In Discipline and Punish Foucault lays out his theory that disciplinary societies arose and became prominent in the 20th century. It did this by modifying and adapting the system of surveillance developed in the prison to all other institutions of human interaction (the educational system, the military, and the hospital are the areas Foucault focuses on). Like most of Foucault's work I had a sense of "Yep, that’s right. Anyone want to get a beer?" This is due in part to the way Foucault couches his analysis in historical processes to present a way of reading the past, as opposed to a way in which to change the future (figuring out how to do that is something he seems to leave that up to us, at least in his major texts).

Deleuze, commenting on Foucault’s work, later suggests that we have entered a time of control societies. In a control society foundational institutions like the family and the prison are no longer are sites of discipline and in fact are breaking down. In this new age things have become digital. This means that the prison is no longer the model, but rather the ankle bracelet that decides when and where you go. This effectively follows Adorno and Horkheimer in their analysis that the current incarnation of capitalism (it is a spirit) focuses on controlling the distribution of things, or in Deleuzian terms controls the flows and stop-flows.

Deleuze recognizes that his own reading of the current situation as a society of control is not the only mode taken by the socius. I think one could say that the American city does operate on this model, such that money and commodities are moved in the virtual realm and the poor are separated off from the rich through control of the means of human exchange, public transit. This creates certain areas where people are cut off from the political space that the city (qua polis) is supposed to embody. These people are, of course, free of the institutional discipline that comes with schools and the like (and you only have to look at the lack of funding for inner-city schools to see that society has given up on that idea here), but they are controlled from overflowing into areas of society that could be harmed by their presence. The city, by its very schizoid nature which resists all discipline, can only control and cut off the political space to certain groups of people while making others obsess over that space (the guilty liberals).

The opposite model seems to be at work in the heartland of America. It is in these spaces that people feel most under watch. In the city you can effectively get away with acting a little crazy on the street or committing social unacceptable acts, either by losing yourself in the massive flux of people (subjectification) or jumping from one grouping to the next (objectification). This is simply not the case for small towns because the small town is always watching over itself. Gossip, as a form of moral control, is a technique of discipline. Perhaps even more so than the sign "God Is Watching" that Foucault mentions, the citizens of a small American town fear their neighbor.

Thus when these two types of people meet, they meet as two types of oppressed people. The city folk bored or envious of the paranoiac nature of the country folk, and the country folk scared or intoxicated by the seeming wildness and freedom of the city. This separating of models helps to keep the two types of people even more separated than the differences in place due to geography. Furthermore, this separation allows antagonisms to form, like our current Blue state/Red state dichotomy, that closes off the more national political space through cultivating apathy and refocusing attention away from the matters of most importance and towards trivial, but controversial, issues like gay marriage.