Julia Vassilieva

Mass culture and the production of the capitalist subject in post- communist Russia

Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in the West for their successes and failures, but much less attention has been paid to the psycho-cultural dimension of these reforms. It seemed taken for granted by most Westerners that inside every docile Soviet body was a free-enterprise spirit just waiting for the state apparatus to founder in order to escape and express itself. This paper takes a different view, arguing that the transformation of Soviet citizens into the self-regulating, entrepreneurial subjects of liberal democracy and the market economy was no less impressive a feat of social engineering than the transition from state-owned to private property and unfettered business competition. Maintaining that mass entertainment was one of the critical means employed by the new post-Soviet business elite for preparing Russians to embrace an unregulated model of capitalism and a consumerist culture, we offer a multi-faceted analysis of one of the ideological apparatuses of the post-communist condition – the Russian adaptation of the television game show, Wheel of Fortune – which were mobilized to dismantle and reshape a complexly overdetermined system of values, beliefs, and attitudes in the process of what we call the production of the capitalist subject.

Beyond Poetics: Raúl Ruiz’s Rethinking of Narrative

Abstract Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon, 2010), Raúl Ruiz’s magisterial adaptation of the nineteenth-century Portuguese novel of the same title by Camilo Castelo Branco, can well be considered Ruiz’s magnum opus. Available as a six-hour TV miniseries and a four-anda-half-hour feature film, Mysteries of Lisbon is epic in scope. Not only does it weave a rich tapestry of Portuguese life at the turn of the nineteenth century, it also delivers a sustained and rigorous meditation on the mutation and possibilities of narrative at the beginning of the twenty-first. Questioning fundamental assumptions about how narrative works, including cause-and-effect relationships; focalisation and point of view; the presence of stable, goaloriented characters; and the notion of a hierarchy of knowledge and reliability of narration, Mysteries of Lisbon puts forward an alternative model of storytelling. This model mobilises a productive potentiality of narrative incoherence, open-endedness, and ambiguity, attesting to the impossibility of fixing the unresolved past and the unfinished, in-flux present. Ruiz puts forward a model of storytelling that goes beyond poetics, as it is aimed not so much at producing a finished product—a narrative—but at staging the process of narrativisation itself, thus liberating its transformative potential.

Narrative Subject: Between Continuity and Transformation

This chapter addresses the issue of stability and change of personality, self and identity through the prism of narrative theorization. The chapter begins by sketching the context of discussion of the issues of personality stability and change in academic psychology. It then outlines a range of positions in literary studies on the issue of narrative continuity. Narrative, change and self are thus positioned as connected by a matrix of functional links that create a range of possibilities in thinking through the issue of change. The chapter then demonstrates how some of these possibilities are realized in McAdams’s model of identity as a life story, Hermans’s dialogical self theory, and White and Epston’s narrative therapy.

Constructing the Narrative Subject

The various narrative conceptualizations of the subject critically examined in this chapter are formulated—implicitly or explicitly—in response to the debate concerning the ‘idea of a substantial self, including the sense that there is a creative force within’, which is generally characterized as the question defining the difference between the postmodern and modern view of the subject (Simon 1999: 57). It is therefore instructive to sketch briefly the broader context of philosophical and psychological discussion regarding the category of the subject in which specifically narrative formulations of the subject have emerged.

The ‘Narrative Turn’ in Psychology

The history of narrative psychology can be construed in different ways. Given that psychologists conduct their research most often through language—by either interacting with their subjects in experimental conditions or as clients in therapy—narrative accounts can be identified within many psychological schools and practices. Some scholars draw attention to the role of narrative in psychoanalysis and share Donald Polkinghorne’s (1988: 120) view that ‘Sigmund Freud made an important contribution to narrative theory’, while Mark Freeman (1993), Jens Brockmeier (1997), Michele Crossley (2000) and some others (e.g. Ammaniti and Stern 1994) question Freud’s methodology and theoretical assumptions about narrative. They highlight the danger of naturalization of phenomena and structures that Freud described and emphasize the necessity to approach Freud’s work historically. These researches allow us to outline both the continuity and influences of psychoanalysis on modern narrative psychology and the latter’s radical difference from the former.

Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Qué viva México! through time: Historicizing value judgement

This article explores several versions of Sergei Eisensteins unfinished film ¡Qué viva México! (1932) assembled by different filmmakers in the 1930s, 1970s and 1990s. While each one of the versions claimed to ‘get as close to Eisensteins vision as possible’ soon after its release it was judged to represent yet another example of inaccurate reading and reconstruction of the unattainable, but allegedly perfect, vision of Eisenstein. By the same token, none of the versions has ever been considered and acknowledged in its own right: in terms of what it reveals, rather than lacks. Reversing this historical trend I approach the multiple versions of ¡Qué viva México! as a unique methodological opportunity offering material testimony of how values and readings shift and mutate through time, how judgements of taste and beauty are intertwined with changing ideologies and politics, and how the ‘death of the author’ ushers in not the unlimited freedom to read and interpret texts but historically specific and constrained ways of engaging with authorial vision. As such, this discussion of ¡Qué viva México! bears on another important issue – material plurality of film as a condition of film study – and becomes instrumental in forging a productive alliance between film theory, film history, and curatorial and archival practice.

After taste: Cultural value and the moving image

The collection of essays offered in this issue of Continuum is an outcome of the conference ‘B for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value’, convened by Alexia Kannas, Claire Perkins, Julia Vassilieva and Constantine Verevis, and organized by Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Melbourne in April 2009. Taking place exactly 30 years after the publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s celebrated Distinction (1979) – a monograph that offered up a powerful critique of transcendental claims to culture – the conference not only paid (implicit) homage to Bourdieu’s legacy but also demonstrated how far the critique of taste has ventured in one particular cultural field: namely that of film and television studies. The present collection’s title ‘After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image’ suggests the possibility of problematizing not only the judgement of taste but also the category of taste itself. The temporal and conceptual modality of ‘after’ continues the move initiated by the post-structural and postmodern critique of the subject, ethics, cultural theory and critical methods, previously elaborated by such scholars as Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981), Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (Who Comes After the Subject?, 1991), Terry Eagleton (After Theory, 2003), John Law (After Method, 2004) and John Frow (Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, 1995). Just as these previous interventions called for the rethinking of fundamental categories of inquiry in the humanities (in the light of earlier deconstructive critique), ‘After Taste’ urges a reconsideration of the notion of taste, and a dismantling of the high/low culture dichotomy (as facilitated by Bourdieu’s intervention). In the wake of a postmodernist assault on the high/low culture divide, the traditional trope of taste – a two-headed Hydra, with one head looking towards artistic quality, the other towards mass appeal – no longer holds. As has been recently demonstrated, not only is there an increasing understanding of how the intersection of categories of class, gender, age and ethnicity bear on the judgements of taste, but also of how taste is itself becoming increasingly omnivorous, where this omnivorousness itself is becoming a marker of distinction (Bennett et al. 2009). How are we to think, then, about the issue of cultural value in this new landscape? The answer – suggested by the ‘Bad Cinema’ conference – seems to be in accord with the move implemented in other fields of inquiry operating under the condition of ‘after’, where the focus of critical attention is shifting to the singularity of occurrence and expression, or what Giorgio Agamben (1993) defines as ‘whatever singularity’, whether it is subjectivity, moral and ethical choice, or the theorizing of cultural work. Similarly, the discourse of