6.

… by, for instance, John LaTour (played by Willem DaFoe in the film)—a street-savvy drug courier. As the sole delivery person for a small, clandestine, yet high-end cocaine distribution firm in Manhattan, John LaTour establishes, early on, the scene of this films’ writing: “white drugs for white people,” he quips to one client, in a moment that accurately foregrounds both the films’ textual limits and interpellative aims. As the narrative of Light Sleepers unfolds, this initial enunciation becomes overtly “serious”—that is, ideologically and narratologically “totalitarian” in its respect for and adherence to this particular agenda. In other words, the film draws quite normatively and thoroughly on its Eurocentric hegemonic situatedness in order to successfully produce this crucial aspect of its “tale”: that it is solely Caucasians that make significant meanings (history) and, as a result, those that might counter or disrupt such an assertion are systematically excluded—in effect, erased—from the meaning-full representational “world” of the film. Light Sleepers, is then, similar to the overwhelming majority of Hollywood cinematic texts, a film that explains the various means and techniques by which petty bourgeois “whites,” by sole virtue of having chosen true and meaningful intimates—other “whites”—and thereby excluded non-meaningful “others,” negotiate and ultimately assuage the (historical) aporias and obstacles of the postmodern social.

So, while John hand-delivers drugs to the firms’ upscale urban clientele—typically, self-indulgent and reclusive shut-ins—the more sophisticated and sultry Ann (played by Susan Sarandon) and Robert (her gay business associate and partner), act as co-managers, cutting the deals, allocating the drugs and the terms of the sales. In this fashion, then, those with access to the necessary capital and means of production for “white” drugs—along with their acquiescing underlings—are unquestionably authorized to both organize and initiate the dynamics and progression of the narrative. It is in this manner—by contributing to the unproblematic and efficient continuation of the current social relations—that Light Sleepers is predicated on its status as a (textual) force of production.

It is significant that the hegemonic race, class and gender at this moment, through filmic texts such as Light Sleepers, bases its explanations of socio-historical effects and consequences—for instance, the exploitation of Third World workers against the wealth of the First World—exclusively on the (personal) history of individual subjects: that is, on how well one has chosen, developed and networked “faithful” relationships with meaningful intimates (e.g., MARKET FAMILIALISM). “Success” (inclusion) or “failure” (exclusion), as they appear in the film, and in the various sites of postmodern culture generally, are presented as effects of the particular symbolic “richness” and “agility” of the sign community—the firm—in which one is located. According to the institutional requirements of postmodern capital and its newest regimes of coalitionalism, it is the exclusive outcome of particular meanings (signs) that are generated and circulated—and the aptitude for reading the various texts of culture under the sign of “polysemia”—that secures the inclusivity guaranteed under this regime of MARKET FAMILIES. In short, the historical agent and origin of radical transformation is located as an aleatory discursive entity predicated on “reading” over and against a material(ist) one predicated on “laboring.”

Light Sleepers, through its participation in this systematic program of inclusion and exclusion, “overlooks”—with interest—the various means by which MARKET FAMILIES restrict access to the means (the historical conditions of possibility) of certain meanings and readings and their political effects in order to privilege others. “Intimacy” and “openness,” then, are not, as Light Sleepers, presents them, obvious sites of inclusion, differentiation and resolution—the origin and proving ground of the local interpretive community—but they provide, rather, a means of excluding an inquiry into the conditions of possibility of “locality” and “intimacy,” a logic that occludes the historicity and globality of class struggle in the name of the incommensurable visscitudes of the “everyday” (experience).

The film participates unequivocally in the perpetuation of this regime that brandishes unmediated access to the “everyday” disjunctured and molecular logic of postmodernity. Its register is experiential—as a means of subtlely reproducing the logic of the “already existing”—the social division of labor or the various autonomous arenas of the “everyday” into which social activity necessarily appears divided under capitalist relations of production. As the reader is informed in the opening moments of the film, through the (meta)narrative voice-over of LaTour, the events of the film occur on, or more importantly, “away from,” Labor Day. Labor Day, significantly, is established as an “other” narrative, or, as LaTour skeptically remarks to the reader in the initial moments of the film, it is “a joke…a contradiction in terms.” “Labor Day” is, of course, the mark of the most unacceptable and antagonistic social relations in regards to MARKET FAMILIES—what Zizek has called the “worst”—that is, collectivity (of families, of desires) founded in the equal access to the means of production over and against the continued absorption of radical social transformation through positing “equality” in the superstructural realm of signs (e.g., in "radical" democracies, in MARKET FAMILIES).

