Abstract
This chapter begins with an overview of the academic literature on the increasing hostility to multiculturalism in neoliberal societies. The scapegoating of immigrants for the systemic failures of neoliberal capitalism is countered in the French-language films of Michael Haneke through a focus on the class interests that motivate French resistance to multiculturalism. The chapter examines how ambiguity in Haneke’s oeuvre exposes the differences between the insecurity of marginalized groups and the manufactured moral panics of bourgeois elites, ethically implicating the viewer in the discriminatory logic of xenophobic displacements of neoliberal crisis. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Haneke’s antagonistic authorship which is related to the class particularism of earlier art cinema.
In France today, the development of racism is generally presented as a crisis phenomenon, the more or less inevitable, more or less resistible effect of an economic crisis, but also a crisis that is political, moral or cultural. This assessment of the situation contains a mixture of incontrovertible factors, on the one hand, and of evasions and more or less deliberate obfuscations, on the other.
—Étienne Balibar, “Racism and Crisis” in Race, Nation, Class
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Notes
- 1.
I am using the term “multiculturalism” to denote the racial, ethnic and cultural diversity of a particular society, and the phrase “multicultural encounters” to denote the meeting between two or more people of different racial, ethnic or cultural backgrounds. My use of the term “multiculturalism” should not be confused with “multicultural policies” of specific nation-states, which typically encompass state support for cultural and arts programs of marginalized groups, the diversification of educational and media initiatives, legal recognition of the collective rights of disadvantaged groups, favorably differential treatment of marginal communities based on their distinct cultures and traditions and the promotion of greater inclusion of underrepresented constituencies in government, education and other fields (Guttman 1994). These policies have, for the most part, not been adopted in France, whose Republican definition of citizenship is hostile to any communal or group-based articulations of identity and rights (Hargreaves 1997; Blatt 1997; Zask 2001).
- 2.
In most of Haneke’s films, the bourgeois household is susceptible to invasion and under the constant threat of dissolution, but in his German-language cinema, it either destroys itself or is assailed by members of its own class. The Seventh Continent is about a white, middle-class family whose members decide to destroy all of their possessions and commit collective suicide; Benny’s Video (1992) is about a boy from a white, middle-class family who is obsessed with violent video imagery and commits a heinous murder; Funny Games is about a white, middle-class family whose members are terrorized in their summer home by two sadistic white bourgeois youths; 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) is about a white, middle-class couple who adopt a Romanian boy, introducing cultural difference into the bourgeois home for the first time, but in an unthreatening way and on the family’s own terms.
- 3.
The intruders in this scene do not appear to be of a different ethnic, racial or national background than the Laurents, but they do seem to be of a different social class. In the apocalyptic conditions that prevail in Time of the Wolf, the stability of the social hierarchy that preserves class distinctions has broken down. So while this home invasion does not constitute a multicultural encounter per se, it replicates the social dynamics that inform multicultural confrontations in the rest of Haneke’s cinema, namely, the rise in power of marginalized groups and the experience of this by the bourgeoisie as a traumatic loss of rights and privileges.
- 4.
All dialogue excerpts are based on the French-language dialogue as it is heard in the DVD releases of the films (based on subtitles and author’s translations).
- 5.
In the era of globalization, the prospects of immigrants are dependent on their position in relation to a series of competing discourses and interests: national immigration controls and citizenship laws versus international human rights provisions, the interests of transnational capital versus those of nation-states, de facto discrimination along the axes of gender, religion and race versus de jure impartiality and color-blindness. Lydia Morris argues that what results from this set of competing regulations is social stratification (Morris 2002). Aihwa Ong notes that the criteria used to establish social stratification in the neoliberal era reflect market values of efficiency, productivity, entrepreneurialism and competitiveness: “On the one hand, citizenship elements such as entitlements and benefits are increasingly associated with neoliberal criteria, so that mobile individuals who possess human capital or expertise are highly valued and can exercise citizenship-like claims in diverse locations. Meanwhile, citizens who are judged not to have such tradable competence or potential become devalued and thus vulnerable to exclusionary practices” (Ong 2006, 6–7).
- 6.
Nikolaj Lübecker asserts that there is an ethical ambivalence to manipulative narration such as that found in Haneke’s French-language films, because the methods used to instill certain values in the viewer go against the spirit of those values: “these films all share an ethical ambiguity that results from … [that fact that] the directors do exactly what they warn us against. They work with aggression, coercion, manipulation and a ‘lack of empathy’ … but they do all this in an attempt to … [promote] warmer, healthier, more empathetic and human relations” (Lübecker 2015, 37).
- 7.
According to Pierre Bourdieu, the importance of the grandes écoles is evidence of a postwar shift in the primary mechanism by which the French state secures the interests of the dominant classes, relying more on ideological than on repressive state apparatuses: “physical coercion and repression [gave way] to the milder dissimulated constraints of symbolic violence, with the police and prison system, privileged by adolescent denunciation and its extensions in scholarly discourse, becoming less important in the maintenance of the social order than the school and authorities of cultural production” (Bourdieu 1996, 386–387). The resurgence of state violence since 1970, directed internally against its own residents, has been fueled in part by the repatriation and reintegration of colonial settlers, many of whom instilled in the postcolonial French state the virulently racist and hierarchical “administrative methods and habits” acquired during colonial rule (Balibar 2004, 35–42).
- 8.
Excerpt from French-language interview with Michael Haneke conducted by Serge Toubiana, included in the “special features” of The Seventh Continent DVD (author’s translation).
- 9.
Wallerstein’s call for a continuous dialectical exchange between particularism and universalism echoes Satya Mohanty’s contention that we must respect cultural difference while retaining a moral universalism, constructed out of the diverse experiences and points of view of all members of multicultural societies. These universal values should not be imposed by dominant groups but rather worked out through cross-cultural dialogue (Mohanty 1997, 240).
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Lykidis, A. (2020). Multiculturalism as Class Trauma: Antagonistic Authorship in Caché, Code Unknown, Happy End and Time of the Wolf. In: Art Cinema and Neoliberalism. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61006-7_6
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