Reconsidering Kinship: Beyond the Nuclear Family with Deleuze and Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari have often received attention for their criticisms of bourgeois families in Anti-Oedipus , but their speculations about non-heteronormative kinship practices have rarely been addressed in Deleuze studies and are yet to be taken up in the study of kinship and the family more generally. This paper is then the first to offer their work on the family to a general academic audience as a useful tool in polarised debates about contemporary family practices. It begins with a close reading of the relationship between desire, capitalism and the private nuclear family in Anti-Oedipus before extending the political use-value of this with the concept of the ‘majoritarian’ taken from A Thousand Plateaus. The second half of the paper brings Deleuze and Guattari into engagement with the larger critical field of kinship studies as an entry point into topical debates about the ‘normative’ family and its alternatives.

which gave many of its arguments a highly polemical tenor. Nevertheless, we hope to demonstrate that Anti-Oedipus's accounts of the political construction of the bourgeois family still has traction in contemporary debates about gender, sexuality and social organisation.
Discussions of the family are not central to Anti-Oedipus. In the second chapter of the book, 'Psycho--Analysis and Familialism: The Holy Family', the politics of the bourgeois family becomes visible only within a scattered but provocative discussion of psychoanalysis and the explanatory limits of the 'Oedipus complex'. Deleuze and Guattari begin by endorsing Sigmund Freud's early discovery of desire in the form of the libido, agreeing that the libido, a drive that can invest into anything and everything, is primary in the subject's relationship to his or her world. But the authors accuse Freud of betraying his own discovery, by limiting the libido to sexual drives and collapsing them into variations of the Oedipal triangle, forcing desire 'to repress its flows in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type "couple", "family", "person", "objects"'. 5 For the psychoanalyst, the psyche's relation with its world must be mediated by symbols; for Deleuze and Guattari, desire invests directly into the social field, into politics, history, communities and mythologies, and also into objects, events, and affects, whole spheres of non--familial attachments that begin with the child's earliest experiences. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari's discussions of the family are always coupled with recognition of 'intrusions' from the outside: 'an uncle from America; a brother who went bad; an aunt who took off with a military man ... Families are filled with gaps and transected by breaks that are not familial.' 6 Rather than attaching itself to pre--existing objects, desire is productive (it 'makes' things), and whenever there is desire, there is also spillage and excess.
Symbols can never be desired without new offshoots springing up, departures and attachments that refuse to settle on Daddy, Mummy or Me. Desire does not restrict itself to Oedipal microcosms that reflect or represent social macrocosms; rather, political, financial, religious, workplace, and familial activities are all mixed up by desire, because it knows nothing of discreet persons. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, desire is a workshop, not a theatre. 7 The psyche thus has no need of symbolic mediation, familial coordination or rational justification in order to desire, nor does it need to 'believe' in the Family to produce love for family members, or anyone else, VOLUME18 NUMBER1 MAR2012 22 for that matter. Oedipus is not a false belief, 'but rather that belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production'. 8 Treating desires as equivocal to beliefs makes it hard to understand how people are able to articulate one set of values, principles or commitments, but still do things-sometimes spontaneously, unpredictably, even zealously-that contradict their stated political or moral worldviews. Put another way, ideological understandings of the world are cobbled together from experiences and activities shaped by desire, or desiring-production. Marxists  In the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus, 'Savages, Barbarians, Civilised Men', different social formations are described in relation to social 'codes', which make bodies and things recognisable, exchangeable and socially meaningful. Deleuze and Guattari understand codes in the most general possible terms, including marking, writing, singing, dancing, tattooing, painting and architecture, as well as activities often described within anthropology under the rubric of 'myth', 'ritual' and 'oral storytelling'. Capitalism, however, is a unique case, because it does not depend on fixed codes or ritualised forms of exchange. Economies of capital investment demand variability in exchange--values and use--values-pumpkin has a different value today than it did yesterday, and so does one's labour in growing them-and so results in a decoding of persons and things. At the limit of capitalist decoding, social activity is reduced to a quantitative, rather than 'signifying', equation between Labour and Capital: 'your capital or your labour capacity, the rest is not important'. 