Light Sleepers goes to great lengths to highlight the vast plethora of meanings that locate and differentiate the asymmetrical privileges of petty bourgeois MARKET FAMILIES over and against “other” less legitimate and less meaning-full, and therefore, unacceptable, modes of social arrangement. Both in its spatial and narrative logic, the film portrays its margins—striking workers, homosexuals and minorities—as hermetically static figures working and subsisting in a hermeneutic void: the narrative unfolds “apart” from them and not “through” them. The truest testament to the actual producers of meaning (history), according to this (ideo)logic that the film provides, is to be found in the subjects of an intricate, complex and therefore meaning-full “daily”; those, however, that contribute on the basis of their (extracted) surplus labor are secondary and antagonistic elements that foreclose on différance and therefore impede the polysemic possibilities of reading, that is, the different and endless ways (the “intricacies”) of (re)consuming the same filmic text.

Light Sleepers is framed for the reader through filmic enunciations that yield to the market familial intricacies of John, Anne, and Robert. It is made obvious that the relationship between the three is meaningfully “intricate” (a term which is for the dominant modes of knowing, synonymous with “intimate”) and, that furthermore, it is this closeness and intimacy—the outcome of “free individuality” founded in the aleatory, uncheckable logic of MARKET FAMILIES—that provides the basis for the meaningfulness and business savvy with which the three interact to generate the movement of the narrative. The workplace in which the three interact—an apartment suite spatially removed from the banalities of the metropolis below—appears not as a traditional firm, with a definitive hierarchy of positions, but rather as an aleatory, playful and, above all, “friendly” space in which the actual business of producing profit (though the sale of already extracted surplus labor) is made to seem secondary, and even superfluous: an “aside” to the “real” and more contingent forces that motor the narrative—desire, openness to convenience and inclusivity—and, as well, that retroactively ground its effects (a space very similar to the contemporary university workplace which also must necessarily mask the centering of its practices around profit and exploitation).

It is under the authority of this (ideo)logic that Ann and Robert quite performatively and playfully take on the role of parents, “reminding” John to “sleep tight” and to “take out the trash.” Ann and Robert, in this fashion, occupy the postmodern space of symbiotic guardians that are not, by any means, “superiors” (managers) that would unethically impose direction and assume an authority that would foreclose on meaning-full possibilities (of the entrepreneurial subject). These (Bhaktinian) dialogical exchanges, that the film returns to over and over, not only effectively continue to diffuse any inquiries into the power relations of the postmodern workplace under the heading of “cooperation,” “openness” and “coalition,” but also provide a display of the banality and outdated naiveté of traditional parenting’s stress on a logocentric paradigm of duty, faith, career and commitment (moral absolutism). The tone of self-reflexivity and cynicism in this regard is consistent with the general thrust of the narrative in regards to families, a cynicism that centers the “tale” of the film in the “outdatedness” of traditionalist family roles and models, in what the film attempts to portray as an exceedingly “complex world”: a world in which the self-reflexive postmodern logic of multiplicatory signs, mass-reproduced images and reproductive technologies have exceeded any remainder of originary, centered and authoritative modes of parenting, pedagogy and management (a historical occurrence that poststructuralism has successfully rehearsed and marketed in the dominant academy around the logos of the “Death of the Author”).

It is however, in the more explicitly crisis-ridden scenarios that the narrative relies on very different tactics in the most reactionary defense of self-interests. In these moments, the ideological ruse of the performativity of MARKET FAMILIES gives way to other (underlying) intricacies: the intricacies of the market, its logic of desperate competitiveness and, hence, its vehement opposition to collectivity—all of which the MARKET FAMILIALISM under which the narrative is organized—is deployed to effectively mask and suppress.

