Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania: Life Under the Totalitarian Gaze [1 ed.] 9783031188053, 9783031188060

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Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania Life Under the Totalitarian Gaze Adriana Cordali

Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania

Adriana Cordali

Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania Life Under the Totalitarian Gaze

Adriana Cordali Frederick Community College Frederick, MD, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-18805-3    ISBN 978-3-031-18806-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18806-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Introduction Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania fills a gap in scholarship on the visual rhetorics of communist propaganda. It  is the result of years of research and a lifetime of deliberate contemplation of various experiences. First, as a child and young woman, I lived in Romania’s restrictive dictatorship and witnessed a violent revolution at an impressionable age, all of which of course I took personally at the time. Living  and working in Romania and other countries, cultural differences and interactions between people holding various preconceptions  fascinated me; and finally, as a transnational scholar, I had the chance to theorize some of the events I had lived in Romania through new lenses I discovered by reading. I have come a long way. The book is about what was in/visible in a regime I intimately knew growing up. When I was able to leave Romania for the United States, I had no idea what to expect but was prepared to start my life over without ever using my background in art, literature, education, and international studies in my career. This book, however, incorporates a lot of knowledge I gained along the way. I probably owe my preoccupation with  understanding the design and purpose of propaganda materials to what I learned while attending the visual arts secondary institution in my native Cluj-­ Napoca, the “Romulus Ladea” Visual Arts College, which emphasized pencil and charcoal drawing, water and oil painting, and art history, while theorizing about design elements, composition, color theory, and the Golden

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Ratio in painting. Later, my interest in sociopolitical issues grew when the violent Revolution of 1989 taught me to put things in perspective and contextualize that experience to the previously-forbidden-to-us larger world. It was a way of growing up by burning stages. So then, in my year of graduate studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy, on a generous scholarship, I could eventually learn about the world what I had never been able to learn living behind the Iron Curtain. I began to conceptualize this book in my doctoral studies at Illinois State University while discovering visual rhetoric and its ability to demystify persuasive moves, including political ones. It became apparent to me that a book of this kind should exist and that, in fact, it should be written by someone who experienced the communist regime in an unmediated manner. Therefore, in this book, I look with different eyes at the communist regime’s materials so familiar to my younger self, to explain how vectors of power intended to convince. This endeavor seemed easy and gratifying because it meant returning to familiar territories and retrieving memories. However, I quickly became aware of the precarious nature of my topic related to communism, especially given political orientations and investments of most people in the United States. When writing this book, I often found myself walking a fine line, at times over blurred borders or crossing through mined territories. Communism may stir strong feelings in many people, whether they lived through it or not. But here I do my best to resist moral judgments about socialism or communism as ideologies. Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania is not another demonstration of “good ideas gone wrong” or about philosophies born in the nineteenth century at the time when industrialization called for societal restructuring of capital and economic forces. In the last century and a half, ideas on the left—from Marxism to socialism to communism—have constantly changed and gained subtle nuances in various contexts, becoming loaded terms,  much like ideas on the right. What remains is the undeniable truth that extremes of both orientations have created horrific totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. Without minimizing the leftist or rightist ideologies that inform totalitarian regimes, we should instead distinguish between extremes and the center as a necessary line of inquiry in contemporary public rhetorics, especially with the rise of right extremism often perpetuated by former communist totalitarian regimes (such as Russia in the twenty-first century so far). The opposite of totalitarianism of either orientation is democracy. Totalitarianisms do not oppose each other; in fact, they have

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a lot in common, as different as they may appear. To return to Romania, the entanglement between totalitarianism and the kind of national communism promoted by Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu has resulted in a perplexity about terms. Given that we are still in the early stages of disentangling the rhetorical confusion left behind when the regimes in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed, a rhetorical insistence persists about those times, in public and political spaces: People feel compelled to identify those who might continue the communist legacy, both in rhetoric and in practices; and of course, some look backward with nostalgia. But what the communist legacy consists in is not clearly defined. Most people often cry “communism” in practices of intolerance and corruption as those had perpetuated throughout decades of society overpoliticization when decision-­making was rooted in political affiliation rather than capabilities. I walk another fine line when I predicate my analyses of the 1989 Romanian Revolution on its spontaneous, popular uprising component. I trace the role of the violence in the two revolutions that framed the communist period—the first one after World War II when communism was imposed in Romania by outside forces through a fabricated “revolution,” and the second one being the 1989 uprising, when people showed agency in bringing down the communist regime and toppling its dictator. I demonstrate that people participating in the resistance to communism and the Revolution of 1989 resorted to violent methods in the same way as the establishment had done at the installation of the communist regime: Armed resistance and people’s refusal to give up land for collectivization were also met with violence and murder. Here, I call the events of 1989 a “Revolution,” although I am fully aware of the large spectrum of participating forces at the time; and I also know that some call it a coup d’état. Again, I cast no moral judgment, nor do I claim to solve the mystery of the 1989 uprising. Instead, I direct the reader to excellent scholarship that examines all these facets—a valid research line without which the bigger picture of what happened in those days may elude us. Experientially, at the time I witnessed the Revolution, I saw in it the idealistic pursuit of righting a wrong, and like most Romanians, I allowed myself to be carried away with that hope, resisting the thought that secret forces started it, or planned to confiscate it, for personal gains or will to power. We now know more about those days. But when I analyze the flag with the hole that emerged in the days of the Revolution, I look at the population’s agentic forces while obscuring from

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view the aspects that expound the revolution as a coup made by a faction of the Communist Party against itself. Additionally, while the Revolution is known to many as an anti-­ communist uprising, I argue that its ideals of toppling a dynastic power can be construed as inherently leftist. In this sense, the fine line between political orientations is once again blurred. Had the totalitarian regime become so oppressive that it had fascist traits, given its nationalistic component? Was it despotic? Are anti-totalitarian revolutions inevitably leftist in pursuit  because they aim at taking back the power for the people? Perhaps the right and the left definitions of old times are too reductionist for contemporary politics. I call myself lucky for having lived in various regimes and for being able to write this book. At the same time as I provide insight into a geographical place and historical time I came to know by close contact, the theoretical work I undertake here should come first: The personal accounts and instances of my life add a local color to this book but are secondary to what visual rhetorical analyses can teach us all, whether we have lived through such events or not. This book is not meant to be exhaustive but rather a beginning—a mere attempt to bring into view and demystify the bearings, symbolisms, semiotics, and semantics of propaganda materials from a specific chronotope (time + space), the Communist period of Eastern Europe. I feel the overwhelming burden of responsibility in the act of choosing the best resources and images to include. Frame setting is in fact a rhetorical act, as I clarify in this book. If in this book I leave out of view other considerations, it is because of the foreseeable spatial limits and the scope of this endeavor. As far as the choice of visual materials to analyze, images of communism can be difficult to find a few decades after the fall, despite their ubiquity in that historical time. I am grateful to my friend Orlando Balaș for pictures he sent me, and to Zoltan Tibori Szabo, president of the Minerva Archive, for a trove of formidable photographs from the time; without access to the archive, this book would have been much poorer in visual materials. Because such materials contain within themselves meanings that are at once similar and different, contingent on the lenses we put on to see them, this book is merely an invitation to other scholars and researchers to further analyze the visual rhetorics of materials used by powerful forces in totalitarian or communist regimes. Frederick, MD, USA

Adriana Cordali

Acknowledgments

I do not have enough words and space to express my gratitude to all my previous teachers, professors, mentors, and colleagues for their inspiration. I have received priceless help along the way. First, I am grateful to the reviewer, Dr. Cezar Ornatowski, for his expertise and for carefully reading the book manuscript more than once. His valuable feedback significantly improved my work. I thank Palgrave Macmillan and the editors who patiently guided me through the process of publication. I am also indebted to the kindness of Minerva Archive’s president, Zoltan Tibori Szabo, who gave me permission to use a few photographs from the extraordinary collection depicting Romania’s Communist regime. I am grateful to my friend Orlando Balaș and Cristian Delcea for personal pictures they sent me to include in this book. My doctoral committee members at Illinois State University, Drs. Angela Haas, Julie Jung, and Christopher Breu, for their wisdom and commitment to earlier versions of this project, namely, my doctoral dissertation, from which I carried into this book some research and ideas. Professors at all the education institutions I attended marked my academic growth, believed in my work, and encouraged me. Friends and colleagues have read excerpts from this book while in the making, and I thank them. I warmly thank Dr. Noemi Marin for fruitful discussions about the rhetoric of a regime we both knew firsthand. Finally, I warmly dedicate this book to friends and family; without the love and support of my parents, Rodica and Romulus Cordali, and of my daughter, Julia, who mostly saw me studying or working all her life, I ix

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couldn’t have finalized this work. My five grandparents I refer to in the book, grandfathers (Ioan, József, and Constantin) and grandmothers (Valeria and Anica), lived to see both totalitarian regimes, times of war, and regime change. Without them, I wouldn’t be who I am. I have come a long way.