9 The meanings, symbols and ideologies produced in the interests of capital accumulation are perfectly capable of being dismantled, rearranged, or connected to something quite different, including social formations with all sorts of codes-state communism, national socialism, despotism and fascism. One might look for contradictions in principles, values or forms of political representation, but no one 'has ever died from contradictions'. 10 Nevertheless, the separation of capital from labour does place certain demands on human relationships and their social organisation. Following Karl Marx, Deleuze and Guattari argue that industrial capitalism's separation between collective forms of production and the private ownership of the means of production is dependent upon a physical divide between public workplace and the private domestic sphere. Within non--capitalist societies, the household has sometimes functioned as a workplace utilised by both working family members and non--relatives; the boundaries of the family are not clearly demarcated by the private household, nor necessarily by the specification of 'blood' relatives. Under these conditions, there is no acute divide between public and private domains: the household is but one of many sites for social labour, while the means of production-public horticultural lands, for example-can be partially owned by individual labourers (Karl Marx's classic example is the crop--sharing of feudalism). In contrast, the collective labour force demanded by the Industrial Revolution is separated from the ownership of the means of production, which is privatised in the hands of the capitalist. The nuclear household becomes the exclusive site for the consumption of goods and services in the interests of so--called reproduction: 'Daddy' and 'Mummy' become the trustees for nourishing and developing the worker--child-'Me'. In the place of kinship structures that saturate the social field, the bourgeois family and 'private man' become the privileged site of material investment and also emotional fulfilment, insofar as enduring human relationships are exorcised from the labour marketplace.
Thus while demanding a general decoding of social relationships and hierarchies (the collapse of non--working nobilities, for example), capitalism also engenders a reterritorialisation on the citizen as property owner, whose right to private accumulation is rendered inviolable by the legal and moral principles of individual autonomy.
VOLUME18 NUMBER1 MAR2012 24 Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the bourgeois family intersects with that of many feminist political economists and Marxists, who have interrogated the ideological separation between the so--called reproductive labours-domestic, unwaged and 'feminine'-and the productive sphere, in which wages are paid out only to sustain private investment in new (and in the contexts discussed by Deleuze and Guattari, male) workers. 11 In the final chapter of Anti-Oedipus, the gendered private family becomes the hinge through which Freudian psychoanalysis and However, escaping Oedipalising forms of domination does not mean finding better principles or ideals to believe in. Marxist attempts to demystify social relations, revealing hidden economic determinants beneath false bourgeois ideology, assume that the psyche can relate to the mode of production (here, capitalism) only through the mediation of symbols-the Church, the State, and the Family as illusory images. On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari insist that desire invests immediately into capitalism itself: 'It is not for himself or his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of the system.' 13 Rather than being deceived into supporting capitalist forms of social domination, people come to desire capitalism, and that desire is part of the system's reproduction.
It is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognise, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure. 14 The psychic repressions of bourgeois households, workplaces, politics and economics do not result from believing in the 'wrong' symbols, but from the channelling of desire into specific relations of power, of which symbols are only secondary manifestations. Oedipus is not, at its limit, a familial construction, but a product of social production, reproduction and repression.
In summary, the bourgeois family unit is not merely an ideological construct, but rather the effect of intersecting psychic and material economies, in which the separation between public production and private consumption reproduces social relations in the interests of capital accumulation. The corresponding alienation of the labourer from the means of production enables an artificial separation between production and reproduction, which has led, until the 1960s at least, to an explicit division of labour between the sexes. 15 But while the bourgeois household tends to block desire by limiting it to Oedipal symbols, these symbols neither explain nor contain desiring--production: every familial desire necessarily spills into other domains, and results in the production of something new. Correspondingly, relations of domination from outside the household come to transverse familial intimacies, but do not depend on them. Deleuze and Guattari thus stress that the nuclear family is a specific historical formation tied to the political and cultural demands of industrial capitalism in the West, rather than a universal social structure that might be 'discovered' in other societies or within other historical junctures. In the following section, we look at instances in which capitalist political economy itself can undermine or transform the coherency of the bourgeois private sphere in the interests of expanding labour markets.

