Reformist Tropes of Resistance
The Filmic Production of Femininity and Family (A Re-Narration of Light Sleepers)
Brian Ganter
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Spring 1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 3 (pp. 16-21) | ||
| • October 1, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
1.
Light Sleepers (1992) makes textbook postmodern sense of a crisis central to the bourgeois nuclear family, a family arrangement currently under the throes and pressures of various delegitimation projects, delegitimations that have only been exacerbated through the contestations of various other “alternative” family arrangements. Through the films’ presentation of and ideological insistence upon one such contemporary regrouping of family under the heading of “convenience” and “inclusivity,” Light Sleepers provides an ideological response to the variety of assaults that the requirements of postmodern capital have brought to bear on the traditional family, an arrangement increasingly under pressure to vacate its dominant edifice of biological sanctity, heterosexual privilege and moral fortitude.
By virtue of its conservative filmic syntax—its representational and existential presentation of an immediately available “world out there” that the text captures and contains for the reader to abstract from—combined with its more liberal and innovative mode of crisis management, Light Sleepers functions as both symptomatic marker and necessary outcome of current tensions between the relations and forces of capitalist production. It is a film, in other words, that by demonstrating postmodern sensibilities—the need for more agile and abstract (“undecidable”) female subjectivities which are unburdened by motherhood, wifehood and matrimony—in a traditional (transparent and immediately available) mode of articulation provides sufficient (ideo)logic to assuage a central contradiction in the daily operating space of capitalist relations. The text performs this ideological function by constructing, through political negotiation, a viable response—a grid of intelligibility—on which to locate and explain away a social crisis particular to advanced industrial Western democracies in the (late) postmodern moment: the “outdatedness” of the biological-nuclear family and its inhibiting role in the current production schema, as well as the subsequent need to offer the “alternative” means of reproducing a coherent and capable work force.
Light Sleepers, then, is paradigmatically complicit in securing this updated series of global forces and relations of production—as well as in the deployment of the postmodern knowledges that justify these familial shifts as transitory and unconnected fluctuations (e.g., as the “undecidable” content of experience). However, this series of shifts are interconnected and necessary; they thoroughly underwrite the texts, arguments, and cultural productions of daily postmodern social relations, including contemporary feminist film criticism, which has made extensive critiques of traditional familialism as well as the modes of knowing and strictures of patriarchy that have upheld it.
These various feminist, lesbian and gay counter-hegemonic interventions in the production of cultural meanings have demonstrated quite thoroughly the bankruptcy of claims to the monolithic and coherent singularity that traditional humanism has reserved for familial intimacies centered solely on traditional blood-bond relations. These more progressive texts of contemporary feminist and queer film theory have found it productive to take part in this struggle to affect the delegitimation of this family—the reigning outcome of European and heterosexual hegemony—in order to secure the space for other “alternative” modes of sexuality, intimacy and family (Mulvey; 1989) (Modleski; 1988) (Silverman; 1989).
However, while these theorists participate in voiding traditional patriarchal families from an entrenched embeddedness in Euro-culturalist frameworks, they support the elaboration, institutionalization and reprivatization of another more “fragmented” familialism. That is, while the texts of contemporary feminist film theory have, for the past twenty years, rigorously criticized the dominant patriarchal social relations at the formal level they are rendered unable (as formalists) to historicize these relations, through critique, and as such, have been unable to politically problematize its newest institutional forms. It is this latter unrealized and, therefore, unproblematized notion of a patriarchal MARKET FAMILY that has signaled the (theoretical) jettisoning of traditional family relations and that currently informs and delimits the intellectual productions of contemporary postmodern film criticism.
The MARKET FAMILY, then, has provided a more abstract and agile, less burdensome and more convenient matrix of self-reproduction (towards productivity) within both patriarchal social relations and the dictates of multi-national capitalism. No longer centered on the visscitudes of the “domestic” the postmodern MARKET FAMILY has been (re)centered on the “workplace.” It has been institutionally accommodated in order to oversee the production of a “friendlier” and more “intimate”—an experiential rather than critique-al and theoretical—workforce that is capable of absorbing political contradictions as legitimate instances of the “daily”; its paradigmatic operation is in the workplace that has erased the distinction between “owner” and “worker”; between “pedagogue” and “student”; that is, an avowedly post-political workplace.
The MARKET FAMILY, additionally, is still quite founded on a respect for the “private” (affirmation) that actively suppresses a revolutionary project founded in the realization of the collective exchange of ideas (critique). It has manifested itself in the higher eschelons of the academy, through the proliferation of programs such as “interdisciplinary studies,” intellectual residency programs, and international studies (“multiculturalist”) programs, the curricular pluralism that grounds the practices of the contemporary university/workplace. These promote the disavowal of gender and racial hierarchies within the current academy to instead substitute at the superstructural level, what Stanley Fish has called “interpretive communities” as the only (acceptably) radical formation in the academy and as a mark of the entrenched institutionalization of the post-sixties and seventies renovating projects of poststructuralism.
These conditions set on the production of (filmic) knowledges have been deployed by Western intellectuals in order to achieve similar ends to the various projects of Clintonomics; as ideological apparatuses, they are aimed at effectively localizing and fragmenting, while simultaneously mobilizing, “local” productive forces; the logic of the “between” is substituted for the logic of the “inside”; “micronarrative” for “metanarrative”; “local” for “national”; “community” for “corporation.” Through the manufacture of MARKET FAMILIES (“communities”) in its various institutional state apparatuses—including the narrative logic of films such as Light Sleepers—the dominant class multiplies the entrepreneurial-intensive capacities of production under a newer, “friendlier” and deterritorialized multi-national capitalism. The regiment of subjectivities, then, that MARKET FAMILIES require, like those that are circulated throughout the narrative of Light Sleepers, are skilled to be “ethical” competitors, that is, to compete not with other subjects (strictly) but rather, to compete “co-operatively” against abstract systems (e.g., innovation as the production of difference)…