Contents

Part I Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania: Life Under the Totalitarian Gaze   1 1 Introduction  3 A Personal Story   3 Access Points  17 Assumptions  19 Frame of Reference  24 Approaches to Visual Propaganda  34 Basic Terminology  38 References  44 2 Living  in the Totalitarian World 47 Decree 770 of 1966  48 Toward a Visuality of Communism  56 Imagery and Visuality  56 A Countervisuality  61 The Importance of History  65 References  73

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Part II Visual Rhetorics of Power: The Communist Gaze  77 3 Communist  Propaganda: Imagery, Propaganda, and Rhetorical Grounding 79 The Nature of Totalitarian Rhetoric  80 Presence and Absence: Hypostases of the Totalitarian Communist Rhetorical Landscape  83 “Us Versus Them”  85 Self-Affirmation and Monologism  97 Hyperbole, Militarism, and Cult of Personality 105 The Gaze, Panopticism, and Surveillance 111 Can Epistemic Violence Be Visualized? 117 References 122 4 Visual  Rhetorical Analyses of Propaganda in Late-­ Communist Romania125 Visual Tropes of Communist Propaganda Materials 125 A Visual Rhetorical Exercise 131 An Image and Its Negative 132 Communist Propaganda Materials Through Visual Rhetoric 141 The Incessant Repetition of the Political Slogan 142 The Ubiquity of the President’s Representation 146 References 159 Part III Visual Rhetorics of Resistance: A Silver Lining 161 5 Asserting  a Presence: Rhetorics in Time of the 1989 Revolution and Early Post-­Communism163 Visual Rhetorics of Resistance 163 The Revolution of 1989 164 The Revolution’s Imagistic Aspect: Turning the Absence into a Presence 169 The Holed Flag: Reclaiming the Void 170 Monuments as Visual Rhetorical Presence 173 Visual Rhetoric in the Revolution’s Aftermath 176 Conclusion 180 References 183

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Part IV Bridging the Past and Present in Post/Communism 185 6 Returning  the Gaze: The Visual Rhetorics of Resistance187 Cristian Mungiu’s Film 4,3,2 and Its Contexts 188 Embodied Rhetorics of Resistance: A Biopolitical Reading of 4,3,2 192 The Violence of the Law 194 Resisting from the Negative Place 197 Cinematic Visuality as Rhetoric in 4,3,2 203 Visualizing the Absence and the Epistemic Violence 205 Conclusion 212 References 215 7 Back  to the Future?219 References 232 Bibliography235 Index247

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4

Fig. 1.5

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1

Pioneers at an award ceremony at the border checkpoint Borș, Bihor County, Romania. Pioneers were celebrated at the border, where they were told that they were the defenders of the country. Courtesy of Orlando Balaș’s private collection. Used with permission 9 Cover of the Femeia (Woman) Magazine of December 1984. Photo used with permission from Orlando Balaș10 The patriotic pioneers. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1985_c1_c7r5_006)11 In this photograph, pioneers participate in Communist celebrations on a stage; notice the hammer and sickle symbol and the PCR abbreviation of the Romanian Communist Party. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1972_c4_ c8r3_017)12 School children, dressed in the pioneer attire, in a May 1 parade in Cluj in 1972. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1972_c4_c10r5_012)13 Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1987-1991_c2_c6r10_003)51 Propaganda meetings. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1971_c3_c5r1_002)89

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Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8

Fig. 4.9

Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1985_c2_ c5r1_004)104 A May 1st parade: celebrating Romanianness. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1970_Agrare_c1_c10r4_009) 106 Youth in a parade. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_ 1966-1972-c1-c16-003) 110 A May 1st parade in the center of Cluj. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1970_Agrare_c1_c10r4_026) 115 Men celebrating as part of a parade. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1985_c2_c6r3_051) 116 Sănătatea (Health) magazine cover. (Used with permission from Orlando Balaș. (color)) 127 Femeia (Woman) magazine cover. (Used with permission from Orlando Balaș)129 Ceaușescu on TV in a dark room. (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1982_c3_c8r2_024)) 133 Ceaușescu in the negative of Fig. 4.3. (Photo modified by Aaron Heiner with permission from the President of the Minerva Archive, Prof. Zoltan Tibori Szabo) 134 Ceaușescu’s book Romania on the Way of Building Up the Multilaterally Developed Socialist Society. (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1987_c2_c6r5_005)) 143 Femeia magazine cover. Used with permission from Orlando Balaș147 Femeia magazine cover. (Used with permission from Orlando Balaș)150 Slogan and presidential portrait on a building. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1983-1984_ c2_c5r5_008)153 Slogan and portrait in preparation of a rally. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1983-1984_c2_c5r5_010) 154

  LIST OF FIGURES 

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4

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The Holed Flag during the Romanian Revolution in Cluj. (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the President of the Minerva Cultural Association, Dr. Zoltán Tibori Szabó) 171 The monument to the Soviet tank in Cluj, defaced in early 1990. (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1987-1991_c2_c3r1_003))174 The front page of Adevărul newspaper, Bucharest, Romania, May 20, 1990. (Used with permission from Cristian Delcea) 178 The Communist Party newspaper in Cluj until 1990, Făclia (The Flame). (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_reproduceri_c1_poze_006).)180

PART I

Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania: Life Under the Totalitarian Gaze

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A Personal Story Growing up in Cluj, in the late seventies and early eighties, my connection to the world was through Voice of America’s broadcast in Romanian. Father and I often whistled together “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” in the opening of the program. The voice from America, speaking in Romanian, though illegal to listen to, refreshed our ears used to the so-called “wooden language” of the state-controlled media. Around that time, walking through my city once, a feeling started growing in me, that I would leave my Cluj and go look for that America of the joyful song, where people seemed happy and spoke freely. I didn’t know at the time that we didn’t have the actual right to own a passport. […] [O]nce, at about 13, returning from school with a group of friends, I casually said that I wished the previous evening they had shown a movie instead of Comrade Ceauşescu’s “genial speech.” […] Little did I know I’d said something wrong. A woman dressed as an Army officer, walking in front of me, stopped and pulled me aside. “Listen, little girl,” she said. “I don’t know who you are, but I can find out. Be careful what you say. Your father can go to prison.” My cheeks burned with shame. My words died. All I could see was her index finger close to my face. And I thought of my second grade Comrade Teacher of English, who once hit the tips of my fingers with a wooden rule. I had forgotten my homework. Pain like I had never felt before propagated through my veins up to my heart. I wanted to know why she needed me to hurt. But you were not supposed to talk back to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cordali, Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18806-0_1

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Comrade Teacher or raise your eyes at her. The Comrade Officer instead, made me feel dizzy, wishing I could disappear from the face of the earth. Her manicured fingers, veins invisible under her skin, made me remember my secret theory that hands evinced people’s handling of others. My mother had pretty, smiling hands; my father’s were sensitive. Only Grandma Anica’s, with bulging blue veins underneath soft skin, were the kindest and most sincere. She kept telling my father to stop speaking up his mind, or he may be taken away one day. None of us believed that could happen. Now this Comrade Officer said the same thing. Was it possible? Later that year, my headmaster Comrade Teacher told me she knew I said jokes that could be interpreted as political and wished that I’d stop [telling] them. She just wanted me to know that eyes were watching and ears were listening.1

I am a child of Communism. I also belong to a generation born as a result of an antiabortion decree passed by Romanian Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1966. More than two decades later, that same generation was instrumental in ousting him from power, in the only anti-Communist Revolution in Eastern Europe that resulted in bloodshed. Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, were executed on Christmas Day, 1989. I was 22 years old when the 1989 Romanian Revolution broke out. Up until then, I witnessed no regime change in my lifetime. An old, wonderful settlement in the mythical region of Transylvania, my native city of Cluj-Napoca in Romania was first recognized as a city in 1316 by Charles I, King of Hungary and Croatia, although it has ruins from the Roman occupation in the second century, when it was called Napoca. Resplendent with old gothic and baroque buildings that peacefully coexist with new brutalist structures built in Communism, Cluj has an eclectic architecture revelatory of the region’s rich, multicultural history, fondly embraced by its inhabitants. Many ethnic and religious groups have lived there together for centuries, under Romanian, Hungarian, or Austrian rule.2 For a long time, I lived on a street called Lenin Boulevard in Cluj. Every town had a Lenin Street, and one city (Brașov) was even renamed as Stalin Town for a period of time. In Cluj, it was a long, broad street that 1   Adriana  Gradea, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Cluj.” The  Romanian American Journal for the Humanities, 1, no. 1 (2017): 8–9, http://rahjournal.org/journal-creativeexpressions. In this personal essay—winner of the 2009 James Ballowe award at Bradley University in Peoria, IL—I describe my native city and some of my personal experiences growing up in the Transylvanian city of Cluj. 2  Ibid.

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still crosses the city along an East-West line. Lenin Boulevard marked my being in the world throughout my youth, in symbolic ways. My address read Lenin Boulevard twice, in fact. First, growing up, in middle school, I lived in a building next to that of the local government. I remember that, at that time, I once had a vivid dream of people rising against the regime in street protest, marching from East to West, in a denotative movement I missed at the time. In the essay “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Cluj,”3 I described the hopeful dream prompted by Grandma Anica’s words once when we talked about the changes of the 1980s when food was hard to come by: “Well, they can’t do this to people. People won’t take it. They’ll get out in the streets. It’s just not fair!” As a young teenager, I waited for a miracle (see Fig. 5.1, which shows revolutionaries in front of the governmental building in Cluj during the Revolution; at the time, I was living steps away from that place): I started to listen for sounds of a revolt in the passers-by. What was the sound of people starting to “not take it anymore?” I didn’t know what I wanted to hear, or if I wanted to hear it. Galloping heartbeat in my ears made me think I had a heart in my head, but after it quieted down, the noises outside proved benign, of peaceful people going about their lives. […] One night, however, falling asleep with a worried mind, I had a vivid dream about people in the streets carrying flags, shouting, marching. In a dark, stage-like atmosphere, people with genuine proletarian rage were really going to change the world. Voices of people walking with courage came from the main street, Lenin Boulevard, from across the big county government’s building. Lenin Boulevard was a long street, parallel with “March 6th” Street, and it was crossing the entire city from the east end to the west. In my dream, walking westwards, the nearby mass manifestation was liberating and exhilarating by its mere novelty. But it was frightening too! Like a wave, its force was growing, taking afloat my impressionable little soul, to engulf the entire nation.4

Years later, as a young woman, I lived on Lenin Boulevard again, in a different part of town, when on December 1989 I heard machine guns blasting through the city at night. Then, when the noise died down for a few minutes, still terrified as I was lying on the living room floor in the dark, with my cousin, I heard an eerie noise. From my fifth-floor window 3 4

 Ibid.  Ibid., pp. 10–11.

