From Communism to Capitalism

Nation and State in Romanian Cultural Production

F. Andreescu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137276919
• eBook ISBN: 9781137276926
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers an interdisciplinary mode of analyzing transitions from communism and planned economy to democracy and capitalism focusing on how the various social and political transformations are reflected within one hundred Romanian films produced during communism, transition, and post-transition.

CHAPTER 1

Transitions and the Aesthetic Turn

Introduction

This book analyzes the transition from communism and a planned economy to democracy and capitalism focusing specifically on the case of Romania. Though informed by the comparative politics and international political economy literature on nationalism and democratic transition, it looks at transition from an integrated cultural and psychoanalytical angle. More specifically, it analyzes how the transition is reflected in the cultural space of films. The research highlights the importance of films as a crucial arena for political struggles within society: struggles over basic definitions of the nation, state, (gendered) self, and symbolic “Other.” This is accomplished by building on the theory of cinematic nationhood and by using a model of analysis relying mostly on insights from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It regards films as forms of communication as well as forms of fantasy, in the psychoanalytic definition of the term. Informed by over one hundred films produced during the last 40 years in Romania, the book observes that the cinematic representations of the nation and state, (gendered) self, and symbolic Other changed significantly during periods of political, economic, and social change; and it further proposes a model for analyzing the different aspects and mechanisms of these changes in cinematic representation. This model is based on three elements of interest: the discourse prevalent in society, the topology of commonplaces, and the structure of fantasy. A second aspect that structures the research includes the three time frames of analysis: communism, transition, and posttransition.

Why Romania?

I analyze films produced within Romania during the last 40 years. Romanian society is an intriguing case because it presents two social traumatic events that could have had the ability to radically change the structure of fantasy formations and the topography of commonplaces. During the communist period the concepts of nation and state were strongly embedded and supported within the social contexts of the Marxist-Leninist discourse. The two concepts gained legitimacy because of their nesting within commonplaces specific to Marxism (work, equality, socialist state, and the bourgeois enemy) and because they embodied the Other,¹ that being the locus of truth and morality within the specific Romanian structure of fantasy. What brings value and interest to this case selection is the different reconfiguration of the commonplaces that initially supported the concepts of nation and state, caused by a profoundly traumatic change in the social discourse. Within the Romanian social and political context, the concepts of the nation and the state gained even greater legitimacy from their association with a rhetoric emphasizing a strong dichotomy between national and foreign ideas and identities. This situation was specific to the social discourse of the transition to democracy. The rhetorical topography was further changed by a swift, radical, and traumatic discursive transformation that charged and empowered specific concepts such as individualism and the free market, which then posed a challenge to the concepts of nation and state.

Structure of Analysis

This research argues that film embodies a relevant field for investigating nationally significant political debates occurring within a society. It further argues that film helps to constitute the very political actor being debated: in this case, the nation and the state. This will be made evident by tracing how the concepts of nation and state, the power invested in these concepts, and the transformations of their meanings during great political and economic changes are reflected in and also affected by the films produced and seen within a particular society. My analysis takes into considerations three main aspects:

1. The dominant discourse present within the analyzed society at the time of the film production. In this sense, there are two main discourses to be addressed: a socialist-communist one with strong nationalist tones, and the main discourse of democracy and market economy.

2. The essential commonplaces within which are nested the concepts of the nation and the state. The research identifies four such commonplaces: the Other, the worker hero, the female ideal, and the space of the nation. The research is structured around these four essential commonplaces, tracing their transformation and relevance during radical political, social, and economic changes. There are numerous other commonplaces that could have been discussed. I selected these four because they have a strong presence within the three important Romanian myths that I examine in the following chapters, and also because they are consistently relevant within the society analyzed during the three time periods investigated.

3. The national structure of fantasy that delineates the collective’s basic understanding of pleasure, freedom, and the relationship to the other. My argument is that the structure of fantasy has a persistently masochistic—or excessively passive—character during all three time intervals analyzed. Masochism² here entails a tendency to regard the Other as having the ability to inflict pain and take away agency, and to understand pleasure as occurring not within one’s own body, but in the body of the Other.³

The research addresses three time periods that present important differences from the point of view of discourse and in their portrayal of the essential commonplaces. I shall briefly overview each period below and, in so doing, preview the research findings.

