5.

It is against the conclusions of theorists such as de Lauretis, Silverman and Mulvey—the dominant intelligibilities that they uphold—that I have found it necessary to produce a counter-reading of Light Sleepers. It is important to recall that the dominant ludic texts only ever conclude with a liberal “inconclusiveness”: that there is no possibility of a decidable sociality, let alone, a transformative political project; rather there are only different “interpretations” (of power, of gender, of race, of family, of class). Drawing conclusions that point to the systemic effects of the dominant structures of patriarchy and class—that is providing a symptomatic account of the intricacies of bourgeois social relations—are, according to these anti-conclusionary conclusionists, not only “out of the question” but absolutely “out of the problematic.” MARKET FAMILIES, through recourse to (universal) inclusivity and convenience—the limit text of the petty bourgeois consumer—have effectively inscribed both dominant and dominated, exploiter and exploited, as inseparable entities within the very process of reading, a playful mode of reading, according to Derrida, in which “whoever loses wins, and in which one loses and wins on every turn” (Derrida, 20).

What is at stake, then, in the contemporary regime of MARKET FAMILIES is the maintenance of the very means by which the academy-at-large (as a historical and cultural institution) teaches, interpellates and produces “readers”—the means by which certain “readings,” their consequences, and the readers that support them are included, at the exclusionary expense of other “readings,” other historical consequences and other classes.

Slavoj Zizek, in his highly influential take-off on Lacanian psychoanalysis in The Sublime Object of Ideology (a writing which as the Voice Literary Supplement has proclaimed, in support of Zizek’s polemics against Marx, “provides [an] intellectual high”) has rehearsed the acceptable post-al limits of "reading", a reading method that is, against its own avowed, and ultimately ludic, principles, both contestatory and dogmatic. Zizek’s texts, in their subtle interdisciplinary movements between “high” (Hegelian) philosophy, anecdotal parodies of state-Eurocommunism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and popular media (film) studies of the modernist texts of Hitchcock and Chaplain, are quite adept at providing both the sensibilities and skills necessary for the market familial subjects of multi-national capital, subjects capable of (re)describing the social (at great length) but never resolving through explanation the vast historical complexities of bourgeois culture.

However, while texts such as Zizek’s are read as unmediated academic inquiries (that provide “an intellectual high”) they do contribute thoroughly—both in their “saids” and “unsaids”—to a historically and theoretically sustained anti-Marxist offensive. Zizek’s contribution to the contemporary moments of this battle to resecure the legitimacy and unavoidability of capitalist hegemony and MARKET FAMILIES appear in the distinctions drawn out in his writings between symptom—the naming of a reading aimed at (following Marx) uncovering a historical logic to “reading” which thereby undertakes “readings” towards transformative social change—and the sinthome—the naming of a reading aimed at (following Lacan) locating within the symptom an unavoidable object-cause of subjectivity that appears retroactively as jouissance, as a desire in excess of history (Zizek; 1989, 11-84). A sinthomatic engagement—counter to the symptomatic and transformative one—(re)secures the unavoidable necessity of the symptom (the effect of the oppressive and exploitative structure) itself: “if we annihilate it [the symptom] things get even worse: we lose all we had—even the rest which was threatened but not yet destroyed by the symptom” (SI, 78). What Zizek intends to legitimate, then, is a very particular and exclusive type of reading community, one rooted in a respect for “other” desires and one that, as well, not unlike the populist agenda of Rush Limbaugh, valorizes co-operative entrepreneuralism as the originary instance of social change—”that intersubjective reality… which… make[s] the subject what it asserts to be” (EYS, 32). Such is the foundational alliance of MARKET FAMILIES that situate “success”—not in the capitalist acquisition and accumulation of more capitals—but in the accomplished performance, reaffirmation and reproduction of the requirements of the autonomous, the local and the molecular (for instance, the academy’s sustained skilling of “close readers”). Change is, then, effectively (re)contained as a movement undertaken from “within” the current social arrangements; REVOLUTION is effectively replaced with REFORMISM.

It has been politically necessary to engage with Zizek’s arguments, in particular, since a “symptomatic” reading—a critique—of Light Sleepers is precisely what I have found it necessary to undertake at this particular moment. Such an approach, it should be stressed, is a mark of the “worst” for Zizek and the ludic ideologues of the contemporary academy, as it is, as well, for more conservativist (humanist) filmic readers such as David Bordwell, who have also bracketed symptomatic readings (theory) as unaccountable to the “concrete details of interpretive practice”; hence, his opposition to more radically “symptomatic” readings such as the Cahiers du Cinema’s “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln” (Bordwell, 104). Bordwell, then, like de Lauretis, finds it more productive to critically interpret—to perform a debate with the text—rather than attempting to move “beyond” the immanent formality of the text (the “dominant fiction”) through demonstrating historical connections between various and heterogeneous “locals” and “debates” and the class logic that informs them. Such a reading attempts to move “beyond” reading as a merely pluralist practice that reinscribes cultural, disciplinary and significatory difference (the skilling of MARKET FAMILIALISM in the contemporary academy), and instead attempts to provide the means and strategies with which to abolish the domination and exploitation—through tracing “symptoms”—that occurs along gender, race and class axes.

More contemporary pluralist modes of family and the representational tactics that resecure their hegemony—both “inside” and “outside” the academy—are not exempt from such a critique-al mode of engagement. MARKET FAMILIES are not, as we now know, the outcome of historical “accidents” or libidinal “ruptures,” of new formations of desire, nor they “outside” of class, but have, instead, remained thoroughly invested in the global logic of capitalist social relations. It is not a matter of signage or slippage that MARKET FAMILIALISM has extended its dominatory practices into Thailand which has provided American, Canadian, German and Japanese middle-class professionals the opportunity to systematically consume the prostituted minors of Thailand; in other words, to “live” their “desires” while simultaneously placing the “other” (colored) desire under erasure.

The mode of symptomatic renarration that has been undertaken against Light Sleepers—the necessary critique-al tactic of a Marxist cultural/film studies project—it will be argued, does not bring the narrative (the “film”) close enough to the reader, that is, it does not provide an unmediated access to readerly desires (for Lacanians, the preeminent structuring dynamic of the narrative). However, while this will perhaps be dismissed as a slippage between intent and language on the part of this writing—the failure to make the presence of the filmic experience available to the reader for subsequent explanation and enjoyment—it should rather be understood and located as a political tactic that privileges one mode of re-narration (a theoretical one) over and above another (an experiential and descriptive one). In other words, where one would typically expect to find a respect for the various formal elements of the film—a sequential renarration of the films’ major events, its enunciatory and cinematographic practices, the resolutions of its conflicts, and so forth—I have found it necessary to provide an “other” re-narration that moves “beyond” what is often referred to as the “immanent logic” of the text. This is a particular re-narration aimed at both problematizing the overwhelming need at this moment for narrative “presence” and a means of contesting the dominant (formalist) mode of reading and narrating culture, a mode which only continues to “silently” and unrelentlessly (re)insure the “presence” of exploitation to others elsewhere…