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that oversaw the city, I could see Army tanks retreating on Lenin Boulevard, eastward, toward the Someșeni5 Army base. The tanks’ rattling sound was disturbing and novel, yet comforting after many hours of thundering gun noise. The symbolism of their eastward march escaped me at the time. Lenin Boulevard, therefore, marked my youth, and still inhabits me, decades later. As Gaston Bachelard explains in The Poetics of Space,6 places (and much more) are “physically inscribed in us.” I would posit that names of places we used to live in are also inscribed in us, especially when they are linked to historically significant times and ideology we inhabit each other. While the street is still there, it has since been renamed “Boulevard 21st of December 1989” to celebrate the date the anti-totalitarian and anti-­ Communist Revolution came to Cluj-Napoca. I witnessed the birth of that street’s name, the conversion from “Lenin” to the “Day of the Revolution,” which is the day when I heard the guns and saw the tanks roll eastward. That moment split my life—as well as the nation’s collective life—into a “before and after.”7 * * * Our intricate relationships with place, space, and various environments inform the way we make sense of the world and how we relate to, or engage in agency with, visual rhetorical representations of it. My rhetorical approach in this book historicizes and honors the diverse conditions from which I have come to know and create, which include my time growing up in Communist Romania. This book is partly about my life in a totalitarian regime and mainly about its inescapably hyperpresent ideology through propaganda. Immersed in the regime’s visuality and growing up under the totalitarian propaganda’s gaze, I first became aware I was part of a larger story when, around middle school, I heard about Romania’s baby-boomer generation to which I belonged (people born 1966–1972). Although, as Karen Barad states, there is a certain “inseparability of knowing, being, and doing,”8 physical being takes chronological precedence over knowing 5  In my PhD dissertation (Adriana Gradea, “Post/Communist Visual Rhetorics of Power and Resistance,” Illinois State University, 2019),  where I make reference to this event, I mistakenly refer to the suburb as Florești instead of Someșeni. 6  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014), p. 36. 7  Of course, this was not the only such demarcation for me; since coming to the United States, another layer of “before and after” occurred. 8  Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and The Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2007), p. 380.

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about being in the world. When I learned I belonged to a large generation, all I knew then was a fraternity with children my age, an idea ostensibly reinforced by Communism’s collectivist ideology. At the time, this meant little more than lots of children around to play with in the neighborhood, overcrowded classrooms and schoolyards, or being proudly considered the “country’s bright future” by the Communist government’s propaganda. But I belonged. However, I rarely thought about the way I came to be in the world in those times. I did not want to carry that thought too far, for fear of what I would find at the other end of it. People in this largest generation in Romanian history have been called decreţei9 in Romanian, a derivative of the word decret (“decree law”) because they were born as a result of Decree 770 of 1966. The Decree banned “all contraceptives, sex education, and abortion and increased taxes for single men and childless couples.”10 Decret ̧ei approximately translates to “decreelings”11 (“children of the decree”), which maintains its original Romanian diminutive form. I thought of it as a term of endearment that gave me warm, fuzzy feelings of appurtenance. I now see it as a label: A linguistic inscription of that government’s legislation on our generation’s existence. As  an appropriation of us through political power, decreeling carved legislation, if not on my body, certainly on my sense of being in the world. It defined my existence in the reductionist terminology of belonging to a group that was important to the regime, alluding to both how we came into being and our envisioned mission to forge the “country’s bright Communist future,” as claimed by a slogan I always heard on TV. Most of the people in our generation interiorized the message. Sara Ahmed states that “knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and sensation; knowledge is bound up with what makes us sweat, shudder, tremble, all those feelings that are crucially felt on the bodily surface, the skin surface where we touch and are touched in the world.”12 Indeed, embodied knowledge is “very clearly connected to

9  Although the origin of the term decret ̧el is unclear, it probably originated with everyday people, who understood the relationship between governmental legislation and the baby boom, and thus found a term to denote this phenomenon. 10  Leidig, Michael,  “Romania Still Faces High Abortion Rate 16 Years after Fall of Ceauşescu. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 331, (2005), p. 1043. 11  Henceforth, I will use the English form decreeling. 12  Quoted in A. Abby Knoblauch, “Bodies of Knowledge: Definitions, Delineations, and Implications of Embodied Writing in the Academy.” Composition Studies, 40, no. 2 (2012), p. 54.

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the body,”13 and propaganda intended to create this link, especially for the country’s children. The propaganda machine first put into discourse14 this materiality of my being-in-the-world in positive ideological terms. Communist Romania’s natalist policies in Decree 770 were part of the country’s larger project. In her extensive book on Ceaușescu’s reproductive policies, Gail Kligman explains that “Socialist states, driven by command economies, actively pursued their revolutionary goals through massive social engineering projects […] mobilization and control of the population were of critical strategic importance for the maximization of development potential.”15 Indeed, I learned as early as preschool that I was supposed to love the President as a father, even to call him as such, which was in line with the cult of personality that started to take flight in those years. Ceaușescu encouraged it, as dictators do. We were also pushed to perform and compete against each other in competitive schools and national competitions called Olympiads.16 This race for the first place was an extension of the larger competition between East and West that the Communist Bloc engaged in during the Cold War. The East had to always prove its superiority. Consequently, this competition had a militant aspect. I saw firsthand society’s militarization as one of the features of totalitarian Communism in Romania when we did shooting practice in high school. Similarly to its role in Fascist totalitarianism, militarization glues together patriotism and performance, school and army, and love for the country with love for the single Party. Conscription was in place for all men and for women enrolled at the university level. Everybody participated in military practice in  Ibid.  In my visual rhetorical analyses, I will use poststructuralist Michel Foucault’s (1981) understanding of discourse as a way of constructing knowledge highly connected with power structures, as well as his concept of episteme as the conditions of producing knowledge in a given time and place. (See Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed.  Robert Young, Boston, London, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1981, pp. 48–78). 15  Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 19. 16  All education in Communist Romania was public (since in such a system the government owns and controls everything) and had specialized high schools that sometimes included the middle school grades. All schools followed a unique, centralized curriculum and textbooks, but schools added extra emphasis on a discipline, from mathematics to chemistry to ballet. All high schools required competitive entrance exams, which were repeated mid-high school, and all students’ grades were always announced in class to everyone. Many of these practices are still in place, in what I call an overemphasis on the epistemological. 13 14

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Fig. 1.1  Pioneers at an award ceremony at the border checkpoint Borș, Bihor County, Romania. Pioneers were celebrated at the border, where they were told that they were the defenders of the country. Courtesy of Orlando Balaș’s private collection. Used with permission

secondary school, at the university level, and in workplaces. Periodically, shooting exercises were organized for everyone through workplaces. Additionally, the government took pride in us as children of the Decree and matriculated us early on in organizations called the Country’s Falcons and Pioneers. This may sound similar to the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts organizations in the United States; however, being a Falcon or a Pioneer in Communist Romania was mandatory for every child in the country, and enrollment was through schools, which were all public and required the same kind of uniform throughout the entire nation (see Figs.  1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5). As schools were government owned, they were also equally politicized and subject to propaganda as was the entire public space: These organizations prepared us for later serving the country as members of the only Party on the political stage, the Romanian Communist Party. After first belonging to the Pioneer Organization, we were automatically enrolled in the Union of the Communist Youth in high school. Figure 1.1 illustrates the link between these organizations for students and

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Fig. 1.2  Cover of the Femeia (Woman) Magazine of December 1984. Photo used with permission from Orlando Balaș

the Party’s ideology: a group of Pioneers received their red tie at the Borș border checkpoint where they were inoculated with the idea that they were the defenders of the country. In addition to promoting a reassuring

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Fig. 1.3  The patriotic pioneers. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1985_c1_ c7r5_006)

sense of belonging, this militarism also happened in visually compelling ways. It also resembled Nazi Germany, where Hitler’s Youth served the same function in the propaganda machinery. In both contexts, the visual insignia was circumscribed to specific, ideologically driven aesthetics. Our uniforms carried Communist signifiers that included red scarves trimmed with a stripe in the national tricolor flag (red, yellow, and blue), medals of valor pinned to our chests on a white blouse, and symbols of hierarchy with the organization’s leadership.

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Fig. 1.4  In this photograph, pioneers participate in Communist celebrations on a stage; notice the hammer and sickle symbol and the PCR abbreviation of the Romanian Communist Party. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1972_c4_c8r3_017)

On the other hand, invisible to us at the time was the fact that the regime employed fear as an instrument of control. Although people in my generation knew little at the time about prisoners or victims of the regime, the authorities coercively sanctioned any misalignment with the propaganda. Historian Dennis Deletant, a specialist in Romanian history, chronicles how the Securitate (secret police) became the feared instrument of Communist Romania when it adopted the “Stalinist practice of mass arrests

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Fig. 1.5  School children, dressed in the pioneer attire, in a May 1 parade in Cluj in 1972. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1972_c4_c10r5_012)

and imprisonment without trial.”17 Similarly, Andrei Codrescu talks about the Securitate punishing writers suspected of dissidence with lethal doses of radiation for having “unauthorized thoughts.”18 Deliberate thought 17  Dennis Deletant, Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), p. 105. 18  Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991), p. 137.

