ENVIRONMENTS OF CONTROL IN THE FILMS OF MELANIE GILLIGAN

Since 2008, the artist Melanie Gilligan has been investigating how the techniques of machinic capitalism have intensified in the face of digital environments. This is expounded upon in three video works in particular. Crisis in the Credit System (2008) raises the question of how the market, controlled by an “invisible hand”, functions as the milieu of an economic subject. Popular Unrest (2010) shows how algorithms intervene in the reproduction of life and, in doing so, not only govern subjects, but interpret their infra- and supraindividual data traces as an environment. In The Common Sense (2014), society regulates itself through a decentralized but omnipresent affective network created by environmentally distributed technologies. In this paper I want to ask what kind of power-formation is sketched by Melanie Gilligan, especially since the focus of all three works is put on the control of environmental factors. 
In order to achieve this, I will follow what Foucault developed in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics. The power-formation he calls governmentality does not aim at the production of subjects (as disciplinary techniques), but rather at the control over their milieus or environments. I want to show that this is a central aspect of the power formation, that is implicated in the diegetic universes of Gilligan’s films. Additionally I discuss more recent contributions to the question of machinic control: Erich Hörl’s concept of environmentalization, Antointette Rouvroy’s term algorithmic governmentality, Gerald Raunig’s latest thoughts about the dividuum and machinic capitalism, as well as Maurizio Lazzarato who has taken up Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thoughts about asignifying semiotics. 
By successively working through Gilligan’s three works, I conclude that the way Gilligan conceives of different formations of control may be analyzed as allegories of historical and technological processes of governmentality, that reach from the 18th century’s milieu of the market to today’s digital milieus.


Introduction
Since 2008, the artist Melanie Gilligan has been investigating how the techniques of neoliberal governmentality have intensified in the face of digital environments. This is expounded upon in three video works in particular, all of which establish a critical stance within three different governmental paradigms of control. Crisis in the Credit System (2008) revolves around the financial markets as a specific system of control by alluding to the prevailing phantasm of a liberal market idyll in neoliberal thought. Popular Unrest (2010) features a central algorithmic data management system, and, in The Common Sense (2014), society regulates itself through a decentralized but omnipresent affective network created by environmentally distributed technologies. Gilligan conceived each work as a fictional miniseries, in several short episodes, like the serials of television and streaming services, and freely accessible on the Internet.
By successively working through these three works, I argue that the ways in which Gilligan presents different formations of control may be analyzed as allegories of historical and technological processes of governmentality, following what Foucault developed in his lectures The Birth of Biopolitics. All three paradigms have in common that they do not aim at the production of subjects, but rather at control over their milieux or environments. In order to sketch out more precisely the differences between these three paradigms, I unfold my subsequent analyses of Gilligan's works in parallel with Erich Hörl's "Reflections on the Becoming-Environmental of Thinking, Power, and Capital," which he has gathered under the heading "The Environmentalitarian Situation". Hörl refers to Foucault's "power-historical intuition," in which governmental modes of power are characterized as environmental. However, it should be emphasized that Foucault was still far from being able to grasp the swiftly advancing "spread of neoliberal logics through digital processes." The ways in which Foucault outlined his arguments on environmental technologies of power were based only rudimentarily on the emerging cybernetic cultures of control in the 1970s. His main references are to eighteenth-century liberalism, in particular to Adam Smith's "invisible crisis that culminated in autumn 2008, Crisis in the Credit System is an unmistakable commentary on the events of that moment.
The series plays out in the colonnades of a wellness spa that is overgrown with leaves. A management seminar is taking place. A small group of young, seemingly exhausted financial analysts are using role-playing and free association exercises to devise ways in which profitable investments can be made in times of credit crises.
However, as soon as the role-playing begins, the setting changes. From one shot to the next, the characters find themselves in a high-rise building. They now populate the glass skyscrapers of the financial world.
They tackle sales negotiations -pitches-while taking the elevator and walking through high-rise lobbies. The financial analysts seem much more alive in their natural habitat. A story within the story emerges in Gilligan's series asks how society is conceived within capitalist paradigms of control, and how liberal and neoliberal knowledge attempts to transpose chaotic and turbulent global situations into ordered and peaceful systems. In Crisis in the Credit System, the discussion of the idyll of the liberal market, which, despite the catastrophic consequences of the globalized financial crisis, still hopes for compensatory processes internal to the market, can be found Dossier | Kuhn, H. | Environments of control in the films of Melanie Gilligan especially in some allusions to the notorious paradigm of Adam Smith's "invisible hand." The course instructor alludes to this paradigm in the motivational speeches she uses to fire up the group: "These are incredibly dangerous financial times, potentially the Great Depression's brutal sequel. So think optimal adaptive strategies.