-COLLECTIVE CARE AND POLITICAL RESISTANCE
While critical of capitalist economics and the bourgeois private sphere, Deleuze and Guattari seem anxious to avoid opposing the Oedipal family to collectivism or communism. They frequently acknowledge lines of 'flight' or 'escape' within every regime of domination, while bemoaning fascist or hierarchical tendencies in even the most idealistic and revolutionary movements. They even employ a distinction between 'subjugated' and 'subject' groups, the former hierarchical and the latter more open to desiring--production, to avoid mechanically linking 'Oedipal' tendencies to any one institution or social formation. 16 Nevertheless, it is unclear whether Deleuze and Guattari do actually embrace the ambivalence towards family that their analysis of subject and subjugated groups would seem to suggest. Their brief discussion of the an--Oedipal 'family--as--matrix for depersonalised partial objects' (later described as 'a depleted flux of a historic cosmos') is abandoned without any clarification of how the concept of 'family' might be used to understand VOLUME18 NUMBER1 MAR2012 26 this matrix. 17 Key passages in Anti-Oedipus even seem to suggest, as Eugene Holland reads it, that schizoanalytic practice must 'eliminate the nuclear family'. 18 Holland contrasts the Oedipal family to 'an--Oedipal family forms', including 'more generations and more distant relatives than the nuclear family' which would be 'more fully imbricated in social relations'. 19 The appeal to the 'an--Oedipal', which for Holland might involve 'communes or collectives of some kind', is by no means foreign to discussions of non--hierarchical communes by many feminist scholars in the early 1970s, although these experiments in alternative living have not been immune to the problems of patriarchy or unequal divisions of labour. 20 Holland's work does make an important contribution to the critique of the private household and 'familial' relations as privileged sites of moral investment, but neither extended family structures nor more 'socialised' living arrangements necessarily escape Oedipalisation or the emergence of new social hierarchies. After all, Oedipus begins as much in the 'socialised' workplace as it does in the 'familial' sphere. 21 Correspondingly, not all desires produced within the household are Oedipal-this is, in fact, Deleuze and Guattari's most important criticism of psychoanalysis, leading them to insist that it 'is not a question of denying the vital importance of parents or the love attachment of children to their mothers and fathers'. 22 Deleuze and Guattari are particularly critical of the nuclear household's blockage of broader social desires, but their criticisms are directed towards an assemblage of power relations including the family and the workplace and state bureaucracies. Deleuze and Guattari refuse to find their solutions to social inequality or moral 'fascisms' by re-arranging the family furniture. In fact, it is precisely this evacuation of the workplace, the state, religion and, indeed, politics from discussions of family that naturalises the bourgeois separation between public exploitation and private morality. We should not confuse the authors' critiques of Oedipal triangulation as a coproduction of the bourgeois household, the workplace and the state (and a little help from psychoanalysis, of course) with the suggestion that individuals do not need parents, that affection for other human beings is always Oedipal, or that arrangements of care based on some notion of 'familial' obligation are always a bad thing. 23 Rather than proposing a fixed 'alternative' to the bourgeois family, Deleuze and Historically, the demands of the labour force have often eroded fixed family forms, even bourgeois ones. The nuclear family has never been entirely stable, has often blended into other, non--nuclear forms, and has not always been shaped by strict notions of privacy. 24 In recent years, strains on the white, middle--class nuclear Stacey's discussion of the 'postnuclear family'. She influentially re--works the term 'kinship', which she opposes to 'family' because she feels it to be more ideologically loaded as 'normative', 'dyadic' and 'heterosexual'. 29 Butler describes kinship practices as 'those that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency and support, generational ties, illness, dying and death (to name a few)'. She thus follows David Schneider in situating kinship as an 'enacted practice'. This can be contextualised with her general theory of performativity in which subjectivity and community are constituted through doing rather than being. If family is re--imagined VOLUME18 NUMBER1 MAR2012 30 as based on participatory actions, then it cannot be built on prior models dictated by perceived gender roles, instead the transformative relay between ontological practices and epistemological framings means that it is always mutable and dynamic. The implication of this, Butler writes, is that it permits us 'to consider how modes of patterned and performative doing bring kinship categories into operation and become the means by which they undergo transformation and displacement'. 30 What Butler suggests is that it is precisely because we do family that there is always  34 Wilson and Donovan also draw attention to the ways in which choice is curtailed by access to social resources, and this needs to be understood in the context of class, race and regional inequalities.