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policing happened at every level. One day, a lady in Army Officer attire stopped me in the street for casually mentioning to my friends that I had preferred to see a movie instead of Comrade Ceauşescu’s “genial speech” on TV the previous evening; phrases such as “the Genius of the Carpathians” and “the Oak of Scorniceşti (Ceauşescu’s birthplace)” were loudly spoken on TV about the Comrade President. Some people even mocked and joked about such fabricated terms, although they did it in private. Only one TV channel existed in the country, and it increasingly showed propaganda exclusively, in a broadcasting schedule reduced to two hours per day. There were food rations too, and electricity and heating were cut for most of the day. The “Comrade” Army Officer lady wanted to intimidate me and to quiet my voice. Andrei Codrescu summarized it right when he stated that, “For all those years Romania’d been a nation of whisperers, people buried deep under a snow-like blanket of fear,”19 because silence was better. Codrescu explains the suppressed speech in the following way: Throughout my childhood I believed that one had to lower one’s voice whenever speaking seriously. A normal tone of voice, possible to overhear, was reserved exclusively for trivia. One would use several tones in the course of a conversation, even with a single sentence. For instance, my mother would send me to stand in line for bread. As she handed me the ration book, she would say in a normal voice, “if there are enough coupons,” and then, lowering her voice even more, “and you find out what people are saying.” This last phrase was well understood. We stood in breadlines not just for bread but also for the news. The breadline was our newspaper since the actual newspapers printed nothing but lies. Rumors, innuendos, and mishearing made the rounds faster than print anyway.20

I learned to keep my silence. Words had to vanish into nonexistence. But I knew it was wrong. * * * Communism has now ended, but its survivors are still among us and I am one of them. In this book, I embrace the role of a “translator of culture.”21  Ibid., p. 138.  Ibid., p. 145. 21  I thank my friend and mentor Dr. Noemi Marin for the enlightening discussion about our roles as transnational scholars who engage in translating cultures for various contexts, mediating the understanding between nations. 19 20

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Having witnessed Romania’s Communist regime and the Revolution in real time, I can provide insight into a geographical place and historical time (or chronotope; cf. Mikhail Bakhtin) that I knew in an unmediated manner. I did not have a voice at the time. During Communism, the government did not listen and we could not talk to the outside world. But we had our sight. On the other hand, I was a youth like millions of others, with an unremarkable life.22 I was not a victim of persecution; it is true that my maternal grandfather had been imprisoned without a trial in the Stalinist period when my mother and her sister were 3 and 1, respectively; but we did not talk about that. I grew up in a middle-class family, although that was different than being a child in a middle-class family in the United States or other parts of the world. I also caution about the subjectivity at work here.23 I do not intend to fetishize my experience as a given that would set me apart from others in both being and knowing because experiences such as mine may be familiar to many people, in many countries, and in various points in history. However, it gives me an advantage in this book. As an eyewitness, I intend my references to lived instances to be secondary to, yet supportive of, the theoretical work I build. While standpoint epistemology is a working hypothesis, I know that people cannot all live through every circumstance of the world; however, we can intellectually understand oppressive situations and issues of right and wrong, as well as sociopolitical regimes we can merely imagine. Additionally, most people who lived in those times filtered what they saw through a sieve, as a survival tactic. My eyes saw, but my mind either could not entirely process or intently avoided noticing the heaviness of the propaganda, people waiting 22  For a wonderful memoir of a family that was the victim of the Securitate (Communist Romania’s secret police), see Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter: A Memoir (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012). 23  However, because the problem is not with standpoint theory itself, I agree with NigerianAmerican Georgetown University professor Olufemi O. Taiwo (2020), who observes as follows: “The call to ‘listen to the most affected’ or ‘center the most marginalized’ is ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles. But […] In my experience, when people say they need to ‘listen to the most affected,’ it isn’t because they intend to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people. Instead, it has more often meant handling conversational authority and attentional goods to those who most snugly fit into the social categories associated with these ills—regardless of what they actually do or do not know, or what they have or have not personally experienced (n.p.).” For instance, although I am a white woman who comes from a stable, educated, and middle-class Romanian family, being middle class in Communist Romania is different than being middle class in the United States.

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in line for food, dusty empty food stores, and the grayness of life outside the home. When all these were overwhelming in our everyday life, we looked for beauty and hope, making an effort to ignore the reductionist life and the lack of material things. It worked. I become more aware of this coping mechanism every time I revisit images of that time. I find out I never entirely forgot what those images depict, but that my eye had trained itself to skim over those realities at the time. Cezar Ornatowski asks “How did one learn to look past, to ignore, to screen out, to ‘tame’ visual propaganda in the landscape? Because one did that; one’s gaze automatically ‘purified’ the landscape besmirched at every point by the ever-present face of the ‘current leader’ and the slogan(s) of the day. Only after I immigrated to the US and visited (still communist) Poland after many years of absence, did I truly and shockingly notice the ugly blight of propaganda billboards and banners. But perhaps that was only my experience.”24 This is not a unique perspective, however: we noticed the differences for many years. I started looking at things with more intensity already in middle school, at a time when a set of events and conversations awoke me to what was aberrant around me. I still constantly revisit what I saw at the time, through various lenses, as time passes. What I saw then is seen again through new visualities, every time I look back. The unbinding of the visual takes effort, as well as informed, conscientious action. In this book, I analyze precisely the banishing of words in the face of propaganda’s insistence, the absence of a voice in those times, and the emptiness left behind in the wake of propaganda’s hypervisibility. I look at the visuality and visibility of this negative space where resistance brewed, hidden in the crevices, and where they found ways to become embodied. I redirect the collective gaze to the territory of the Second World of post/ Communism. Since the fall of Communism, a few books have approached the analysis of propaganda materials from various perspectives without, however, explicitly calling the examination a visual rhetorical one. Victoria Bonnell’s 1997 book Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin examines propagandistic artistic productions through their “genesis 24  Cezar Ornatowski, personal communication. Ornatowski also remembers how, as children in communist Poland, he and his friends “collected Western postcards from whoever happened to receive such, because they showed such a colorful world (compared to the greyness of our world) and because they showed places we would probably never be able to visit. They thus represented a ‘dream’ world that helped us endure the ‘grey’ world we lived in.” This also speaks to my experience as a child in Communist Romania.

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(origin, sources, history),” mythology, and possible interpretations given by contemporaries25 and offers an “analysis of the mental universe conjured up by political art.”26 More recently, The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power, edited by Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone, presents a collection of essays on the topic of the leader’s portrait, including one by Manuela Marin that focuses on Ceaușescu. In Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania, I attempt to bring into view and demystify the bearings, symbolisms, semiotics, and semantics of propaganda materials from the Communist period of Romania through my experience, and I show the limits for exercises of power and resistance within that regime. It contributes to previous studies by proposing analyses of the totalitarian gaze, the right to return the gaze, and the modalities to do so, within the dynamic of rhetorical absence/presence. The gaze is at once embodied and beholding of knowledge, to some degree.

Access Points By differentiating between various types of rhetorics along lines of political and institutional power structures, within a restrictive and reductionist totalitarian Communist society, Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania: Life Under the Totalitarian Gaze explicates rhetorical practices, in general, and, more importantly, the visual rhetorical interventions in such a regime by examining the ideology-infused propaganda artifacts specific to those times. This book presents features and visual tropes of the Communist propaganda; establishes the hypostases of absence and presence that the totalitarian sociopolitical system employed; looks at the resistance rhetoric in response to state propaganda; and draws possible historical lessons that are still relevant in shaping public knowledge. Additionally, I show that the epistemic violence and its visual rhetorical instances (visual epistemic violence) are better understood through the prism of the history they are predicated on. Informed by my life, I propose a Communist visuality that is complemented by a countervisuality to build a more accurate image of the authoritarian political power and those who engaged in resistance. This theoretical framework is completed with case studies applied to Romania as well as personal accounts from my life growing up in that country. 25   Victoria  Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 19. 26  Bonnell, p. 14.

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I situate the book at the intersections of rhetorical theories, visual rhetorical and cultural studies, biopolitics and embodied rhetoric, post/totalitarian and postcolonial studies, and feminism. In the wake of the so-called pictorial, digital, and material turns, this book conceptualizes a Communist visual rhetorical methodology that extends visual rhetorical studies to post/Communist areas. Propaganda is a feature of the public spaces, which have rhetorical bearings that reflect political practices, especially in a totalitarian regime, where the politicization is taken to extremes. Jacqueline Jones Royster remarks that public spaces should be recognized as “institutional space[s], that is, as circles of practice that are socially, politically, and culturally, endowed.”27 How is that different in totalitarian Communism? By inserting memories from my life in various places in the book, I underline the connection between life as existence and life as a learning process. Because I focus on rhetoric’s effect on people’s everyday lives, the definition of rhetoric I rely on in this book is also defined in terms of the relations between being and knowing. Malea Powell et al. illustrate this point by stating that rhetoric is the “art of knowing” that is “both a phenomenon” and “a practice (or set of practices) that produce meaning in very specific cultural or social circumstances.”28 Consequently, I draw upon scholars and practitioners of rhetoric, and I argue that this art and practice of cultural knowledge production and communication are always already contextualized to the systems where rhetoric emerges, circulates, and stagnates (see Chap. 3 where I elaborate on the features of Communist propaganda). Explicating the dynamics between the strategies (or the rhetorics of and from power) and the tactics (or the rhetorics of resistance)29 sheds light on the nature of the public dialog in totalitarianism. Population groups can 27  Jacqueline Jones Royster,  “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 36, 2 (2003): 148–67, p. 160. 28  Malea  Powell, Malea, Stacey Pigg, Leon Kendall, and Angela Haas. “Rhetoric.” In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.), ed. Marcia Bates and Mary Niles Maack, 4548–56. (London, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 4548–56, p. 4548. 29  As previously discussed, Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010) calls “a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated.” Explaining that “power is bound by its very visibility,” he further calls the strategy “an effort to delimit its own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other” (pp. 36, 37). While Certeau creates this theory having in mind Western Europe’s cultural realities, its extension to Communist Romania affords the recuperation of otherwise disregarded visualities that had been intently obscured, ignored, or suppressed in strategic ways.

