Is Universalist Cinema Possible in a Particularist, Identitarian World?
25 October 2024
It was recently announced that ‘Kneecap’ – a generously state-sponsored Sony Pictures film about an Irish-language rap group fighting for identity against oppression (by the state) – is to be given a major US rerelease. The film itself is not uniquely remarkable – aside from energetic, technically brilliant cinematography and some charismatic performances, it is neither particularly good nor particularly bad – but it is particularly typical, most especially in its claim to political radicality, despite being in no way at odds with the impetus of corporate capitalism.
‘Kneecap’ tells the story of three Northern Irish men who fight against the decline of the Irish language via rap music. It is comparable with something like Disney’s 2021 ‘Encanto’: a simple tale about keeping the candle of identity burning in apparent resistance of the evil oppressors bent on pressing out diversity in favour of monotone culture, a callback to very real oppressive dynamics by the capitalist state in past decades and centuries, but quite different to those more mystified dynamics that exist in today’s regime of state-sponsored, corporate colonial forces, perhaps at their most intense in Ireland (with its history as a tax haven for the world’s biggest tech corporations). This new dynamic in capitalism both relies on the commoditisation of identity in its profit-seeking expansiveness and leads alienated individuals to cling to identity signifiers in an increasingly unfair and destabilising world. ‘Every word spoken in Irish is a bullet’, the film claims, against the relentless oppression of the English. It should be noted that the film was funded by the British government and that, nominally at least, Irish GDP per capita is currently twice that of Britain’s. (In reality, Irish citizens are increasingly impoverished by corporate forces, in the same way as their British counterparts).
There is nothing too extraordinary in all this, even if it is interesting that (perhaps buoyed by the band’s stated support of certain very important causes) some of the radical press have heralded the Disney-like storyline – showcased at Sundance Festival – as a radical act of anticapitalism. As the film du jour, what it does indicate is the two great trends that dominate contemporary cinema and film-making practices. First, it reflects the increasingly tight hold that a small group of funding bodies and festivals have over which films are made and distributed, pointing to a new phase in the history of the art-form in capitalism. Second, it shows the dominance of particularist identities and a politics of representation in the films permitted to exist by this industry, most especially at a time when these funding bodies have sold out – like the state in general – to massive international corporations, to whom they are in the descendency because they are unable to impose tax.
Treating both developments in the film industry as two sides of the same coin is a new book, also released this month. Psychocinema, the latest in Laurent de Sutter’s Theory Redux series with Polity, is by the film-maker and psychoanalytic theorist Helen Rollins, a longtime critic of the politics and economics of the film industry. The book reexamines the connection between psychoanalysis and film, arguing for a return to the universalist core of both cinema and subjectivity. For Rollins, a misinterpretation of psychoanalytic ideas led to a dominance of capitalist, identitarian thinking within film, mystifying and intensifying the destructive forces of the market whilst claiming to solve them and turning a potentially politically powerful medium away from its truly emancipatory power, found in its universalism: its operation over the structure of subjectivity, which is universal.
For Rollins, a part of the responsibility for this lies, perhaps surprisingly, in the role of certain interpretations of psychoanalysis in the history of film. From the perspective of a psychoanalytic thinker herself, Rollins takes aim at some of the big names in the history of psychoanalysis and cinema such as Laura Mulvey – whose concept of the ‘male gaze’ overpowered film studies in the 90s and has come to dominate the way makers, funders and viewers understand the screen medium – and Barbara Creed – whose famous reading of the Alien franchise as the embodiment of the ‘monstrous feminine’ set the tone for a generation of feminist film interpretations.
Rollins points out the merits of some of this work – as in the writings of thinkers focused on manifest systems of power in the mid-to-late twentieth century such as Foucault, but argues that a particularist understanding of subjectivity is antithetical to psychoanalysis and analogous, fundamentally, to the logic of capital. It is perhaps no surprise that one of the stars of ‘Kneecap’ details in multiple interviews with major magazines (Rolling Stone, NME et al.) that an indigenous language ties its speakers to the essence of the land. At a time of right-wing, anti-immigration riots throughout the country under slogans such as ‘Ireland for the Irish’, this kind of ‘left’-wing identitarianism – an argument formed against the logic of colonial actions in past centuries and shrewdly offered, by capitalism, as a solution to issues of oppression in the present (caused by capitalism) – is clearly not, in today's context, as radical as it claims. First as tragedy, then as farce.
Returning to Ridley Scott’s films, Rollins argues that Alien was “misunderstood at times as containing a singularly feminist message, rather than – potentially – a Marxist one.” For Rollins:
A feminist reading may have been most pertinent at the time of the film’s release when women had been long excluded from aspects of public life; at a time when gender-based progress narratives have been weaponized to mystify the workings of capital (for example, ‘girl boss feminism’), a materialist critique may be most fruitful and may expose how particularisms can stymie, in the longer term, the psychoanalytic contribution to emancipatory politics.
