4.

The historical functions of many of the institutions of contemporary life such as family, friendship, marriage, and parenting (in other words, the various modes of intimacy) are put in question by the cultural contradictions of postmodern society…. By naturalizing social organizations such as family and separating their “essence” from the circumstantial “accidents” (namely history) affecting them, the dominant ideology privatizes the problems of intimacy represented in marriage, family, and parenthood as the failures of individuals (138-9).

It is following these historical revelations, that more conservative (humanist) texts have attempted to portray the sweeping institutional reconfigurations of postmodernity as the outcome of a rampant individualism; what arch-patriarch Alan Bloom has invoked as a moment undercut by a “radical egalitarianism” (Bloom, 27). Such tactics have attempted to explain (away) more molecular and differential modes of familialism—for instance, gay modes of intimacy, love and friendship as well as various academic “multiculturalist” programs—as the conspiratorial, volitional and transient undertakings of a few transient “radicals,” in a move to reclaim the unquestionable philosophical “truth” of Eurocentric and heterosexist practices and (high) bourgeois dominance.

However, it is through the substantial and foundational institutional support provided by the reigning petty bourgeois ludic (poststructuralist) regime—the psychoanalysis of Lacan; the power analytics of Foucault; the performativity of Judith Butler—on which MARKET FAMILIES have acquired and secured their domineering legitimacy in the post-sixties academy. Drawing on this legitimacy, theorists such as Kaja Silverman (1992), have persisted in deheirarchization and deconstructive tactics—drawing on the self-displacing tendencies of the signifier—to privilege an “undecidable” relationship of power between class, patriarchy and family as a means of introducing and legitimizing a decentered network of MARKET FAMILIES. As Silverman goes on to argue, in Margins of Male Subjectivity, traditional narratives accomplish the exclusion of more pluralist and differential modes of familialism in and through the perpetuation of a metanarration in which the “coincidence of the system of kinship with the human[ist] family” is unproblematically assumed and therefore naturalized (38). Silverman, following Levi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology, argues that the privileged term of familial consideration not be reduced to a centered, monolithic and singular “family,” a reading which would attempt to uphold a universalized, centered and transcendental set of internal relations (father, mother, brother…) by concentrating on the “within,” and which would, simultaneously, secure the marginality of those families constituted differentially, in the “between” (39).

Resistance to the logocentric Oedipal narrative and the nuclear family—the outdated philosophical tactics of presence, coherence and transcendence that it both promotes and relies upon—are, for ludics like Silverman, founded in the embracing of misrecognition (meconaissance): an attentiveness to the aporatic and aleatory movement of signifying chains. In this fashion, the resulting textual order is capable of subverting what Silverman terms the “dominant fiction”: the attempts by the dominant to construct the appearance of a relationship of certainty towards knowledges, a “certainty” (theory) which, eventually ends up resisting itself (discursively) from “within”—a brand of deconstructive self-effacement that Paul de Man has located as the tropological movement of the “literary” (de Man, 3-20). “Families”—and all cultural phenomena (signs)— are subject to this self-displacement which Silverman provisionally organizes around the elusive figure of “kinship.”

The Oedipal structure, then, as an ostensibly coherent narrative of patriarchal explanation (of its own dominance) is no exception, as Silverman continues, since it is always underwritten and enabled only as a “local instance” of the arbitrariness of the “Law of Kinship”: the arbitrary playfull-ness of signification. Patriarchal dominance is acquired—along class, gender and racial lines—according to this reading, solely through attempts to rationalize and fix (familial) meanings, that is, through constructing a coherent representational system which foregoes any attentiveness to meconaissance (41).

However, the patriarchal and the ideological are, in the ludic theories of Silverman and de Man, not political (supportive of certain interests and resistant to others) but, rather rhetorical (situated to accommodate all differences; to bring every marginal “outside” “inside”). In other words, Silverman rejects, through classical poststructuralist maneouvers, the notion of the nuclear family as a means of patriarchal domination—not on the political grounds that it invokes a binary logic of gender in the support of relations of exploitation and oppression—but on the formal grounds that it is epistemologically “unsound” and “crude.”