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participate in the oppression or subvert the hegemonic rhetorics of power, at the same time as most people do not resist at all, while others resist with the risk of not surviving. Those who could resist and survive in Communism had to find subtle ways of subverting in order to avoid the authorities’ surveilling gaze. Additionally, rhetorical strategies and tactics are in constant flux in all societies and thus should be examined within the specificities of their various sociopolitical circumstances: they may still be distinguishable in post-totalitarian periods, because what used to be tactics in the old regime may become strategies over time, after regime change.30 In visual rhetorical terms, the strategic visualities, visibilities, and invisibilities deployed by the power structures informed the tactical responses undertaken with subtlety by population groups officially excluded from public dialog. For example, in Chap. 4, I discuss the discursive visuality of dominant Communist Romanian slogans and other propaganda materials. Further, in Chap. 6, I discuss how the passing and consequences of biopolitical legislation (Decree 770 of 1966) rendered women invisible in conversations about their reproductive rights because the law talked about the women from patriarchal positions of power. As a result of the rhetorical exclusion, women became the biopolitical “Other,” and were not allowed to engage in dialog about their own reproductive rights. Moreover, my case studies showcase the Communist Other’s resistance to the establishment’s exclusionary practices, which should be found in the silence. My contribution to Western rhetorical theory is a conceptualization that offers a contrast to Western denotations of rhetoric as dialogic, deliberative, and organized around the structure of the public sphere, toward embodied rhetorics that burgeon under the totalitarianism’s oppressive gaze and in response to practices of surveillance. Faced with such practices, the population had to submit to the official political rhetoric or to find alternative outlets of expression away from the observant eye of the authorities or Securitate, Romania’s Secret Police. Assumptions I employ the term “Communist propaganda” to refer to the totalizing activity of spreading ideas (including the abundant deployment of images and slogans) to support the regime and, at times, discredit its enemies. In 30  I find this to be a pertinent explanation for the rampant corruption and misinformation campaign that mars countries in the aftermath of dictatorships.

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the totality of discourses31 of power I include visual rhetoric or the use of visual materials seeking to advance the state’s agenda while negating any opposition. Communist propaganda’s features are based on Socialist ideology, but in addition have a totalitarian aspect, which at best include deliberate exaggerations and at worst debasing, exclusion, and character assassination, if not violence and even murder. Visual rhetoric takes as its object the insistence of the visual in persuasion. In a space as ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse as Central-­ Eastern Europe, the visual signs and symbols of Communist propaganda acted as a unifying language during the Cold War because they were informed by the same ideology. In general, and irrespective of sociopolitical systems, according to Kenneth Burke the human being is a “symbol-­ using, symbol-making, symbol-misusing, and symbol-made animal.”32 Although Burke referred to linguistic symbols in that statement, for visual rhetorical purposes, “symbol” here includes “visual symbols”: they have meaning-making capabilities; images are universal, ubiquitous, and nonlinguistic tools that exist within an interdependent network of possible and actualized meanings. Visual rhetorical analyses are, however, predicated on the historical realities where visual symbols circulate. A totalitarian regime employs the “state apparatus,” a system that compounds the power of the state and that of the leading political party, which intensifies the power of the propaganda. Authoritarian power structures employ visual rhetorical practices to oppress, surveil, and control the population. According to visual culture theorist W.  J. T.  Mitchell, images already want “a kind of mastery over the beholder,” and thus they are more than “vehicles of meaning or instruments of power”; an image “‘hails’ the viewer verbally and tries to transfix him [sic!] with the directness of its gaze.”33 To establish the public culture and visual rhetorical aspects of Communism, we need to identify the images and visual materials with the potential to reveal stories and circumstances, elicit emotions, and provide insight into that historical period. What are the materials that define the Communist time? For example, John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman  I use “discourse” here in the Foucauldian acceptation.  Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), p. 63. 33  W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 35, 36. 31 32

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define visual rhetoric as the “large body of visual and material practices, from architecture to cartography and from interior design to public memorials.”34 They examine visual rhetorical instances of late modernity, iconic photography, and photojournalism within the democratic, western context, clarifying that “Visual practices are well suited to representation of what is partly tacit and to making connections among prevailing institutions, norms, and beliefs.”35 They then define the concept of “public culture” as “the performances, texts, images, discourses, and arts that have developed historically through modern communicative media to define the relationship between the citizen and the state.”36 To build a visuality of Communism, this book presents a framework of examining visual materials within the specific non-Western space of post/Communism. Similarly to the liberal-democratic context, examining post/Communist spaces in terms of visuality requires first finding those iconic photographs, then establishing the set of tools (features, tropes, motifs) that they relied on for communication, and last but not least, a theoretical framework for “reading” them. Referring to the liberal-democratic context, Lucaites and Hariman state as follows (I propose reading the excerpt through a lens that considers the need for a visuality of Communism): [Iconic] photographs reflect social knowledge and dominant ideologies, shape and mediate understanding of specific events and periods (both at the time of their initial enactment and subsequently as they are recollected within a tableau of public memory), influence political behavior and identity, and provide inventional (figurative) sources for subsequent communicative action. Additionally, we believe that they mark fundamental relationships between the practice of photojournalism and twentieth-­ century American democratic public culture.37

To showcase the power of an image in relation to the former Communist Bloc, in Café Europa Revisited, Slavenka Drakulic analyzes a photograph of a Ukrainian girl from Communist times and elaborates on the emotions it stirred. In her book, the chapter called “A Sulky Girl in Ukraine” is 34  John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture.” Rhetoric Review, 20, 2/1 (2001): 37–42, p. 37. 35  Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Visual Tropes and Late-Modernity Emotion in U.S. Public Culture.” Poroi, 5, no. 2 (2008): 47–93, p. 5. 36  Ibid., p. 6. 37  Lucaites and Hariman.

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about Ukraine’s relation to its past, while at the same time it strikes as applicable to Eastern Europe. While Drakulic analyzes the image without providing it in the book, it can easily be found on the Internet as “the photo of a little girl in Lviv.” In the picture, a little girl with balloons on a May Day stands in the foreground; the blurred background shows people celebrating, as well as a building “façade adorned with a red flag and four magnified photos of communist leaders, as well as a slogan written on a red banner.”38 The girl is simply dressed, with cotton tights that “don’t exactly fit,” and her seemingly angry or displeased face “holds the viewer’s gaze.”39 Taken by photographer Ilya Pavlyuk, it is now part of the collection of the Museum of History of Photography in Lviv. Drakulic reminds us that having a camera was a rare thing in those times, especially in Eastern Europe. When the picture was posted on the museum’s website in 2017, it obtained “more than seven thousand likes and five thousand shares.”40 However, that was only the beginning of the story; the picture immediately prompted people to talk about the past in ways that reveal how necessary such conversations still are. The post-Soviet generation entirely misunderstood the photo: some called the girl “poor” because of her apparently “old” clothes, while others were baffled by the display of portraits of prominent Communist figures on the background building, a sight so familiar to people who have lived in those times. At the same time, “women born in the Soviet times” immediately identified with the girl in what the author calls “the ‘it’s me’ effect,” comparing the photograph to Marcel Proust’s la petite madeleine scene that recalls past memories.41 Drakulic explains that the remarkable “phenomena of mass reactions to the ‘sulky girl’ photo” prompted popular Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko to write and teach about the picture, and to discuss the “internalization of what people are conditioned to see under a system of what she calls ‘visual totalitarianism.’”42 This uptake of a visual rhetorical event demonstrates the power of an image even across time. Drakulic’s revisiting of the past by means of a photograph proves that post-Communist societies are still grappling with the legacy of recent history. Visualizations of the past help bridge historical periods in which people lived collectively and felt intensely. In the same vein, the present book examines the effect of totalitarian Communism on people’s attitudes and  Slavenka Drakulic, Café Europa Revisited (New York: Penguin Books, 2021), p. 25.  Ibid., p. 25–26. 40  Ibid., p. 27. 41  Ibid., p. 29. 42  Ibid., p. 28; emphasis in the original. 38 39

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creates a visual rhetorical framework to help people reconcile with the past. Like Drakulic, I too can retrieve memories from pictures from that historical time because, similarly to Proust’s madeleine, they recall my childhood.43 Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania explains that both what is and what is not contained in images matters, by centering on what is present and what is absent as hypostases of existence in restrictive regimes. I am also interested in what is not made apparent and what cannot be easily known. Drawing on Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, Mitchell points out that the power of the image has a “paradoxical double consciousness,” stating that one needs to reckon not only with the “meaning of images but their silence, their reticence, their wildness and nonsensical obduracy” (emphasis mine); in other words, we need to account for “their powerlessness, their impotence, their abjection,” and the paradox that images are “alive—but also dead; powerful—but also weak; meaningful—but also meaningless.”44 Totalitarian regimes employ visual materials to make certain sociopolitical issues rhetorically absent (invisible) or present (hypervisible) for political expediency. Specifically, I argue that the authoritarian state apparatus employed “acts of making visible or invisible” to regulate the circulation of ideas in the public space. The Communist regime deliberately excluded from discourses (and hid from sight) other elements, as dictated by the new ideology imposed after World War II. With time, what the regime emphasized as a presence through the manipulation of the visible became hypervisible, hyperbolic, and loud, while what it deemed as undesirable or forbidden turned into an apparent absence. Furthermore, I posit that absence is the locus where tacit resistance brewed and from where it sought ways to manifest. The possibility of resistance is complicated by totalitarianism’s deployment of the surveilling gaze, which was meant to regulate people’s behaviors and bodies. How do these aspects transpire into the visible and the visual? And more importantly: How did the population respond and find ways to survive or resist oppression? In this book, I advocate for the right to return the Communist totalitarian surveilling gaze from the post/ Communist perspective. In Communism, the state apparatus cumulated all the sociopolitical power, and excluded opposing views while annihilating collective responses. Rhetorically, in the absence of a proper locus for resistance, a  Ibid., p. 29.  Ibid., p. 10.