Despite the contextually important gains for feminism, the psychoanalytic film-studies crowd of the 90s and 2000s ended up obscuring economic and material conditions under a progress narrative (not unlike the idea of ‘Kneecap’ and an Irish language renaissance, when it is tied to a specifc identity group), and – more importantly – ended up associating psychoanalysis with fighting for the singular emancipation of (often marginalised or oppressed) identities. This logic – she shows – which presented itself as progressive, precisely embodies the logic of the Bad Infinity of contemporary capitalism and its arts and film funding systems. It is difficult to analyse and criticise this dynamic precisely because of its righteous conviction and its (mis)-use of the aesthetics of truly left-wing, anticapitalist movements. Whilst the personal is political insofar as subjectivity, existing within an embodied individual, is universally lacking in its structure and cannot be assuaged in the transcendent ways capitalism promises and insofar as it points to a collective of lack in which all may be included (against a particularist social order, the likes of which are critiqued by Hegel in his delineation of the Master-Slave dialectic), identitarian capitalism arrests the promise of emancipation at the level of the individual and pledges an assuagement of existential lack via the collection of identity signifiers as commodities and the contingent inclusion of specific meritorious individuals, simultaneously exploiting the history of emancipatory politics as an ideological foil to the destructive forces that create the need for emancipation (of specific groups) in the first place.
Opposed to this, Psychocinema argues that there is in fact a connection between psychoanalysis, film and emancipation, but it is not to be found in the promise of identity. Instead, Rollins argues that the power of cinema can be – like the power of a psychoanalytic clinic – to radically reveal the subject’s structure to itself and, in doing so, force the subject into a universalist realisation: that we are all subjects capable of desiring, thwarting and thinking – and of being caught up in the fantasies of capitalism – together, regardless of our identities. In holding space for the perennial, universal lack of subjectivity, we can come to terms with the fallacy of capitalism’s ideology of promise, an investment in which necessitates the exploitation, exclusion and subjugation of certain groups.
According to Psychocinema, another error made throughout the history of associating psychoanalysis with film has been a misunderstanding in the way psychoanalysis can help us think about and interpret films. As part of the mainstream approach, like mini-academics coming out of the theatres, we have tended to use psychoanalysis to reveal the secrets of the film to us so that we could finally understand that, in truth, bananas meant penises and spaceships meant wombs. Like detectives unearthing hidden meanings, we may have reflected on what was really going on inside the director’s head, as if this is where the true meaning of the film resides. Opposed to this, Rollins sees cinema not as ‘representation’ but as ‘process’ – a process by which the desires and fantasies of the subjects are captured, caught up, and then (ideally) revealed – forcing the subject to leave the theatre with a realisation (perhaps unconscious) about themselves: not that we are smart critics who can see the truth that is hidden to others, but that we are all subjects of fantasy and ideology together.
For Rollins, ultimately, film is a new technology, only a few generations old. Its particular power, relative to other technologies, is to be “mechanistic, in terms of affect and, most importantly, in terms of fantasy” – a process much like a materialist, conception of psychoanalysis that is not about identity but about structures of subjectivity that intersect with the outside, material world. When watching a film – she hopes – we can confront the nature of subjectivity as it is: oriented around lack, failure and shared brokenness. This cuts directly against the oppositional thinking of the identitarians and the capitalists, a mode of thinking that is becoming progressively more dominant as the logic of the market seeps into every crevice of our world, even subjectivity. As capitalism seems more impossible to overcome, the more we are thwarted by it, the more we invest in it, like addicted utopians, unable to face up to and think about – in the mode of Marx’s living flower – creating a more equitable way of fashioning our world. In doing so, we come to engage in friend-enemy distinctions, impossible visions of purity that require contingent scapegoats in whose absence we can imagine it would possible for capitalism to function without its contradictions in its pure, ‘ethical’ form. We fail to understand that these scapegoats – those essentially unlike us, existentially different in their structure of identity – are the necessary factor in sustaining this utopian, impossible ‘possible’ world, casting a vision of a perfect world in their shadow. This (unconscious) logic is sustained by an ideological investment in the promise of oneness in identity, that there can be a subjectivity at all that is excepted from ontological lack (antithetical to the foundational tenet of psychoanalysis).
This, she argues “has been glimpsed by makers and audiences, but often eclipsed by the oppositional logic of capitalist” thinking. What we see with the production, funding and distribution of more identity-driven hero stories, the ‘progress’ narrative foil for the class consciousness we really need, is the further obfuscation of this emancipatory potential of cinema. There is a crisis of identity in the film world – but it is a crisis of too much identity and too certain an investment in identity.
.jpg)
.png)
.jpg)
Comments