Time Frame I: Communist Films of the 1970s–1980s

The films produced in the 1970s–1980s period reflect the pronounced tendency within the Romanian communist state prior to the collapse of the Soviet bloc to glorify the concepts of state and nation by placing them on center stage. The state and the nation represent the driving engines of all important and virtuous actions. This specific aspect of the communist films was greatly influenced by socialist realism. Socialist realism, which observed that artistic content is related to the social conditions from which it emerges, is an aesthetic style attempting to mold the audiences’ minds as directed by the Communist Party. It promotes the incessant repetition of a single, simple message via all channels of communication that socialism is endangered from both internal and external enemies, but the new socialist-communist man inevitably must triumph (Stoil 1982, 29). Socialist realism leads us to assume that the themes within socialist-communist films vary between an emphasis on a strong Marxist internationalist framework and a more nationalist-oriented one, largely in response to the overall geopolitical climate as well as to the bilateral relationship between the Soviet Union and the satellite country. A stable international context allowed for the promotion of the Marxist social system and the high level of importance to be attributed to work and workers in building up the progress of the nation. More turbulent global contexts called for films that emphasized national, political, and cultural symbols that stirred up patriotic and nationalist sentiment. Likewise, closer political relations with the USSR made more powerful the Marxist ideological aspects within films, while tensions or conflicts downplayed Marxist universalism and the worker hero and instead brought to the fore national symbols and themes. In Romanian films produced during communism, the main protagonist is the ethnic Romanian worker and the symbols used are strong national symbols, due to the country’s relatively cold political relationship with the USSR.

The place of the Other in the films produced during communism is occupied by the socialist state, the nation, and the fatherly, stern, but righteous figure of the secretary general of the Communist Romanian Party. The Other is omnipotent and imposes its law and its rigid identities, out of which the worker hero is the main social identify. In these films, the worker identity takes priority over all other possible social roles (parent, partner, friend, etc.). A second rigid identity, the female ideal, has two aspects to it: the worker heroine that in films appears as a weaker version of the worker hero as well as the heroine mother, whose body and reproduction capabilities are at the disposal of the social authority. The female role is that of a sacrificial being who needs to submit to male power and duty as well as to the state authority. The space of the nation is split into the city and countryside. The countryside serves as a base for the industrial development specific to the city as well as a guarantor of morals and of the national tradition. The space is overwhelmingly represented by the workplace guarded and structured by the law of the Other. The structure of fantasy is identified as a masochistic one.

Time Frame II: Transition to Democracy—the Films of the 1990s

The films I examine show great sensitivity in reflecting the political, economic, and social transformations happening during transition. The revolution and the transition within Romania represented powerful shocks or traumas suffered by this state’s social, economic, and political systems. This critical juncture brought to a zenith the power of nationalism and is reflected in film via the veneration of the national spirit and the nation appearing as a dominant theme.

The commonplaces investigated suffered transformations as well. With the death of the fatherly figure and the collapse of the socialist state, a vacuum of power is observed. The postcommunist films portray an increasing desire to reinstall a just and moral law that would bring stability to the nation. The worker hero is dramatically affected by the political and economic changes. He becomes a dark character, in pain, suffering injustice in a difficult struggle for survival. The female ideal is transformed as well, exchanging the heroine worker and mother aspects for two equally inflexible roles: the traditional Romanian woman or the prostitute. Furthermore, the space of the nation starts to present variations. There is no longer a single space under one authority and functioning under one law. Smaller, shadowy spaces emerge that seem to be subjected to authorities other than the main national authority and function according to different laws. The structure of fantasy nonetheless retains its masochistic character.