43 44

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type of embodied rhetoric took shape in an attempt to subvert power structures or to avoid surveillance. The book’s exigency emerges from the growing interest in merging visual rhetoric and visual culture studies—as well as a dearth of inquiry into Communist rhetorics, much less visual Communist rhetorics, three decades after the dissolution of Eastern Europe’s Communist states. Therefore, I propose a new way of seeing the post/Communist periods, laying bare the parameters within which rhetorical practices of power and resistance coagulated in the absence of organized or official opposition. Frame of Reference I situate the visual rhetorical frame of reference in this book within scholarship in the field of post-Communist studies, extending extant research in visual rhetoric and biopolitics  to Central and Eastern Europe. Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania focuses on both the Communist time and the time of transition to post-Communism, tracing the visual rhetoric of the post/Communist regimes as well as their strategic practices—that is, the regimes’ efforts to  make certain issues either invisible, visible, or hypervisible for the population as part of the larger propaganda efforts modeled after the ideologies at play. The theoretical scaffolding in this book builds on a few premises, among which is the fact that in totalitarianism the power dynamic constitutes a negating framework that is structurally different from other (softer) power relations at work in less-restrictive sociopolitical systems. Subsequently, given the asymmetrical balance of power in a totalitarian regime, we need to ask the following questions: How does the rhetoric of power rely on the use of visuality to propagate messages? How can resistance find ways to exist or even be visible when opposition is forbidden? To what degree does resistance emulate the totalitarian power’s aggression when it claims access to power? Approaches through visual culture often lack the rhetorical apparatuses or the rhetoricity central to visual rhetorical scholarship, while  those through visual rhetoric may sometimes fail to acknowledge cultural, historical, and/or visual cultural aspects, although they inevitably reside there. In the first part of the book, I establish the fundament of the larger theoretical framework of the visual rhetoric of power in Communist regimes  where I consider both cultural, historical, and visual cultural aspects. Consequently, resistance may possibly take shape, in limited forms, within a perimeter set by the political power. In the case studies I examine in this book, I read materials through the visual rhetorical theory

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I elaborate in the first part of the book, analyzing Communist propaganda visual materials, iconic imagery of the 1989 Romanian Revolution and its immediate aftermath (i.e.,  the year 1990), and an award-winning Romanian period film set in 1987 that showcases the embodied rhetoric of resistance in visual rhetorical ways. Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania, therefore, examines how ideologies of the Communist time transpired to the visible in the materiality of images and objects. How were images manipulated by the power structures in a totalitarian country? What are the effects of totalitarian propaganda on people’s practices, actions, agencies, comportments, and, yes, psychology45 over time? How does resistance happen in the totalitarian order? What becomes visually manifest in times of revolution and upheaval? By examining how post/Communist rhetorics worked during the Communist rule, whether they may still linger today, and how those oppressed by post/Communist rhetorics of power responded, scholars can forge productive relationships between rhetorical theory, post/ Communist studies, and visual culture. Intersectional methodologies designed to contribute to several fields of study can advance transnational imaginaries and post-Cold War narratives and what Andaluna Borcila calls “ways of seeing.”46 Because we live in an interrelated, globalized world, I argue for the importance, indeed the necessity, to look at the former Communist spaces as underrepresented sites. Although I focus on Romania because of my life experience having grown up there, the propaganda features I establish in this book are not specific to that country, nor is life under oppressive situations unique, and a certain commonality exists about the Eastern European space and throughout the Second World. Certain theoretical approaches have already applied visual rhetorical research to various geographical, historical, and cultural spaces, and this book contributes to such expansions by adding new perspectives on the visual rhetoric of Eastern European post/Communist spaces. I posit that  Geraldine Moane, “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision.” In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, ed. P. Kirby, L.  Gibbons, and M.  Cronin. (London: Pluto Press, 2002). Moane identifies a number of behaviors in the Irish population as a result of colonialism: “cultural pathologies” (denial and doublethink, social irresponsibility, distortion of sexuality, alcohol and drug consumption) as well as “cultural strengths” (creativity and imagination, spirituality, and solidarity and support) (pp. 109–123). These are all patters that easily apply to post-communist societies, and for my analysis, the distortion of sexuality resulted from Decree 770 is consequential in Chap. 6. 46  Andaluna Borcila, American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), p. 11. 45

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certain theories and critiques developed in (and about) the West can (and should) also demystify the Communist East, provided we carefully account for the differences because the shift from the familiar to the unfamiliar is easier in this manner. The first step in my argumentative edifice is the premise that we must look at history as the bedrock to understanding the rhetoric of the time, as the two are interdependent factors in the making of a regime, especially a totalitarian one. Those of us who have lived in a dictatorship know too well that a lot remains in excess of explanation or comparisons with circumstances familiar to people in democracies  who have not experienced it first-hand. Totalitarianism is difficult to imagine for an outsider. Thus, to help facilitate this understanding, while in this book I present my own theory and concepts, I adopt, adapt, and rely on certain concepts already established in other fields, knowing that “concepts travel in the humanities,” to quote a metaphor employed by cultural theorist Mieke Bal in her 2002 book.47 Theoretical frameworks informed by traveling concepts help illuminate otherwise unfamiliar environments because theories and concepts continuously evolve and find fertile ground in other fields. My argument relies on a few theories that I refer to throughout the book.  nequal Balance of Power U First, I establish that rhetoric (or discourse in the Foucauldian sense) exists within specific dynamics of power in society that inform them, and thus, defining the context in which discourses of power operate is necessary. Consequently, in creating this post/Communist visual rhetorical theory, a fundamental assumption is the understanding that, by nature, a restrictive regime corrupts rhetorical practices: its conditions intensify certain aspects while suppressing others, with a force that the West might find hard to grasp at times. Communist rhetorics of power—the term by which I denote all the discourses48 that supported and served the regime while enabling its oppressive strategies—are more heavily based on ideology (than those in democratic regimes), hence their accentuated epistemological nature. Therefore, in totalitarianism, the rhetorics of resistance are often more positioned at the ontological level: resistance happens in general individually, in everyday life, in unorganized fashion, and away from 47  Cf. Mieke Bal, Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto, 2002). 48  In Michel Foucault’s (1981) understanding of discourse.

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the public space where the authorities’ surveillance practices are in place, which consequently make these resisting tactics more embodied rather than overtly expressed in language. Throughout this book, I find Michel de Certeau’s theory of strategies and tactics in The Practice of Everyday Life to also explain the interaction of rhetorics in Communism: rhetorics of power, similarly to strategies, and rhetorics of resistance, similarly to tactics, explain the difference in capabilities between actors in totalitarianism. Indeed, Certeau shows that “power is bound by its very visibility,” a statement that rings more powerfully in totalitarian regimes. Distinguishing between strategies and tactics as actions in any society, he calls “a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated.” He further calls the strategy “an effort to delimit its own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other.” Conversely, Certeau defines a tactic the “calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus […] in short, the art of the weak,”49 which best describes powerless people’s attempts to subvert authority. Generally, public space conversations follow a dialogic pattern; while it may sometimes escape us, we should still attempt to discern how statements enter a larger dialog where ideas respond to each other. Unlike in democracies, where this dynamic between discourses and counter-discourses is normalized in an ongoing conversation enabled by the free nature of the system, in a totalitarian state the dialog is hindered by restrictions and roadblocks. Propaganda corrupts public space interaction because of its totalizing reach. In such regimes, resistance as tactical acts may be harder to detect because it always strives to avoid the surveilling gaze of the state apparatus. Postcolonial and Post-Communist Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania considers comparative post-­ totalitarian and postcolonial studies to conceptualize the visual rhetoric of power as a constitutive part of larger national narratives. Productive analogies between colonialism and Communism can help demystify everyday practices people employed as tactics of resistance. I recognize that the comparison only applies to some extent and know that some scholars disagree with this comparison. However, I subscribe to Bogdan Ştefănescu’s assertion that Soviet and Western colonialisms are “subtypes or instances of coloniality which can be seen as the overarching category or genus”  Michel de Certeau, pp. 36, 37.

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(emphasis in original).50 Even if, as some argue, Soviet Communism in Russia started with positive ideals that in some form still exist today, when exported outside of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) after World War II, the Communist regime was perceived as foreign and had little support, which undermined its success from the beginning. Moreover, Communism’s installation in Central and Eastern Europe was a violent undertaking. Therefore, a postcolonial understanding of the region helps with the way we map the various forms of discourses throughout historical periods and regime change to understand the power dynamics of the rhetorics as play. Russia’s imperialist behavior manifested within and without the USSR, and to some extent, even beyond the Cold War, and its rhetorics spread helped by its prowess. Admitting that postcolonial studies may be too narrow and post-Soviet studies too parochial, already in a 2001 article, self-proclaimed “comparatist” David Chioni Moore noticed the postcolonial nature of the postSoviet space and the “extraordinarily little attention” this fact received.51 Moore argued that the term “postcolonial,” and everything that goes with it—language, economy, politics, resistance, liberation and its hangover—might reasonably be applied to the formerly Russo- and Soviet-controlled regions post-1989/1991, just as it has been applied to South Asia post-1947 or Africa post-1958. East is South.52

In referring to the Global South, Moore observes that all the rest of the world already falls under the “postcolonial compass” to a certain extent.53 He notes that post/Communist regions have been excluded for too long from “notable synoptic articles on postcolonial studies and in recent major classroom-use anthologies,” although the region’s “postcoloniality” explains the Central and Eastern Europeans’ “return to Westernness that once was theirs” as a “desire for authentic sources.”54 Since Moore, other scholars 50  Bogdan Ştefănescu, Postcommunism. Postcolonialism. Siblings of Subalternity (Bucharest, Romania: Editura Universitătii din Bucuresti, 2012), p. 66. (In English). Ştefănescu presents the various stances regarding this comparison. 51  David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique.” PMLA, Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies, 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–28, p. 114. 52  Moore, pp. 112, 116. 53  Ibid. p. 112. 54  Ibid. pp. 116, 118.