[…] Picture everything that's happened with the credit crisis so far as one big brain, and you're the thought processes, accessing this past and making connections." The group is urged to see itself as a networked brain, functioning as a very small sample of all the market participants connected through the globalized financial market.
"The market thinks a trillion thoughts, it sends trillions and trillions of thoughts around the world. And it connects billions of lives." Exaggerated enthusiasm for the wonders of the free market can be heard in this quotation, which sounds very similar to formulations by Milton Friedman, to name only one of its more recent advocates. According to Friedman, only the price system, which arises from the unconstrained transactions of buyers and sellers, manages to coordinate "the economic activities of millions".
What are the consequences when the market oversees the connections of billions of lives? The aforementioned quotations parody the liberal ideas of control for which Adam Smith devised his now infamous metaphor. The market brings all exchange processes driven by the interests of consumers into balance, but the controlling hand must remain invisible, and above all it cannot be replaced by the governing mode of a sovereign ruler. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault points out that this is also a problem of representation that is inherently connected to the problem of control and government. Although economic processes seem transparent at first, the "totality of the process eludes each economic man." There is a kind of transparency of the regulatory system to itself. But no human agent should intervene in the regulatory process, because there can be no preferential point of view on the whole system.
It is "impossible for the sovereign to have a point of view on the economic mechanism which totalizes every element and enables them to be combined artificially or voluntarily." The invisible hand prohibits "any form of overarching gaze" and it also "prohibits any form of intervention." Trust in the market mechanism enables a system of control that governs not by governing individuals but by trusting the system's ability to find balances and equilibria without extensive intervention from any sovereign instance.
Joseph Vogl has noted that, since the eighteenth century, invisible market mechanisms and the spectral obstinacy of capitalist circulation are invoked as "mystifying phenomena" within the field of economics itself, often in the form of allegories or ciphers such as the invisible hand, which has been put aside recently in favor of black swans or black boxes. In her films, Gilligan also uses allegorical figures to denote similar economic paradigms. For example, in Crisis in the Credit System she creates the figure of an oracle as a proxy for the invisible hand.
One of the financial analysts has the ability to put himself into a trance in order to process the truth of the market in scenes reminiscent of spiritual séances. His unconscious is "highly networked with the whole of the market." The oracle explains this ability as follows: The conscious mind is too slow to understand the truth of the market, and to keep up with the billions of thoughts that the market thinks. The oracle claims to have an unconscious that is directly linked to all the market processes. His unconscious is the market, one could say, because it reveals the truth of the market in a kind of "veridiction".
But Gilligan's films are not limited to parodying the nebulous terminology of liberal epistemologies. Her later films, in particular, also chronicle the more recent technological metamorphoses of the capitalform, which intensify the governmental technologies of early liberalism.

