ensure equilibrium. The spectacle of surveillance—ubiquitous CCTV cameras, data-mining algorithms, social credit scores—does not merely watch; it normalizes. The observer is no longer external; it is internalized. The system does not discipline; it conditions. The subject does not obey; it conforms. Resistance is neither crushed nor eliminated; it is rebranded, commodified, and reintroduced as an aesthetic. The dialectic flickers: a contradiction so violently sustained that it appears motionless, a zoetropic system so recursive that it becomes indistinguishable from the world itself. The subject no longer stands in opposition to capital because the subject is capital—optimized, tracked, predicted, and modulated. The last illusion to fall is that of negation itself. Late capitalism has no enemies; it has only inputs. Every opposition is data. Every revolt is a variable. Every insurrection is another function in the recursive algorithm of control. The system does not suppress its antagonists—it runs on them.
Deleuze’s concise yet prescient text “Postscript on the Societies of Control” amplifies Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary enclosures—prisons, schools, factories—by suggesting that these sites of confinement have mutated into open-ended circuits of data extraction and feedback. Whereas disciplinary power aimed to train subjects, control power modulates them, producing a fluid continuum of surveillance and regulation. The upshot is the emergence of a new universal: not the Enlightenment-era universal anchored in Reason or divine logos, but an immanent one forged in real time by predictive analytics, biometric databases, and logistical infrastructure. In sociological terms, this universal is operational: it exists only insofar as it can be computed, optimized, and constantly updated.
Central to this operational universality is a latticework of devices and platforms—from cloud computing architectures and predictive policing algorithms to high-frequency trading software—whose technical operations function as the hidden scaffolding of power. Borrowing from Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of “machinic enslavement,” We can see that subjects become node-like participants in networks designed to capture and repurpose their behaviors, desires, and affects. This infrastructural substrate claims neutrality yet encodes historically specific logics: the commodification of labor, the extraction of surplus value, and the normalization of data-driven forms of life. When these assemblages falter, whether through hardware malfunctions or crises of legitimacy, the partiality of this so-called universal reveals itself as a precarious patchwork rather than an ahistorical absolute.