Between Control and Reclusion: Unravelling the History of the Societies of Control

Considerable attention has been paid to the relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault's respective concepts of control and discipline. Opinion has ranged from treating the two concepts as entirely distinct to arguing that they are essentially identical. One dimension of this debate that has received far less attention, however, is Foucault's own commentary on control. His commentary is, admittedly, sparse. Foucault frequently uses the term ‘control’ in a non-reflective manner and offers only a brief development of the concept in several lectures he gave in the early 1970s. Nonetheless, his thoughts are instructive, as they position control as something that is both distinct from and yet interrelated with discipline. Foucault clarifies that discipline was formed from two elements – reclusion and moral control. Reclusion clearly relates to disciplinary enclosure, but Foucault's argument is that the modern disciplinary institution also absorbed the more diffuse task of ethical control that worked via forms of personal responsibility and moral conduct. Although his comments are brief and somewhat opaque, we might conclude that control represents a form of regulation or government that works at a distance, and which enables discipline to extend beyond enclosures into more diffusely organised populations. Given Deleuze's concerns with the failure or breakdown of the carceral element of disciplinary institutions, control might be understood as the element of earlier disciplinary societies that has best survived into our contemporary era. Following Foucault more closely, control appears less as a wholly new mode of regulation than as a remnant of a more integrated disciplinary system.