From the milieu of the market to environmental control
Before I come back to this, however, I would like to situate more precisely the significance of the invisible hand and the liberal market theories of the eighteenth century in the context of Foucault's analyses of governmentality. Foucault differentiates the emergence of governmentality from sovereign power and the disciplinary regime. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault still outlines the distinction of sovereign power from the disciplinary regime in terms of panopticism. Sovereign power operates primarily through punishment, while panopticism aims is not worthwhile to use drugs, and so cheap for those who are already addicted that they do not have to become criminals. Foucault is astonished that the entire typology of figures to which he devoted the critical efforts of his earlier books (the criminal, the sick, the insane, etc.), simply no longer played a role in the sources he analyzed in this lecture, to be replaced by a more fundamental anthropology of homo oeconomicus: all human beings are assumed to be "'responsive' to some extent to possible gains and losses," regardless of whether they consume drugs, commit crimes, attend to their educational or retirement needs, or enter into love relationships. In the following lecture, on March 28, 1979, he therefore turns again to the eighteenth century, and traces the genealogy of both this anthropology of homo oeconomicus and the neoliberal paradigms of control back to the ways in which governmental rationality manifested itself in that century. The anthropology of homo oeconomicus is determined by a form of subjectivity he calls the "subject of interest," as conceived by the empiricists Hume and Locke. As opposed to the theories of contract, summarized by Hobbes and Rousseau, the subject of interest knows no negativity, no asceticism, no self-control, no restraint. It knows no law and no normativity; it is ultimately based on the unprincipled and unjustifiable interest in self-preservation, the avoidance of pain, the choice of that which is more pleasant. The power technologies of discipline comprised enclosing, parceling out, hierarchizing, and they aimed at producing subjects via normalization and the exclusion of what cannot be normalized. However, the "general movement of Environmentalization" is characterized by a "different form of intervention, a kind of nonintervention." Exactly this characteristic already marks the liberal knowledge of the eighteenth century, promising the control of subjects not through direct intervention, but through intervention in the milieu of the market. What is decisive for the description of our contemporary situation is that a form of control emerges that regulates and manages "molecular and no longer molar, forms of individuation and subjectivation." The process of Dossier | Kuhn, H. | Environments of control in the films of Melanie Gilligan environmentalization, through which a formation of power is actualized, and which has been approaching in the form of governmentality for some time now, must be formulated "in parallel with the spread of distributive media technologies and cyberneticized environments" "whose basic problem consists in capturing and controlling, in managing and modulating behavior, affects, relationships, intensities, and forces." It is from here that the critical task of critiquing governmentality should

Popular Unrest
In the miniseries Popular Unrest (2010), a centralized computer system called the "Spirit" takes the place of the invisible hand. Via this figure, three new aspects are introduced into Gilligan's allegorical thinking about governmentality. The Spirit functions above all as a kind of artificial intelligence, whose algorithms improve themselves through machine learning and whose governmental control is increasingly better adapted to all possible environments as a result. In order to do this, it relies on digital data collected from all levels in the world of the film. As a result, the Spirit reaches into the field of biopolitical control. It collects fitness data, health data, elicits the emotional and affective states of the subjects, monitors physical and cognitive work processes, and intervenes in the reproduction of individuals and the population as a whole by controlling, predicting, and preempting these processes. The Spirit also functions as a digital currency. Everything is made equivalent and comparable through omnipresent measuring. The Spirit's algorithms decide which work, which self-improvement, which emotional state, which communicative behavior is the most profitable, and create all possible incentives in order to encourage the individual subjects to act in the desired way. The audience, along with the characters, are constantly confronted with cynically exaggerated and yet familiar slogans and calls to understand themselves as human capital or self-entrepreneurs. Episode 1 introduces the viewer to the world governed by the Spirit by showing a dialogue in a call center. A man who is worried about the rankings and scores attributed to him by the Spirit calls there and receives the following answer: "Many of your market indicators are low, though you're good on your energy and output profile, part-time schemes and home labor scores. The Spirit has to give you a double C rating, but it could be worse." The Spirit's algorithms blatantly give scores to everything and everyone. capitalism is no longer concerned with individuals, but rather with dividuals. Following Gilles Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control, the disciplinary regime was concerned with individuals and masses. But in the regime of control, "[i]ndividuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses [have become] samples, data, markets, or 'banks'." As Raunig notes, the reference to banks sounds oddly misleading, since it makes you think of the bank as a concrete space with counters, clerks, and so on. But one should instead think of databanks or databases, which confront us with "infra-and supra-individual" data-traces, as Rouvroy puts it, or with "dividual data flows", as Raunig explains: "The reality of today's dividual data sets, enormous accumulations of data that can be divided, recomposed and valorized in endless ways, is one of worldwide streams, of deterritorialization and of machinic expansion, most succinctly expressed as Big Data." Accordingly, Popular Unrest doesn't emphasize the individual as a possible center of its narrative universe. The individual simply doesn't count here. The Spirit is not concerned with individuals (it only traces pre-individual or trans-individual data streams), nor is the series, which is why it is not so easy to follow its narrative structure. We learn nothing about the motivations of the individual figures or their private feelings or thoughts. No story unfolds in which the protagonists assert their subjective goals, unless as parody. In the meantime, it seems as if a kind of revolutionary collective subject is forming within the groupings that will take up the struggle with the Spirit. The reaction of the neuroscientists is scornfully blunt: "Stop the Spirit? What do you want, Communism?" (episode 4).