Time Frame III: Posttransition—the Films of 2000–2012

The research analyzes the extent to which the stable democracy and market economy present currently in Romania as well as the membership of this country within a powerful international institution—the European Union (EU)—amplify individual interests and personal goals that have the capacity to override or diminish the centrality of both the nation and state concepts. Recent Romanian films focus their narrative on the individual; as a result, the themes of state and nation receive less attention and come to be seen as less important than the concerns of the individual. The strengthening of neoliberal values and institutions, as well as the EU membership, have thus greatly diminished the earlier emphasis on Romanian national identity. The commonplaces analyzed underwent further transformations as reflected by the films produced during this third time frame. Here, the Other is now embodied by diverse male characters or by the West. In the third time frame, the Other’s inconsistency is greatly emphasized, as is its moral failures. There is a loss of hope for achieving a moral law that would restore stability. The worker hero has become a dark character who has lost his former power and is depicted in a condition of suffering. He is a desiring subject with no fantasy to channel desire and consequently without any hope to escape his present state. The female ideal is still represented by the two constrictive roles of traditional woman or prostitute. The woman’s sacrifice is now performed at the request and coercion of an immoral Other. The sacrifice becomes a traumatic one, for there is no moral reason to justify it. The space of the nation is divided into diverse places with various authorities and rules. During this epoch we encounter a great schism and incompatibility between the city space and that of the countryside. Finally, as before, the structure of fantasy remains a masochistic one, but the Other loses its just and moral claims. The effect is a weakening of the legitimacy of the social order and a concentration of the efforts aimed at enlarging the limits of the possible within the social order.

Transitions and the Aesthetic Turn

By analyzing social transitions represented in cinema, my analysis positions itself within what has been called the aesthetic turn in the study of world politics. Under the rubric of the aesthetic turn, aesthetics are relied upon to add a new dimension to the understanding of the political, offering insights that are often inaccessible to scholars using more conventional theories and practices (Bleiker 2009, 11). The aesthetic turn is associated with scholars such as Michael J. Shapiro, Cyntia Weber, Jutta Weldes, James Der Derian, Stephen Chan, Christine Sylvester, Adele Marie Barker, Martin Blum, Roland Bleiker, Cerwyn Moore, Terrell Carver, and Anca Puṣca. While artistic texts do not propose plans on how to best structure a newly formed government or organize general elections, they can nevertheless offer insights into how the processes of political, economic, and social transitions are experienced and how they affect the lives of various actors whose voices and experiences are usually silenced or dismissed in the study of world politics. Furthermore, employing aesthetic approaches to exploring images could offer a way of understanding political aspects inaccessible to textual analysis. In this regard, Anca Puṣca, in following Walter Benjamin’s thinking, brings attention to the fact that the rise and fall of different regimes is marked by and could be analyzed through a focus on the material construction or destruction of symbolic objects and images (Puṣca 2008, 369–70). She argues that the transformations of the visual horizon can be captured in a theory of aesthetics of change, and that regime changes are accompanied by silent nontextual changes pertaining to the visual (Puṣca 2008, 370). We could say that the multitude of images experience history alongside living beings, and carry within themselves stories that are otherwise not remembered by the human mind (Puṣca 2009, 247). Such a focus could open a space of analysis in which politics become embedded in the transformation of the visual environment (Puṣca 2008, 380). The study of change becomes a study of how significant moments such as revolutions have been physically marked into the surrounding environment (Puṣca 2009, 249). Agreeing with Pușca’s perspective, this book makes evident how the fall of the communist regime is marked in the visual cinematic space by observing how uniform and transparent cinematic spaces become temporary, shadowy, and fragmentary spaces—spaces that hide their own world and that are ruled by various authorities.

