CfA - 4S 2026 Open Panel 139: "Life After Control" - closes 30 April

[Timothy Neale]

Call for submissions closes 30 April 2026: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php Feel free to get in touch with the organisers of this Open Panel if you are interested in contributing.

Open Panel 139: "Life After Control"

Timothy Neale, Deakin University; Christopher Kelty, UCLA; Courtney Addison, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington 

Environmental/Multispecies Studies; Infrastructure; Governance and Public Policy

Scientific and governmental logics of control continue to exert a powerful influence, even in the face of persistent failure. Pest control specialists continue to poison rats, long after losing the battle to these and other agile nonhuman species. Disaster management continues to provide command and control solutions long after they are inadequate to the previous disaster. Experiments and interventions with Artificial Intelligence technologies solicit novel proposals for decentralized control in a world impervious to practicalcentralization.These are only a few of the domains in which control continues to exert a substantial influence. From its origins in medieval bureaucracy as a name for accurate bookkeeping -contra (against) and rotulus (a register) - control has proliferated as a generative imaginary and apparatus for the administration of forms of life. 

But perhaps the “control society,” as theorised by Gilles Deleuze (1992), has become belated? The enduring aftermath of technoscientific attempts to shape life are now an implacable “second-crop” of anthropogenic biology (Landecker 2024), but the pervasive coding and quantitative modulation of our open environments goes on apace. Life’s uncontrollability inspires expanding techniques and infrastructures of control, yet escape from control is itself a productive critical moment for new knowledge and new responses; the word itself “escapes” capture, amidst a ubiquity of material and symbolic traps (Corsín Jiménez andNahum-Claudel 2019). Is the tendency for life to escape our attempts at epistemological and physical control, and thereby inspire better attempts, a virtuous or viscous cycle?

We invite submissions interested in exploring new adventures in control and escape,the aftermath of control concepts and systems, or telling tales of control’s possible ends of persistence in impossibility. What typologies of control can we find for this moment? Can we celebrate all those who escape control’s domains?