Self-tracking, Power, and the Transition from Discipline to Control

This paper examines self-tracking as illustrative of the transition from Michel Foucault’s discipline society to the Gilles Deleuze’s control society. These two forms of societies both relate centrally to the organisation and (re)production of power relations, but they organise space and time in different ways. Self-tracking refers to data-driven practices of self-monitoring by digital devices, and the practice is here treated as an individual subjective activity, in which the self subjects itself with the help of a self-tracking device. Importantly, our claim is that this subjectivation takes place in the broader context of the control society and its increasingly data-driven character, in which traditional institutional discipline is being replaced by in principle unbounded regimes of (self-)control.