Scholars contributing to the literature of the aesthetic turn argue that it is at the level of popular culture, of which the cinematic visual environment is a significant part, that power is produced and reproduced. However, the level of popular culture is also typically dismissed, and viewed by most observers as frivolous and thus irrelevant (Weldes 2003, 6). Against the tide of this repudiation, I and other defenders of cultural analysis, argue that films and other forms of art possess qualities able to transcend the ordinary in order to procure a more holistic understanding of the political (Hutchinson 2010, 354). We, defenders of cultural analysis, further argue that films and other forms or art represent a critical intervention that repartitions the sensible and the intelligible, thereby opposing and challenging the traditional perspective. In this sense, cultural analyses are often not merely supplements but rather challenges to commonsense understandings. The methodology of the contributors to the aesthetic turn differs significantly from previous works on culture and politics. Previous works include Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s (1963) The Civic Culture and more recently Samuel Huntington’s (1997) The Clash of Civilizations, which establish a specific relationship between culture and politics, one in which culture is an independent variable that has effects on politics. The aesthetic turn insists on a dialectical relation between culture and politics, in which neither term could be seen as a causal variable (Carver and Chambers 2012, 2). The aesthetic approach makes visible the political aspects of films, novels, poetry, music, TV, photography, and architecture. The analysis of aesthetic texts focuses on meaning that is continuously shaped and reshaped, where the meaning makers and the effects of meaning making are sites of politics (Carver and Chambers 2012, 3). In this context, culture is a process or a set of practices including representations, language, and customs that are concerned with production and exchange of meanings (Weldes 2003, 6). This makes culture a key element in understanding world politics as it helps to shape and represent world politics for state officials. The legitimacy of official representations depends on the way in which the public understands world politics. Popular culture is a main way of socializing and of creating a vision of the world. For this reason, it becomes an excellent medium for generating consent for policy and state actions (Weldes 2003, 7).

Engaging with artistic texts challenges the usual way in which we think about and recognize the political. I argue that the political aspect is associated with the aesthetic form itself, which most times is not thought of as political in an explicit recognizable manner (Bleiker 2009, 8), and also with the manner of investigation and of understanding world politics. In his discussion of the aesthetic turn, Roland Bleiker highlights the lack of critical attention given to the dimension of representation with which social science engages. He makes a distinction between aesthetic methods of scholarship and the dominant mimetic approach to world politics. The mimetic approach attempts to represent politics as realistically as possible, while aesthetic approaches assume the presence of a gap between the form of representation and what is represented. It is Bleiker’s opinion that the gap between the representation and what is represented serves as the very location of politics (Bleiker 2001, 19), as representation constitutes an act of power through which subjective origins and values are made invisible (Bleiker 2001, 24). The mimetic approaches in social science are based on the idea that there is a distinction between facts and values, and between a subject of observation and an object of observation. This implies that there can be brute experiences, unaffected by prior concepts or theories, and that these value-free facts can be accessed and used in explaining the world. On the one hand, the mimetic approach strives to create explanatory theories that observe the general patterns of occurrence in society and determine the objective laws that cause these happenings. On the other hand, the aesthetic approach tries to grasp meaning. It argues that without studying meaning, the research in social science has little value. Societies are built on meaning, and unless one is aware of meaning, one will not be able to understand social facts. Understanding meaning leads to constitutive or reflective theories. Aesthetic approaches further engage the gap between a form of representation and the object it seeks to represent. Rather than fearing this gap as a threat to knowledge and political stability, aesthetic approaches accept its inevitability (Bleiker 2001, 512). The particular way in which mimetic approaches understand representation is challenged by its dependence on fallacious assumptions. Attention is brought to the fact that all representation refers to other representations, nothing ever being authentic. For this reason, representations create the truth they are supposedly reflecting. Language has no direct relationship to the real world. All representation is mediated by language that makes it linguistically reflexive rather than reality related. Furthermore, representation encourages generalization failing to appreciate the importance of difference, assumes homogeneity, implying equivalence and identity of interest (Rosenau 1992). The aesthetic approach further takes into consideration the characteristics of the observer besides those of the subject of observation. It insists that there can be no separation between an observer and the object of observation, but that both of them should be studied, as the observer adjusts his/her perceptions to his/her already formed frame of thinking. All these will have an influence on the image one forms about the object of observation. This mode of analysis implies that it is impossible to separate facts from values, and that facts will never be value free. An obs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1   Transitions and the Aesthetic Turn
• Chapter 2   Radical Social Change and Distortions of Fantasy Formations: A Model of Analysis
• Chapter 3   Transitions and the Changing Face of the Social Authority
• Chapter 4   The Journey of the Romanian Worker Hero
• Chapter 5   The Changing Face of the Sacrificial Romanian Woman
• Chapter 6   From Communism to Capitalism: Reshaping the Space of the Nation
• Chapter 7   Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index