3.

While there is a recognized necessity to the decisiveness and certainty articulated in conclusions such as Gledhill’s, it is also necessary to move beyond a mere political “denial” of ludic feminist film theory, thereby simply containing resistance at the level of “debate” (point-counterpoint). It is necessary, rather, to situate “debate” historically by uncovering the historical conditions of possibility that give rise to certain debates and that subsequently exclude “other” debates by legitimating only certain chains of “points” and “counterpoints.” What it is necessary to contest, then, is the dominant notion, articulated by Teresa de Lauretis, that THEORY is a mediating device that acts as an alternative to “assumption[less]… debate” (de Lauretis, ix). HISTORY is not the outcome of “debate”… it is the outcome of the conclusions and practices that provide the conditions of possibility of certain “debates” at certain moments… THEORY is a means of uncovering these conditions of possibility and providing the means to transform them… to produce HISTORY and not just dialogically “debate” about it (by simply re-reflecting the “already existing”); “The philosophers have already interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it” (Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach"). My “point” in this text, then, is to “change” (demystify) the currently dominant notions of family and demonstrate that they are not “outside” of class, but rather, uphold it… towards the production of revolutionary knowledges that will enable feminists, MARKET FAMILIES and interpretive communities to transform the prevailing global logic of oppression and exploitation.

It is here, in taking up extensive space to situate the terms of these discourses, that I would contest the notion that this text relies on any notion of a “certain” and “fixed” correspondence between signifier and signified: these are not the limit-concepts of my text. Instead, I am introducing and, indeed, relying on, for particular political effects, the notion of LABOR as a determining excess of discursivity, an “outside” to language. Language is, after all, as Marx and Engels have argued, above all, rooted in already existing social practices: “language is practical consciousness... language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men… consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning, a social product” (Marx; 1989, 51). By the introduction of the concept of labor towards a materialist feminist project, it becomes immediately evident that cultural subjectivities are not merely implicated in oppressive gender relations—as part of a differential system of signifiers and signifieds—but are actually capable of either upholding or transforming the very structures on which these gender relations are founded, that is, of radically transforming the relationships between signifier and signified. Drawing on the texts of Marx and Engels, I understand this extended process of the production of culture through (wage) labor as HISTORY.

Finally, I consider it a quite “ludicrous” and self-aggrandizing (that is, both epistemologically “impossible” and politically reactionary) notion that one could engage with the filmic artifact (Light Sleepers), with feminist film theory or with postmodern family arrangements immanently, that is, with each “on its own terms.” This is, again where, discursive analysis falls apart under its own contradictions, insofar as for the theorists of the bourgeoisie, there are no necessary connections! In other words, it is the law of the MARKET FAMILIES of the ludic academy—and of the slogans of the post-Cold War/New World Order that buttress their legitimacy—that there is no necessary connection between the discourses of feminism, the discourses of family, the discourses of racism, the discourses of film, the discourses of trade unionism: they are all “different” and all self-sustaining. However there is a logic to this “difference”; it is a “difference” that, as Marx has demonstrated, supports certain practices—in this instance, reprivatization along the boundaries of “family”—and excludes others. A reading of Light Sleepers , then, entails engaging with an extensive series of mediations and systemic connections that traverse and support these structures of class-based dominance; that is, with HISTORY.

It is only through an extensive materialist analysis of the historical conditions of possibility of meaning production, then, the initial move towards an effective revolutionary Marxist cultural/filmic studies project, that is capable of revealing that the underpinning “samenesses” of Light Sleepers—the “samenesses” that ludic “difference” works to conceal are not ahistorical ones, but are in fact the limiting “samenesses” that have historically underwritten the exploitative reprivatizing logic of bourgeois knowledge-practices and, as well, all of its forms of familialism.