Speaking about non--heterosexual parenting in particular, they caution that there is a significant difference between the new possibilities we can imagine for family and our ability to 'negotiate the economic, political and biological realities involved in realising those opportunities'. 35 Weston explains that despite these limitations, there is value in maintaining the descriptor 'choice' as a 'rhetorical strategy'. 36 We hesitate to adopt the language of choice because it tends to simplify the ways choice is both enabled and constrained in any family formation, regardless of the family's relationship to normative ideals of family life. The notion of choice has come to evoke the discourse of 'lifestyle choices', creating the impression that an ontological claim to queer sexuality is tenuous. This is not to say that the current arrangement of gender and sexuality is ontological and therefore invariant, but rather that there is ontological reality to desires beyond the heteronormative framework. What is problematic about describing non--heterosexual kinship practices in terms of choice is that it frequently leaves unexamined the assumption that nuclear families are a natural outcome of heterosexual intercourse, and thus reproduces the dichotomy between the heterosexual identity as a natural configuration and queer sexuality as cultural or lifestyle experiment.
This critique of taxonomical distinctions between different 'types' of families also risks supporting an unqualified plea for political inclusivity. In Undoing Gender, Butler cautions that struggles for state recognition of so--called 'deviant' families risks privileging the state as the sole instrument for cultural and moral legitimation.
State--oriented activism both empowers those who make claims to social inclusion and validates the state's power to decide what counts as intelligible or appropriate sexual behaviour or parenting practices. 37 The legitimation of certain family forms requires conformity to an imagined set of cultural values tied to the national project of conferring and policing both cultural and legal citizenship. This is particularly relevant to current debates about marriage, which operate as dominant sites for public discussions of gender, sexuality and parenting. In relation to marriage, John Borneman suggests: A simple appeal for tolerance or pluralism, for inclusions of other, already existing forms within the marital type will do little to challenge the boundaries between the married and the non--married; rather, we must create a framework that allows for recognition of a proliferation of forms Warner's key claim here is that 'heterosexual culture' is self--constructed as coherent, but is actually 'failing'. They offer the anecdote of talk show hosts discovering that 'people who are committed to hetero intimacy are nevertheless unhappy'. 43 In contrast, they celebrate 'queer culture' and the 'queer counterpublic' as a mobile, unsystematised and insurgent movement, with 'no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation'. 44  case study of heterosexual people they know, the authors speculate that these 'are people whose reproductivity governs their lives, their aspirations, and their relations to money and entailment, mediating their relations to everyone and everything else'. 49 Not only does the suggestion that familial activities are pathologically 'reproductive' trivialise the (still gendered) labour involved in maintaining domestic households and kin--networks, 50 it also forces a simplistic dichotomy between the ideologies that supposedly 'organise' desire; that is, between heteronormative, familial 'reproductivity', and queer counter--cultures.
Little space is left for loves, desires and intimacies that do not conform to these two ideological commitments. Berlant and Warner thus risk dismissing families as a bad ideological choice, rather than as a network of personal, financial, and political investments in which multiple, often contradictory desires are produced. sensationalise, but also to obscure, these diverse issues. In The Queen of America, Berlant indexes her chosen case studies (magazines, television programs, court cases and so on) to symbolic struggles over narratives of nation, which she then links to 'mass culture', 'a sublime collective manufactured consent', the 'consumption of nationality', and 'a collective desire to reclaim the nation for pleasure, and specifically the pleasure of public self--entitlement'. 52 By assuming that the 'masses' passively digest a message in a tablet laced with hetero--intimacy, she displaces questions about why intimacy, family and socialised forms of care and guardianship continue to be important concerns for viewers and voters. Ultimately, Berlant's opposition between 'mass--mediated' intimacy and the 'less institutionalised events, which might take place on the street, on the phone, in fantasy, at work', 53 depends on an assumption that social institutions are self-evidently a bad thing (something with which many neoconservative or 'Reaganist' economists would also agree), making it difficult to talk about the need for infrastructures supporting all 'intimate' relationships, both inside and outside familial environments.
