Joshua J. Kurz, (Dis)locating Control: Transmigration, Precarity and the Governmentality of Control, Behemoth: A Journal on Civilization, Volume 5, Issue 1, Pages 30–51, June 2012
https://dx.doi.org/10.1515/behemoth.2012.004
Abstract
In this essay, the author takes up William Walters’ (2006) incitement to theorize transmigration through the Deleuzian concept of control. The importance of mechanisms, or technologies, that modulate population flows are explored by paying close attention to novel strategies of migration policing and securitization in the United States, the European Union, Australia, and North Africa. These technologies no longer take the border as their “proper” site, but instead rely on processes of internalization, externalization, and excision to produce conditions of generalized precariousness. The author argues that these technologies of control resist simple categorization as biopolitics, and instead are more fruitfully considered through the lens of control societies and precarity. Ultimately, the inclusion/exclusion dialectic is put under erasure.
The author discusses the spatiality or territoriality of biopolitics as reliant upon enclosure, whereas control relies upon open/smooth space.
Keywords: transmigration, precarity, control, biopolitics, borders, migration, Foucault, Deleuze, topological borders
Foucault News 
I am taking very seriously Foucault’s warning that surveillance and confinement, the Panopticaon, is our greatest danger. As he has said the resistance needs to focus on the place of greatest danger. As an older woman, 78, I am becoming very aware of surveillance of the elderly, the way they are subtly, without their awareness, being marginalized, being carefully confined. Once you “see” the Foucauldian Grid you also begin to “feel” it, not only in the ways you already know it, but in ways that are to come for you in the future.
One major example is driving. Nader warned us about compulsory car insurance and how it would play out. It was sold on the basis of accidents with uninsured people causing the accident, forcing them to get insurance to protect US! And the fund set aside for uninsured motorists causing accidents after compulsory insurance was law. I am now seeing it play out in my own life. My car insurance has doubled this year. It will make it impossible for me to have it. This will make it impossible for me to drive. That will have the consequence of confining me more. I am not sure how much wiggle room I will have to deal with this. I am healthy. I can bike, but long distances will be impossible for me unless I go “bareback”. If caught penalties are severe. A catch-22 all to protect me from uninsured motorists hitting me and having no insurance. “There is no outside.”
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