Celebrated ludic film theorists such as Silverman, and, as well, Slavoj Zizek—drawing on the texts of Lacan—have thoroughly embraced meconaissance ("misrecognition") as both radical and progressive, since any insistence upon its “other” of certainty (“recognition”) is a minimal requirement for the maintenance of any notion of class, labor or transformational politics, all of which ludic theory has rejected and abandoned as “totalizing.” For liberalist ideologues such as Zizek, there is no ideology outside of meconsaissance: the “(presup)position” of a symbolic order that guarantees coherence in the face of radical “historical contingency” (Zizek; 1992, 59). Accordingly, it is the “misrecognition” of the prevailing discursive “impossibility” of an established and, therefore, dominant social order that is the foundation of the “ideological” and not the exploitation of one class by another or subordination along gendered and racial lines. “Oppression,” for Zizek, is nothing more than a symptom of the “belief” in the possibility of a coherent binary of dominator-dominated; there is then, for Zizek, no more radical move then to “ENJOY YOUR SYMPTOM.”

Film theorists such as Laura Mulvey (1989) have “agreed” along the same political lines: that there are indeed certain “symptoms” of capitalist (post)familial relations that need to be “enjoyed,” that is, only experienced and not transformed through a critique-al analysis of the historicity of patriarchy… of family… of class. It is in “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama” that Mulvey begins by criticizing any notion of “progress” (telos) as an ultimately restricting and dominant ploy to introduce an illusionary notion of a coherent (social) totality as an “outside” to textual relations. Such a notion is of course, akin to Derrida’s “scandalous” assertion that “there is no outside-the-text.” The site that, for Mulvey, introduces this rupture into the telos of “progress” that underwrites patriarchal capitalism and that thereby secures the very impossibility of a foundational knowledge is written into film as “melodrama.” Melodrama, according to Mulvey and others (Gledhill; 1987), provides the outlets for the ideological “inconsistencies” of domination, a point from which to observe the social totality, particularly the narrative of the Oedipal family, collapse upon itself. There is what Mulvey calls, “a dizzy satisfaction” in viewing melodramas and therefore “witnessing the way that sexual difference under patriarchy is fraught, explosive and erupts dramatically into violence within its own private stomping ground, the family” (39).

Filmic melodramas—the enunciatory site of familialism—are, for Mulvey then, the site at which the endless contradictions of “bourgeois” familial relations are made to unravel into MARKET FAMILIES. These effacing conditions reveal themselves to the viewer through the unfolding of the narrative, as Mulvey argues, not as part of the filmic rhetoric but as their very “content.” This content is consistently made visible in these melodramatic texts for unmediated experience, or, as Mulvey writes, for “the simple fact of recognition” (39). It is according to this logic that Mulvey alludes to the “simple fact” that experience (e.g., “dizzying satisfaction”) subverts both the realm of the “private” as well as that of “analysis” (theory)—theorization capable of providing explanation and, therefore, strategies for overcoming the increase in domestic violence against women—and that the collapse of family is a conditioned solely through the slippage of ideological-textual practices. When held up to a global framework of intelligibility, however, there is no need for a “comparison” between the structures of violence inflicted on Third World women in the workplace—in the maquiladoras of the Mexican-American border for instance—and of the domestic “private” violence characteristic of Mulveys’ narrative, the latter which Mulvey sees effective to “publicize.” There is nothing “subversive” about socializing (rendering in a public space) an already social (“public”) exploitation at the site of the workplace: these are not the “same” “simple fact[s]” but are materially and socially differentiated articulations of patriarchal social relations under capitalism that only a Marxist feminism is capable of addressing and transforming.

On the ludic terms that Mulvey, Silverman and Zizek uphold, any transformative politics or theory of radical social change (revolution) are voided from the discourses of culture. In addition, “family” (any notion of an exclusive group) is rendered as too undecidable for the fulfillment of the conditions of reproduction of any social or historical (structural) effects, such as society, capitalism or patriarchy. It is, as such, too “unfounded” (unknowable) to serve as a reliable site from which to launch a critique of the vast intricacies of regimes of domination and exploitation and, similarly, too “different from itself” to be able to uphold any systematic power relations in its various daily and historical forms. It is with these points in mind that a deployment of the concept of MARKET FAMILIES attempts to account for this movement: that is, to account for what bourgeois feminism has been unable to and to locate and situate: the “excess” to bourgeois patriarchy as a system of representation, or rather, its (internal) differences as a historically contingent series of causes and effects. In other words, MARKET FAMILIALISM in its most radical formulation, locates patriarchy within a series of global and social relations and not—as bourgeois ludic feminists such as Mulvey, Silverman, de Lauretis argue—in textual (signifier) relations.