2.

Contemporary feminist film theory has relied thoroughly on these historical developments both for the epistemological justification for its arguments as well as for its political conclusions. The texts of the dominant feminist film theory are largely underwritten by this same celebration of the “local” and the “specific”—that is, the absorption of aspects of the state into the various forms of familialism—through its project of close readings of filmic texts. This marks the emergence in the past twenty years of what Teresa Ebert has called a “discursive” or “ludic” feminist/cultural studies: a shift from “consciousness”-oriented resistance to a renewed attentiveness to the language-effects brought about through the arbitrary movement of the signifier or what Lacan, in Ecrits has termed the “symbolic” (Ebert, 6). This is a cultural treatment exemplified in the writings of Jacqueline Rose, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze, Gaylyn Studlar, Juliet Mitchell as well as in the celebrated “avant-garde” films of Sally Potter, David Lynch, John Waters, Chantel Ackerman and Yvonne Rainer, all of which construct their renderings of power, gender and sexuality around what Rainer has articulated as the need for “a revolution at the level of the signifier.” The dominant mode of engagement is then, as Ebert argues, a “cultural politics…a mode of rhetoric aimed at changing cultural representations” rather than a transformative materialist feminism: “a collective practice through which existing social institutions are changed” (6). The political stance of these filmic and theoretical texts, then, can be summed up as an incredulity towards metanarratives such as family, patriarchy, capitalism or even a coherent notion of the “social”: they are post-familial texts. They, instead undertake a movement towards the local agencies provided through the immanent slippages of representation, or what Derrida has termed the movement of différance (Derrida, 3-27).

Through the deemphasis of a biological and heterosexual maternalism—and its corresponding codes of parenting and authorial meaning transmission through a coherent and centered family arrangement—ludic feminist film theory contributes to the production and legitimation of “updated” and “inclusive” modes of family. Although more conservative readings of this historical break have contributed to film theoretics as well—for instance, E. Ann Kaplan’s “The Case of The Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor’s Stella Dallas “(1983), Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) and several other texts which rely on an affirmation of the liberatory possibilities of an inherent feminine “nurturing” (over and against “contesting”) that has assumed ostensibly radical forms within fragmentary families—what is of greater concern here are those more strictly ludic postmodern film theorists that have taken up the academic task of producing, and more importantly, performing, the newest and most innovatory modes of privatized familial knowing in the moment of postmodernity. The more traditional/humanist and essentially moralist readings of the right—provided by arch-patriarchs such as Alan Bloom and Pat Robertson—have been embarrassingly apologist. However, it is the material task of the most prevalent and archetypical ludic postmodern canon-texts—Derrida’s Glas, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus , Kristeva’s Powers of Horror—to actually naturalize these disruptions, fragmentations and atomizations of the traditional nuclear, blood-bonded family and its modes of parenting, marriage and patriarchal (gendered) authority—upheld in and through the Oedipal narrative of family formation—and thereby institute MARKET FAMILIES as the newest common-sensical arrangements of culture; that is, as a mark of genuine and daily social relations (the “natural”) that are incorporated invisibly into the logic of cultural meaning productions. Deleuze and Guattari:

It is in the ludic texts of Lacanian psychoanalysis that the nuclear family, inscribed predominantly in the texts of Freud,[1] has been canonically marked out as a fetter to the dominant productive relations: “Before strictly human relations are established, certain relations have already been determined… [by] signifiers… these signifiers organize human relations” (Lacan; 1981, 20). It is this idealist dehistoricization of familial relations—the replacement of one totalizing (natural) “truth” with another (discursive) “truth”—that materialist analysis has historically intervened in (Kollontai; 1977). It is in The German Ideology that Marx and Engels demonstrate that family arrangements, like those of gender, have always been epiphenomenal to the social relations of production: “family” and “feminity,” in this revolutionary class-based paradigm, acquire their historical differences and authority not from cultural-superstructural arrangements (the relations of signification) but from the dominant structure of social arrangements and the material division of labor (the global relations of production).

On these materialist terms, contemporary public contestations at the site of the sign of “family,” for instance, in regards to health planning, collapse upon themselves (as rooted in “free-speech” debating). These “debates” as it turns out, are less about the most progressive form of health care, but are, rather intent on realizing the most effective FAMILIES for maintaining the dominant social relations; that is, how to most efficiently replenish an available (First World) work force: by preserving the traditional (biological) family or by shifting the burden of reproductive “coverage” to the multiple and heterogeneous MARKET FAMILIES of multi-national capital thereby eliminating the former more centered and immobile, that is “low-tech” (industrial), versions of family. This crisis is founded in a problematic that has been central to late capitalism in the West: the most effective method by which to reproduce the conditions of production and, in the case of “family” how to most effectively continue to replenish one of the most central conditions of production--LABOR POWER. These debates, similar to debates now taking place within the bourgeois academy are less about the most “progressive” or epistemologically innovative theories (though they present themselves as such), but, are, instead, concerned with (re)producing very typical and monolithic notions of power and progressivity, an “undecidable” power and progressivity that presuppose the “certainty” of class and the dominance of American-European-Japanese capitals (the legitimated subjects of “health” and self-affirmation) over their respective Third-world labor camps (the legitimated subjects of “disease” and exploitation).