In an interview with Deleuze, Negri observed that control ‘relates to the most perfect form of domination, extending even to speech and imagination’ (N: 174). The assemblages that characterise a society of control intervene at the level of speech and thought. Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962) is a meditation on control over language, expression and thought, but also technoscientific control, namely, the Ludovico technique, an assemblage of cinematic technology and pharmaceutical innovation the State uses to resubjectivise the criminal class. The novel is as famous for its ultra-violent aesthete, Alex, as for its fabrication of Nadsat, a fictional argot spoken by delinquent youths. Through Nadsat, sensations, affects and intensities are estranged, from sublime aesthetic pleasures to horrific violence, nauseous organs and images to new perceptions, new ways of looking and listening. Deleuze never cited Burgess, but he wrote at length about Stanley Kubrick, who adapted Burgess's novel in 1971. What interested Deleuze was how Kubrick initiated a ‘cinema of the brain’ (TI: 198) where the screen itself became a ‘cerebral membrane’ (TI: 121). Together, Burgess and Kubrick illuminate Deleuze's thoughts on literature and language, cinema and control, and allow us to trace their affinities with SF criticism and the genre's linguistic creations. This chapter will set aside Baudrillard, who will return in Chapter 2, in order to place Deleuze into relation with SF, and explore what he means by control.

Minor Language and Abstract Machine

For Freedman, SF may be characterised by its generic narrative tropes, but also by the ‘molecular operations of language itself’ (2000: 36). SF distinguishes itself as a genre through its idiosyncratic use of language. Freedman selects the opening passage of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to illustrate this:

The ‘stylistic register’ of this passage ‘marks it as unmistakably science fiction’ (Freedman 2000: 31).