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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
Fight Club and the Deleuzian Century - Page 2
By Frankie Dintino
In other words, societies of discipline were marked by strict molds that regulated behavior, whereas in control societies there is no set mold and there is instead modulation, or a more amorphous exercise of power immanent to the social body (Hardt and Negri 23-24). The difference between these two societies is shown in the transition from the factory to the corporation, from wages to salaries and bonuses, from prison to house arrest. Everywhere boundaries overlap and stretch, where they were formerly rigid and separate. To further explain, Deleuze draws on an economic example, stating that:
Money, perhaps, best expresses the difference between the two kinds of society, since discipline was always related to molded currencies containing gold as a numerical standard, whereas control is based on floating exchange rates, modulations depending on a code setting sample percentages for various currencies. (Negotiations 180)
Thus, control societies are characterized by a lack of a real referential, for example, a gold standard. To give just one example of the lack of a real referential in the film, the main character lacks a proper name. This exaggerates the features of a control society in that he is not defined by a strict demarcation, designated by the proper name, but rather by a more diffuse network of signification, such as in his relationship to his job or to his furniture.
At the beginning of Fight Club , the viewer is introduced to the protagonist of the film: a 29-year-old disillusioned insurance worker, who by convention is referred to as "Jack." The film is set in a present day control society, with all the characteristics that implies. Jack narrates that for six months, he has been unable to sleep. His description of insomnia presents the first introduction of Deleuzian themes in the film, in that it bears a striking similarity to Deleuze's concept of simulacra. Jack notes that "with insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy, of a copy, of a copy" (Fincher). The simulacrum is that which, through the repeated act of copying, becomes different in kind from the original. More exactly, the simulacrum is a copy that lacks an original, or whose origin lies only in other copies. Disneyworld's " Main Street, USA " is a commonly invoked example: it is a copy of something that never really existed in the first place. In his book Difference and Repetition, Deleuze traces the history of philosophy ¾ a history which has asserted the primacy of identity over difference and the model over the copy since Plato's Sophist. To give a short summary, Deleuze believes that philosophy has had a habit of using essences to define identity. So, for instance, if you ask someone what a human is, they will often reply something like "a rational animal" (Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy 9). This is, in Deleuze's view, missing most of the picture. Deleuze believes that identities are mere effects of stronger underlying processes, and that these processes are best described by difference and multiplicities rather than identity and unities. The consequences of this line of thought are tantamount to (and in many ways similar to) Darwin 's ideas about the origin of species, because both Darwin's and Deleuze's theories abandon a static and essentialist view of nature for a more dynamic one. Along with the historical disregard for difference in-itself, Deleuze hopes to overturn the privileging of the model over the copy. Thus, he writes:
When the identity of things dissolves, being escapes to attain univocity, and begins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass . . . Everything has become simulacrum, for by simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is overturned. ( Difference and Repetition 67-69)