Against Nuance in Critical Reading
Towards a Dialectic of Interpretation and Immanent Reading
Articles discussed in this blog:
Bogdan Popa (2018) What's wrong with the Romanian New Wave? Auteur cinema, the communist and the production of the violent working class, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 9:1, 89-102.
Andrei Gorzo, Making Sense of the New Romanian Cinema: Three Perspectives, Close Up: Film and Media Studies | Vol. 2, No. 1, 2018, 27-42.)
The 1960s saw the birth of a reaction against interpretative readings, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. The case was made that to interpret is to project one's thesis onto the text. As Jacques Derrida once remarked, psychoanalytic readings always uncover the Oedipus Complex in any work. Similarly, Marxist interpretations always find class struggle. In an article published in 2018, Andrei Gorzo made a similar observation regarding Bogdan Popa’s interpretation of anti-working-class bias in Romanian Cinema. Gorzo accuses Popa of projecting his leftist ideological thesis onto the Romanian auteur cinema. Instead, he calls for a more rigorous analysis and nuanced reading. In many ways, this is a veiled return to the ‘close reading’ strategy, which claimed that the meaning of a text is internal to it. Is there anything outside the text? Should the text not be situated?
One could ask: is not deconstruction guilty of the same sin? Does not a deconstructive immanent reading always find that a text deconstructs itself through its unavoidable contradictions? And what is a nuanced reading of a text if not unseeing the forest for the trees?
The real challenge is to find the dialectical relationship between the trees and the forest, between the ideological interpretation and the immanent reading.
I will propose that a text is not a thing in itself, but a set of representations of relationships, and that that representation is always written and read through the lens of a political situation, i.e. an ideological framework.
In the case of Popa and Gorzo’s texts, the question arises: Would a nuanced reading of Romanian cinema invalidate the thesis that it presents an anti-working-class bias?
I will show that it does not. In fact, Gorzo’s own reading is biased, projecting a liberal bourgeois thesis onto the texts: that at the core of artistic texts is a radical undecidability. Gorzo confuses rigour with nuance, when in fact they are the opposite of each other. Rigour is attentiveness; nuance is an ideology.
What is the role of ideology in a critical reading? This is an urgent question because critical readings, especially those launched from a Marxist/class perspective, are often accused of misreading, of projecting their ideological view onto the object of critique.
Let's look at Andrei Gorzo’s review of the article “What’s Wrong with the Romanian New Wave? Auteur Cinema, the Communist and the Production of the Violent Working Class” by Bogdan Popa. Reading the film Reconstruction (1968) by Lucian Pintilie as a precursor of the Romanian New Wave Cinema, Popa’s thesis is that there is a tradition in auteur cinema, Romanian and European, which projects a “deep fear and hatred of the popular classes.” In his review, Gorzo argues that to prove his thesis, Popa systematically ignores or misrepresents certain aspects of the films he interprets. Moreover, Popa’s knowledge of the history of “realism” and “auteur cinema” is erroneous. Gorzo’s point is that this kind of left-leaning critical engagement is a priori ideological: they project their ideas onto the object of their reading. In contrast, Gorzo argues for a more attentive, nuanced and scholarly informed reading of films. However, does Gorzo’s nuanced reading of Reconstruction disprove Popa’s thesis that the film presents a critique of Communism and the demonisation of the working class?
For Gorzo to disprove Popa’s thesis is not enough to point out his misreading and errors (it is possible to do so and yet maintain the same ideological interpretation), but to show that the film has a pro-working-class agenda. However, Gorzo does not, and instead, he proposes a different ideological reading.
Gorzo claims that Lucian Pintilie’s cinematic vision is more ambiguous than Popa’s reading allows for. Gorzo situates Reconstruction in the tradition of 1960s auteur cinema that was anti-authoritarian and focused on the individual and rebellious youth. This kind of auteur cinema is neither ideological propaganda, like Socialist Realism, nor Hollywood entertainment. The two working-class young men, the protagonists in Lucian Pintilie’s film, are caught between the figures of authority and the mob. Gorzo argues that Pintilie can be read to have sympathy for the working class because he treats his two working-class protagonists with sympathy. Supposedly, this blurs the politics of the film. However, what is the basis of this sympathy: the fact that they are working class, or that they are individuals? This is a crucial question. Gorzo's reading points to a sympathy for individualism. From this, derive a whole set of political structures framing Pintilie’s understanding and critique of oppression. For Pintilie, as well as for Gorzo’s reading of the film, the oppression of the two young men is not class-based, but the oppression of the individual (regardless of their class) by the state/masses.
Tracing the ideological genealogy of this framework is easy. The idea of the individual versus the alliance between the corrupt leaders and the manipulated masses is a well-established trope dominant within the Nietzschean, left or right, critique of democracy, socialism, and modernity in general. In the 1960s, it became a form of anti-systemic liberalism that rejected both the conservative right and the socialist left. Eventually, this politics of individualist protest contributed to the emergence and rise of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism has proved to be the defeat of working-class politics in the name of individual freedom.
Ronald Regan declared, “The government is not the solution, the government is the problem”, while Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society, only individuals.” To be fair, these views were also part of the post-Marxist/post-modern left, for example, see Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), where class politics is replaced by identity politics based on individual rights. Regardless of how we want to read it, be it progress or regress, the working class’s defeat was more thorough than we accept.
Therefore, even if we accept Gorzo’s reading of the film, we still arrive at Popa's thesis. As such, the problem is not that Popa projects his ideas onto the film, but that perhaps his analysis, while intuitively correct, is not sufficiently precise. Paradoxically, Gorzo, under the guise of critique, provides that precise analysis to support Popa’s ideological reading.
One could turn the question of ideological projection to Gorzo’s own readings. He seems to be reading “nuance” (perhaps a byword for liberalism?) into every “worthwhile” film. This is suggested by the distinction between “ideological” and “nuanced” films. His readings are not simply “nuanced” but systematically so; they tend towards ideological blurring, finding “radical undecidability” where it matters. The fact that Pintilie’s films are original and complex cultural products doesn’t mean that they don’t have a clear political take on social reality.
Contrary to popular belief that ideology is a blunt political instrument that leads to misreadings, ideology is a necessary framework within which one could construct various narratives, some more ambiguous than others. Pintilie’s films point in a less ambiguous direction.