Television: The politics of control and inhabited resistance

This chapter provides a new theoretical perspective for analysing television. Examining Deleuze’s description of control, it is argued that television is a technology of control, albeit one that has the potential to produce resistance to control’s operations. Although control’s politics of resistance are not extensively explored by Deleuze, the chapter utilises related theory and commentary in developing the concept of ‘inhabited resistance’ for understanding political action in the society of control. Finally, the chapter signals the potential of certain styles of television comedy for illustrating television’s relation of control and inhabited resistance.