Biennial Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America

San Antonio, TX

May 2014

In "Postscript on Control Societies," Gilles Deleuze contrasts MIchel Foucault's disciplinary societies and their reliance on confinement with control societies that use "free-floating control" to govern ("Postscript" 178). In his discussion he highlights five important institutions of confinement—prison, hospital, factory, school, and family—that are threatened as control societies emerge.

Deleuze's prescient "Postscript" previews many early adoptions of control mechanisms that have become pervasive in our contemporary culture. Although he explicitly names the family as an interior in crisis, Deleuze does not return to it in the end of "Postscript." Perhaps Deleuze does not address the threats to the family—and any attendant new weapons of control—because the family in the late twentieth century was a more problematic case than the prison, the hospital, the factory, or the school.

As the oldest social institution, both in terms of human history and individual lives, the family perseveres as a tool for bodily intervention, management of individuals at a distance, and population regulation.

On the one hand, proponents point to same-sex marriage as important to the preservation of families.

On the other hand, opponents see same-sex marriage as threatening the traditional family.

Though the place of same-sex marriage is contested, at least in religious and juridical spaces, the variety of possible familial formations has expanded.

While an expansive definition could indicate the sustainability of the family as a social institution, it also calls into question its continued effectiveness as a disciplinary apparatus. After all, childless heterosexual couples, cohabitating homosexual couples, and latchkey children are all potentially "dangerous" identities that may resist traditional disciplinary techniques, and anxiety over these new familial formations is only heightened.

Just as our understanding of what it means to be a family has changed, so have the conditions of the married couple. As social historian Stephanie Coontz notes, the character of heterosexual marriage has "steadily become more fair, more fulfilling, and more effective in fostering the well-being of both adults and children than ever before in history" (Coontz 301).

According to Coontz, marriage no longer serves as an obligatory part of a "credentialing process that people have to go through to gain adult responsibility and respectability" (276).

There are two significant contemporary challenges for regimes of power when it comes to managing marriage and family, and this is where Deleuze had it right, both in conceiving of the family as an environment of enclosure threatened in control societies and in leaving it out of the institutions that had developed new techniques in relations of control.

First, the family is the one institution Deleuze mentions that isn't institutionalized. That is not to say that families are unregulated, as both same-sex marriage legislation and investments in social welfare programs related to mothers and children demonstrate; however, there is no spatial institutionalization of the family.

Second, conceiving of marriage as a risky endeavor runs counter to its position as the cornerstone of the institution of the family. In the contemporary context marriage both is and is not optional. Individuals are no longer expected to marry in order to transition into adulthood, but many of the privileges of adult romantic partnerships are reserved for married couples.

The crisis of the family in control societies, it seems, is a crisis of marriage. Marriage makes the institution of the family.

Today, converting singles to marrieds is a more challenging enterprise. Indeed, a post-marriage condition necessitates persuasive mechanisms for reconstructing the marriage trajectory, and online dating is one system that works to preserve the marriage imperative.

As we have already seen, the family works better as a disciplinary apparatus than as a mechanism of control.

In our contemporary context, marital choice operates more or less under a synchronic logic isolated spatially and temporally.

Uneasiness is the byproduct of the decreasing confinement of individuals within the family.

It would seem that free-floating control, especially its modularity, should offer a fitting response to the challenges of confinement.

It would seem that free-floating control, especially its modularity, should offer a fitting response to the challenges of confinement.