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have promoted this comparison between Communism and imperialism/ colonialism. In Chap. 3, I discuss the notion of otherness in Communism and further elaborate on the similarities and differences between the colonial other and the communist other. In the Conclusion to Chap. 5, I further point that the Communist experience has in fact taught the people in the area more about class consciousness than colonialism could in the Global South (see my explanation regarding this point in Chap. 7). The scholars who disagree with the comparison with colonialism suggest that the “colonized other” in Communism is not the same as the one in colonialism;55 first, the racial/ethnic aspect does not (generally speaking) exist and, second, the nations themselves became their own propagator of Communism, so the racial/ethnic  difference between self and other is almost absent. That is true; however, at least in the beginning, the regime was imposed through puppet governments modeled after a foreign one. What mainly interests me in this comparison is the regime’s effect on the population, the way it modified behaviors, and the distance it created between the authorities and the people. The Communist colonization in that area took place both from the outside and from the inside: The imported political ideology took over the entire society through the Communist Party, and then, at the same time, propaganda colonized the public space through society’s politicization; in fact, I argue that apart from the public space, the state propaganda attempted at colonizing the private and intimate spaces. The comparison with colonialism is perhaps most relevant in the “post” periods of postcolonialism and post-Communism, namely, in the effects these systems had on people’s behaviors and practices. Drawing upon and extending the work of postcolonial scholars in rhetoric and cultural studies, I ask: How can postcolonial concepts be employed in examining post/ Communism? A necessary conceptual extrication leads to a postcolonial reading of post-Communism that enlightens the parallels between the two, so that we can detangle the bad from the good in the aftermath of such systems. It behooves those who have lived through Communism to contribute to these ongoing conversations and to advance the scholarship in this field.  mbodiment, Ontology, and Biopolitics E At the same time, we cannot entirely separate our being (which refers to ontology) from knowing in the world (which is about epistemology). Therefore, the framework I build in this book engages embodied rhetoric toward a post/Communist rhetorical conceptualization that emphasizes  Ornatowski, private communication.

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the ontological. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, of any extraction, disproportionately insisted on ideology (which is connected to epistemology) often neglecting, if not abusing, people’s everyday biological life (or the ontological) (cf. the extreme violence of Nazism). Because as Christopher Breu states, “all stories are, in part, about the body,”56 I theorize life under the totalitarian gaze by relying on my eyewitness experience to Communism and on the reflection performed both at that time and in hindsight, in apperception. I refer to both ideology and ontology when I recall my life experiences, inevitably finding myself walking a fine line between subjectivity and objectivity. I agree with Knoblauch’s statement that “an embodied rhetoric that draws attention to embodied knowledge—specific material conditions, lived experiences, positionalities, and/or standpoints—can highlight differences instead of erasing them in favor of an assumed privileged discourse.”57 Consequently, I argue that more attention to the human aspect is in fact necessary in relation to totalitarianism. When recuperating underrepresented voices of the Communist period, in one of the case studies in this book I look at the resistance through the body. Especially given the references to Romania’s antiabortion Decree 770 and its effect on my generation and the lives of many women in Communist Romania, it is critical to interrogate the epistemology/ontology connection. Although Karen Barad is not a rhetorician, her concept of “ontoepistemology” (ontology plus epistemology) offers an innovative approach to rhetoric, especially when it illuminates the effects of ideology-infused totalitarian rhetoric on people’s private and intimate spaces. Epistemological (ideologies, knowledges, beliefs, viewpoints, mentalities) and ontological (biological, physical existence, human experience, body) aspects are in fact inextricable: the being within the “ontoepistemological” structures can help us to explain the link between discursive practices and material phenomena (see Barad58). Indeed, Barad shows that: practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation 56  Christopher Breu, Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. vii. 57  Knoblauch, p. 62. 58  Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 44–45.

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of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. Onto-­ epistem-­ology—the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that we need to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter.59

I posit that Barad’s “knowing in being” requires a practice of purposefully looking back. Subsequently, I draw upon theories of biopolitics to examine the abuses of the female body in Communism because resistance through the body is also a rhetorical act, despite its nondiscursive quality. Michel Foucault defined biopolitics as a “politics in the name of life,”60 and whereas his focus was on biopolitics’ positive side, its negative facet can lead to an extreme type of ontology. Similarly, almost two decades before Foucault, Hannah Arendt61 had already conceptualized homo laborans, showing that biological life “gradually occupies the very center of the political scene of modernity”; she attributed “the transformation and decadence of the political realm in modern societies to this very primacy of natural life over political action,”62 which makes her a precursor of biopolitics rarely acknowledged as such. Then, Italian theorists Giorgio Agamben63 and Roberto Esposito64 have recently moved farther away from the initial Foucauldian positivity celebration of biopolitics65 to emphasize instead its negativity, given that biopolitical interventions often result in death.66  Ibid., 185; emphasis in the original.  Roberto  Esposito,  Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 15. 61  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) p. 4, clarifies that the fact that Foucault could develop his study of biopolitics “with no reference to Arendt’s work (which remains, even today, practically without continuation)” shows the “difficulties and resistances that thinking had to encounter in this area.” 62  Cited in Agamben, (1998), pp. 3–4. 63  Agamben, (1998). 64  Esposito,  (2008); Roberto Esposito,  Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013). 65  Cf. Michel  Foucault,  Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976. Trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997). 66  Agamben, (1998), p. 4. Agamben argues that precisely these struggles “account for the curious fact that Arendt establishes no connection between her research in The Human Condition and the penetrating analyses she had previously devoted to totalitarian power (in which a biopolitical perspective is altogether lacking), and that Foucault, in just as striking a fashion, never dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.” 59 60

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 otalitarianism: Extremes of the Left and the Right in Politics T In fact, commonalities between the two types of totalitarianisms have already been studied,67 even if less so about biopolitics in connection to Communism. Agamben and Esposito discuss biopolitics within totalitarian regimes—predominantly Nazism and its extreme form of thanatopolitics (or the politics of death), and Agamben calls the camp “the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West”; yet, the gulags of Eastern Europe have remained largely ignored by extensions of biopolitics.68 Examining the biopolitics of Communist regimes is the obvious next step, namely, the negative effects of the Gulag or natalist policies that resulted in numerous deaths. Mainly based on the paradigm of the “state of exception” conceptualized by Giorgio Agamben in 2005,69 it can be said that the totalitarian state apparatus creates the conditions for exceptional political and biopolitical power. Although distorted, corrupted, or suspended, totalitarian rhetorics and methods of persuasion (Nazi, Stalinist, or Ceauşist) have existed, persisted, and they have also been resisted. Therefore, they deserve more analysis. Current rhetoric and composition scholarship on totalitarian rhetorics are exemplary models for examining the intersections between totalitarian political power and propaganda. For example, when analyzing the Communist rhetoric in Poland, Cezar M. Ornatowski explains the relation between rhetorics and regimes, showing that totalitarian rhetorical features are more intensified in conjunction with “cultural, historical, and institutional factors and regime-specific characteristics”; he identifies discursive features such as the “totalizing category of ‘one enemy’” and the forced mass identification inherent in Communist rhetorics.70 Steven 67  Cf. Hannah  Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism. Seventh edition (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1962); Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, CO and London, UK: Rienner, 2000); Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 2001); Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004); and Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century  (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012). 68  Agamben, (1998), p. 181. 69  See Giorgio  Agamben, State of Exception, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 70  Cezar M. Ornatowski, “‘The Future Is Ours,’ Or Is It? The Rise and Fall of Totalitarian Rhetoric in Poland (and Elsewhere).” In The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, ed. Smith M. and Warnick, B., 345–8 (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2010) pp. 342.

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Katz71 connects classical rhetoric with Holocaust technology to theorize an ethic of expediency used to forward the Nazi agenda of the “final solution.” Katz demonstrates how this Nazi ethic was used rhetorically to justify the extermination of Jewish people, where “expediency seems to become an end in itself.”72 Likewise, images can be weaponized and inscribed with political codes for the same purpose of expediency. In response to Katz’s article, Mark Ward73 theorizes an ethic of exigence for information designers in relation to a 1935 Nuremberg Laws poster used to exclude Jews from the community. Ward’s examples demystify “why a particular arrangement of textual and graphic elements has symbolic potency within a given institutional or organizational culture.”74 Ward examined Nazi technical documents, revealed totalitarian strategies of visual rhetorical exclusion, and called on visual rhetoricians to “take a more nuanced look at how a designer and user could, from a single page of pictograms and text, co-construct the meaning that excluding an entire class of human beings from their community was perfectly rational.”75 Ultimately, these authors’ works have helped to clear a path for rhetoric scholars writ large to be better poised to engage responsibly with Communist and totalitarian visual rhetorics and their “hyperpragmatism,” to borrow Ward’s term. In the following chapters, I identify the rhetorical features and visual tropes of the discourses of power in Communism, and I organize this discussion around their connections with ideology. Case studies focus on materials referencing Romania’s Communist times, such as displays of Communist political slogans; symbols of the 1989 anti-totalitarian revolution; printed press samples from the early post-Communist period; and an internationally acclaimed film that looks back to late Communism to represent resistance that was not visible at the time. Because such materials contain inherently contradictory meanings, contingent on the lenses we see them through, this book is merely an invitation to other scholars and researchers to further analyze the visual rhetorics of materials used by powerful forces in totalitarian or Communist regimes. 71  Steven B.  Katz, “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust.” College English, 54, no. 3 (1992), 255–75. 72  Ibid., p. 261. 73  Mark Ward,. “The ethic of Exigence: Information Design, Postmodern Ethics, and the Holocaust.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 24, no. 1 (2010), 60–90. 74  Ibid., p. 63. 75  Ibid., p. 64.