The ruptures that do occur in the daily space of the diagetic world of Light Sleepers initially arise out of Anne and Robert’s decision to sell the narcotics business to a wealthy client—an enigmatic Germanic-Austrian capitalist—and then use the income in order to legally fund and market exotic perfumes and body oils (under the guise of an exotic and primitivized Eastern aura of mysticism, an extension of Ann’s New Ageist/Foucauldean and Eurocentric sensibilities). Since John is unamenable to such a project, he takes the dissolution of the narcotics business to be a personal, and not a market, affair, both a definitive sign of personal betrayal and an exclusionary measure which would leave him not only unemployed, but more significantly, “alone” (excluded from the family). As Light Sleepers unfolds further, this narrative of self-crisis telescopes through the reappearance of John’s former lover, Mary Anne, who also thwarts John’s attempts at reestablishing an intimate relationship, a further threat of social exclusion (“meaninglessness”).

Despite the endless string of crises that beset John he is not portrayed in the least as “failed” or “worthless” (subjected to narratalogical exclusion). On the contrary, John, in reflecting on these moments of abysmal incoherence and personal and spiritual breakdown is rendered as a martyr-like figure, an exemplary figure scrambling to make sense of the violent exclusionary practices that traverse his “daily.” This is, after all, the valorized mode of existence of the petty bourgeois subject, for whom “exclusion” is not the outcome of shifts in the dominant regime of the “private” (private property) but is a mark of subjective “failure” that requires extensive self-examination and reparations (philosophical reclusion). It is exactly in these moment of reclusion, then, in which John is made most transparent for the reader; that is, in his unmediated individuality and as a genuine person beyond both history and social contradiction. As the “tale” of the film is written: it is meaningful enough to reflect on and describe these social and political contradiction—as John does in the film by keeping journals--and without working to explain and transform them.

However, the crises of the postmodern subject, as Light Sleepers acknowledges, have greatly exceeded these older modes of management (it is significant, then, in the film, that John simply throws out every journal he finishes, in order to begin a new one). This is one such aim, for which the MARKET FAMILY arrangements that the film demonstrates have been deployed. MARKET FAMILIES, as the film attests, are more adaptable to the visscitudes of postmodern crisis management, not only in their capacities to envelop and account for the failures and shortcomings of the daily “real,” but in the way they accomplish this task in a totalizing “anti-totalizing” way from within seemingly disparate and autonomous pockets of the diagetic social space of the film. As John reveals in another space to Teresa, the psychic/therapist he has hired, his “real” (biological) family was in fact a quite different one—an overwhelmingly monolithic and repressive one— in which his mother finally brutally “betrayed” him (unlike the MARKET FAMILIES in which psychic/therapists, such as Teresa in the film, unequivocally “include” and thereby justify and support his endeavors as an entrepreneurial subject).

In keeping with this agenda, then, the text devotes a large amount of space to this particular thematic—the collapse of traditional tactics of centered and nuclear families—as a means of upholding the allegorical postmodern “truth” of Mulvey’s “dizzying satisfaction” for the reader. In short, as the film explains, this atomization at the site of family—the dispersion of its roles to more heterogeneous, diverse and reprivatized spaces—is part of the new postmodern “common sense,” a common-sense which is explained as wholly progressive, liberating and, above all, post-patriarchal and post-exploitative.

It is quite clear that in conversations that John holds with his former lover Mary Anne, in the hospital where Mary Anne’s mother is terminally cancer-stricken, that biologically centered family (marital) ties are stressful, riddled with betrayal and ultimately unlivable: Mary Anne’s father has withdrawn from his family and remarried; John’s father, it turns out, was generally unsupportive after the death of John’s mother; and as John and Mary reflect on their current relationship from within their logic of reprivatization—that is, the erasure of social “needs” with privatized “desires”—it is the erratic flows of “desires” that ultimately exceed any notion of “commitment” and “sociality” and that, as well, finally render both “commitment” and “sociality” as absolutely irrelevant to the contemporary realities of postmodern relationships.

There is then, within the regime of MARKET FAMILIES, no theory possible of capturing the vast and differential possibilities of “desire,” which as Lacan and other luddites have argued, is a concept in excess to any notion of sociality or class. It is “desire,” in both Lacanian psychoanalysis and in the logic that Light Sleepers embodies, that has been deployed to mark out—at the site of the subject—the reservoir of possibility of all social transformation and historical change within the postmodern political imaginary.