Where Berlant draws a line between normative, hegemonic desires and their ideological adversaries, Deleuze and Guattari insist that no commitments are intrinsically Oedipal, 'familial', 'heteronormative' or perversely 'reproductive', but only become so within specific contexts shaped by other sorts of desires, frustrations, angers or aspirations. Familial spaces are constantly traversed by workplace anxieties, classroom failures, even lingering road rage, a whole melange of concerns that animate, sometimes threaten, those interpersonal relationships on which we nevertheless depend. There are, of course, immense dangers in romanticising the family as a natural site for the expression of 'human' desires, but there are equal risks in reducing family to a false consciousness caught up in 'domesticity', 'reproduction', 'procreation', 'patriarchy', 'ideology', or even 'hetero-intimacy', whether in the interests of moral conservatism or anti--hegemonic critique. Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of capitalist decoding allows us to separate the provisional ideologies generated within specific contexts of bourgeois production from the vicissitudes of the labour market itself, which intrude upon the private sphere and can create forms of domination not dependent on, although sometimes coextensive with, bourgeois family norms. Furthermore, by treating desiring--production as irreducible to the objects it passes through, Deleuze and Guattari move beyond the critical sleight of hand that judges intimacies, values, commitments, loves and frustrations from the ideologies produced by the mass media or conservative politicians. Rather than trying to fix desire on to better objects (public or counterpublic, the effects can be the same), Deleuze and Guattari focus more on regimes of judgement-from the Left and the Right-that prevent desire from producing different ways of being or desiring, sometimes, but not always, recognisable as intimacies.
We do not deny that struggles around rights, representation and the public recognition of sexual diversity are important. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge the importance of struggles over moral or legal 'axioms', insofar as structures of visibility and invisibility, recognition and exclusion, determine the limits of political activism and revolutionary praxis. 54 The crucial point, however, is that recognition should never be an end in itself: it must always be coupled with a destabilisation of the mechanisms of recognition. Important distinctions need to be made between the sorts of public recognition generated by 'mass medias' or legal discourses, the ways in which symbols of inclusion or exclusion trickle through popular and everyday cultures, and the complex configurations of kinship, family and interdependency to which such popular discourses around identity are actually applied. The privilege of certain intimacies over others is certainly problematic, especially within political discourse, but having to choose between authentic and inauthentic, or 'non--institutional' and 'mass mediated', intimacies makes it difficult to talk about what people actually desire, the contexts in which desire is produced, or the concrete effects that desiring--production can have.

-CONCLUSION
This article may have raised more questions than it has answered, but this has been a necessary part of exploring the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus might enable a more complex understanding of family. Their work provides valuable VOLUME18 NUMBER1 MAR2012 36 and under--utilised tools for complicating notions of the 'nuclear family' by opening it up to questions of political economy and desire, so that it is not reduced merely to an ideological construction. While this article supports the disinvestment of the nuclear family's social privileges, we have been hesitant to support dichotomous understandings of the so--called 'normative' family and its alternatives (even when these are framed in celebratory language), and have argued against a taxonomical understanding of the diversity of family form. Rather than seeing a particular structure of the family as inevitable for social (or psychic) organisation, we envisage family as a continuum composed of varied and shifting practices. This means that family is something we are engaged in doing and as such our material practices cannot be based on prior or 'innate' models of being, related to limited and limiting notions of gender and sexuality. Family practices will always operate in excess of their empirical classification and consequently the way it is politically acknowledged and discursively framed will continue to shift. This article has argued for better ways to theoretically acknowledge the intricacies of contemporary family practices, surely an important and neglected aspect of the study of gender and sexuality, and a project that is vital for the recognition of new forms of intimacy, desire and love.