Popular Unrest is concerned with the dividual, and it oscillates between
what Gerald Raunig calls the "dark side" of the dividual (an "increasing obligation and self-obligation of the parts to participate") and an understanding of the dividual that becomes part of a molecular revolution. One of my questions is whether the series helps us to delineate the 'brighter' side of the dividual, the one that helps us devise practices "as emancipatory, as not governed in that way, as not valorized in that way," in order to "develop cooperations that are not compliant in that way." I think that this is what Gilligan had in mind initially when she developed the series. These questions are also discussed among the members of the ominous 'groupings' in the series. Unfortunately only the Dossier | Kuhn, H. | Environments of control in the films of Melanie Gilligan "dark side" of the dividual appears in the narrative. In a world governed by the Spirit, the dividual only emerges as entangled and valorized in machinic capitalism.
This allegorical story that Gilligan tells us begins with a multiplicity of new collectivities. We watch the emergence of these groups out of nowhere, their sense of togetherness that cannot be rationally understood, and their inexplicable knowledge of their togetherness.
Later we find out that the groupings and the impossibility of understanding their sense of togetherness are the narratively irrecoverable symptoms of an epistemic shift that does not conceptualize individuals, but that traces their patterns of behavior. It does not ask any hermeneutical questions, it does not ask for signifying semiotics. As is learned in Episode 1: "All the spirit does, is count." It counts data and uses it to develop preemptive strategies that valorize these data in machinic capitalism. Only in the fourth and final episode is a group informed that their mysterious knowledge was the result of a minor pattern correlation: "There was nothing special, just a random comparison The omnipresent tracking devices, the so-called Internet of Things, ubiquitous computing, etc., are omitted. An apparatus of control is realized through these environmentally implemented technologies that could be described as capture capitalism, which crystallizes the latest manifestation of an environmentally operating governmentality. technology] I'm 94% more likely to adjust my behavior to appease him.

Gilligan addresses this issue in
It gets straight into your employees' limbic system. They'll do anything to make the manager happy." Unlike in a disciplinary regime, Patch technology does not aim at generating productive subjects. Instead, these are controlled by asignifying semiotics. Taking up Guattari's analyses of "integrated world capitalism," Maurizio Lazzarato has recently emphasized that contemporary capitalism operates on a molecular level that affects the "dividual," i.e. "the non-individuated, intensive molecular component parts of potentialities of matter and machines." People are contiguously folded into machinic assemblages; "they constitute a 'humans-machines' apparatus in which humans and machines are but recurrent and interchangeable parts of a production, communications, consumption, etc." While Lazzarato primarily aims at the role that asignifying semiotics (diagrams, graphs, equations, algorithms, charts, sensory measurement results) play in these apparatuses of control, Gilligan exaggerates such an approach.
The Patch insidiously perfects the automation and conformation of all possible working environments by merging the Patch's automated monitoring and its affect control into a single function: "It gets straight into your employees' limbic system." My three readings of Gilligan's works sketch out a very brief genealogy of environmental processes of control that leads from the invisible hand of the market to environmentally distributed technology. Crisis in the Credit System raises the question of how the market, controlled by an invisible hand, functions as the milieu of a subject driven by its desires and its interests. Popular Unrest shows how algorithms intervene in the reproduction of life and, in doing so, not only govern subjects, but interpret their infra-and supraindividual data traces as an environment.
The Common Sense portrays a world in which the processes of capture capitalism are intensified by means of environmentally distributed technologies. The affective environments that transversally intersect the subject can no longer be distinguished from data streams that can be managed and regulated.
The Commons Sense introduces the viewer into a world where the dividual is valorized in manifold ways. It is interesting to note that while Melanie Gilligan was working on the films, she had a plot in mind that would be open to a variety of emancipatory ways of appending to the machine: "In my fiction, the sharing of affect is potentially a means of eliminating the need for value and measure, replacing money's externalizing, abstracting function by offering an alternative connective medium." But by introducing an "alternative connective medium," as an environmentally distributed technology, the plot took a rather dystopian turn. As soon as the affects turn into data, the only appearance they take in the series are as diverse feelings of being indebted. As such, these feelings turn out to be economic debts most of the time. Sometimes the series translates what is being communicated via the patch into written inserts that appear on the video-image, readable by the viewer. In most cases these written inserts inform the characters that although the patch considers them to be dividual data streams, they most often end up being reconstituted as individuals, or more precisely, as indebted individuals.