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At the same time, I am fully aware of the delicate nature of a topic relating to Communism, given that the term has layers of connotations and that U.S. political history has also weaponized it.76 Extremes of both orientations have created totalitarian regimes in the past, and the danger to repeat history is real. In my analysis, however, I refrain from moral judgments about Socialism or Communism as ideologies, as I also do about the aesthetics of the visual materials. In the last two centuries, ideas on the political Left, from Marxism to Socialism and Communism, have increasingly changed from one socioeconomic context to the next, which is also true about ideas on the Right. In the last chapter, I discuss the contradictions and the emotional investment inherent to these labels—which is more exacerbated in postCommunism—and subsequently argue for the need to work toward redefining the Left and the Right going forward.77 The entanglement of totalitarianism with the kind of national Communism promoted by Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania has resulted in a perplexity about terms, which I will discuss in the final chapter. The more we untangle the past’s cobwebs, the better it will be for our understanding of the present. In many senses, even the very anti-Communist revolutions can be seen as leftist, as paradoxical as that may sound, in that they sought freedom from authoritarianism. Approaches to Visual Propaganda Propaganda expects and creates its own spectatorship, using visibility and visuality as its instruments.78 To paraphrase Shakespeare (who said that all 76  Although the U.S. academe is criticized by the Right to be more on the Left, especially the humanities, I can say from personal experience that this claim is highly exaggerated. 77  Again, as I already stated, this book is meant to help demystify the hybridity of ideas, the contradictions inherent to historical times, and the way we visualize rhetorics of power and resistance in society. In traditional Marxist thought, socialism is a precursory stage to Communism, and genuine Communism (the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat”) is a final stage that in actuality has never been attained in the world, despite the various Communist regimes that have existed and still exist (North Korea is the most striking example). Socialist regimes exist outside the Second World spaces, and they may be democratic, capitalist, and multi-party systems, possibly with a free-market economy, more or less controlled by regulations. 78  The ubiquitous presence of propaganda materials performed rhetorics of self-affirmation by promoting Romanian nationalist and Communist ideologies and symbols. Given this book’s investment in rhetorics, political discourse, social (dis)engagement, and ideological intents intrinsic to the creation and the use of images, aesthetics considerations are relegated to a secondary plane. While both Nazi and Communist aesthetics have their place in the research landscape, they do not escape the trained eye.

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the world’s a stage, in As You Like It), during the Communist time, Romania was a theatrical stage set for propaganda. In the public space, propaganda was solipsistic, that is, it was the only thing that was real or mattered; it was self-referential; and while it affirmed, it also negated at the same time. A visual rhetorical analysis of propaganda should consider both the rhetoric of individual materials and the unifying whole they constitute. Within the Communist state apparatus, propaganda acts as a spectacle in which the visual aspect mediates a relationship between the state and the individual. In its entirety, propaganda’s ambition fits Guy Debord’s definition of the spectacle as an “instrument of unification” and not a mere “collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”79 First, most of the photographs I analyze in this book come from the Minerva Archive, which is a sizeable collection found after the Romanian Revolution of 1989 at the local newspapers’ headquarters in my native city of Cluj. Rather than discard them, the archive’s president, Zoltan Tibori Szabo, decided to keep them on a platform.80 The photographs belonged to photojournalists who shot them sometime during Romania’s Communist regime, for whatever purpose. I remind that, before the Revolution, all the media in Romania was owned by the government and the Communist Party. As few people had cameras in those days, a photojournalist with a camera was among the few privileged people whose line of work allowed them to take pictures. Second, as a holistic and unitary system, propaganda achieves its goals by colonizing the public space and by establishing a presence in people’s lives. In this aspect, propaganda constitutes itself as an ideological (master-)narrative that is made up of a set of segments articulated individually, similarly to any linguistic text. Next, we can deconstruct propaganda to its smallest visual or verbal segments that make up the whole (e.g., the slogan supported on a material object used propagandistically in a public space). However, how comparable are propaganda’s segments to parts of linguistic discourse? Does propaganda have a grammar? What role do the visual tropes play in the larger propaganda project? Although separating propaganda’s functions is a difficult endeavor, propaganda taken as a whole or in parts has specific qualities. When considered in its ensemble, the accumulation of propaganda materials has certain  rhetorical effects, though it may lack a linear or chronological  Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. (Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 1983), p. 2.  Private communication.

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unfolding. In  Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin, Victoria Bonnell81 uses “critical terms usually applied to spoken and written language,” a kind of “visual syntax,”82 a concept I find intriguing as it connects the textual and visual. Bonnell refers to a visual syntax of the posters she analyzes, which she defines as “the positioning of figures and objects in relation to each other and the environment. As images changed, so did the syntax. […] Like books, images and their combinations may be ‘read’ in unpredictable ways.” Bonnell uses a linguistic analogy and treats images as part of a “visual language (with a lexicon and syntax) in which all the elements are interdependent,” acknowledging that “the Soviet lexicon changed over time.”83 If we were to accept this description, we would only do so because in the case of propaganda materials, the meaning of the sentence resulted from the assemblage of the parts is already known from the start, and it is the incessantly repeated propaganda message (see Chaps. 3 and 4). Thus, in a structuralist sense, propaganda integrates atomistic units— slogans, images, symbols—into a seemingly organic whole that is only partially comparable to discourse or the narrative of a film; it lacks an organizing syntax or the chronology characteristic for the arrangement of sequences in a film. However, a discussion of film and photography is not unwarranted here because of a twofold argument. First, these media were preponderantly available to propagandists in the time period I analyze here, unlike the plethora of technological media we have today (e.g., the Internet, smart phones, social media, digital software). I remind that Christian Metz calls film and photographs “modern technologies of mechanical duplication”84 (emphases are in the original throughout this paragraph). Secondly, and as a corollary of the previous point, the visual rhetorical analyses in this book focus on photographs and film. Additionally, many film aestheticians call them “arts of presence,”85 a characterization that gestures toward propaganda’s deliberate visual hyper-presence I conceptualize in this chapter. Similarly, if, according to Metz, “film is always  Bonnell, p. 14.  Bonnell quoted in Manuela Marin, “‘For Our Beloved Leader’: Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Propaganda Portraits,” in The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power, ed. Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone  (New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2020), p. 191. 83  Bonnell, p. 8. 84  Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen, 35–65. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 36. 85  Ibid., p. 40. 81 82

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discourse”86 made up of sequential shots, propaganda’s display of visual materials throughout the public space resembles a film-like discourse that coagulates in a certain narrative. In this analogy, I argue that the “filmic shot” is comparable to propaganda’s complex visual material as an “atomistic segment” rather than the word or the slogan in language, in line with Metz’s observation about the “great differences between the shot and the linguistic statement.”87 More importantly, according to Metz, the “grammar of cinema is a rhetoric rather than a true grammar, since the minimum unit (the shot) is not determined, and consequently codification can affect only the large units.” Metz describes the syntax of film as an “alternate montage” that “is an ordering that is both codified (i.e., the fact of alternating itself) and significant (since the alternating signifies simultaneity).”88 Propaganda’s atomistic segment is also codified and significant; however, its totality fails at organizing a chronology and lacks the ability to create a self-sufficient, stand-alone world. While propaganda has separate units that organize a narrative without a genuine grammar-like structure, it has a powerful rhetoric. In fact, I agree with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s statement that “the nature of the semiotics of film is that grammar and rhetoric are not separate in it,”89 which applies to propaganda. I then consider features such as the panopticon and the surveilling gaze, which help amplify the presence of visual materials throughout the colonized public space. Self-affirming propaganda simply superimposed itself over century-old traditions that employed the image as the main mode of communication with ordinary people. Victoria Bonnell focuses on the political portrait in representations of Stalin and Lenin, mainly in posters and art productions, stating that political education in Russia privileged the eye90 and that the icons of political art in Soviet Union were “part of a system of signs imposed by the authorities in an effort to transform mass consciousness.”91 Importantly, Bonnell, in her analyses, emphasizes the connection between the practice of displaying Russian Orthodox religious icons and the propaganda images in the newly established Communist regime in Russia. Knowing that every peasant had icons in their homes and that “the image itself had sacred powers for the Orthodox  Ibid., p. 51.  Ibid., p. 41. 88  Ibid., p. 41. 89  Ibid, p. 41. 90  Bonnell, p. 3. 91  Bonnell, p. 8. 86 87

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believer,” the Bolsheviks found images effective in educating ordinary people,92 and propaganda’s enveloping effort preserved this prowess of the imagistic practice. Propaganda continued this tradition by invoking ideological symbols of success to legitimize the regime, including galvanizing collectivization and industrialization efforts and succeeding in WWII mobilization. This zeal in the use of propaganda was exported to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including in Romania, which is also a predominantly Christian Orthodox country where religious icons are displayed in people’s homes. This connects to the concepts of the surveilling gaze. If in its aggregation propaganda aims at enveloping its consumer in feelings of surveillance and control, materials that make up the corpus of propaganda contain visual tropes consisting of design imagery and stylistic motifs of ideological extraction. In articulating these visual tropes of the Communist propaganda, I show their connection to ideology and to the features already theorized in the previous chapter (e.g., the presence and absence hypostases, hyperbole, militarism, or cult of personality). Although the intrinsic relationship between rhetoric and political actions is not a new problematic for analysis, by scrutinizing the impact of the visual rhetoric of propaganda materials in abusive Communist regimes we can discern certain specific tropes, such as those used in the early stages when “enemies” were excluded as a result of class struggle: paroxysmal purges in the Stalinist decade (also dubbed “the obsessive decade” in Romania), the debasing of the bourgeoisie as a class antagonistic to the working class, or the denouncing of the corrupt West. However, as I show in this book, once exclusion rendered the desired results, rhetoric moved to a self-­ affirming stage, which also brought about new visual tropes. Basic Terminology This book focuses on Romania’s Communist period (1947–1989), at a time when the country had a single-party political system, with a planned socialist economy, the well-known Five-Year Plan, which was implemented throughout the countries of the Second World. Then, it discusses the 1989 Revolution and the time of regime change after 1990 (in 92  Bonnell, p. 4. See also Hobsbawm’s study she cites, which approached socialist iconography and to which Bonnell adds with her book as she claims Hobsbawm’s account is incomplete (p. 18).

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post-­Communism) when the country began the transition toward a multi-­ party, democratic, free-market, capitalist society. Historically, Communist totalitarian regimes were installed in stages in Central and Eastern Europe after World War II. Providing working definitions of terms such as Socialism, Communism, and the Second World93 has become a practice with books that address the historical time of totalitarian Communism (see, e.g., Borcila94 or Ghodsee95). In what follows, I explain some terms that occur throughout the book.  hetorics Versus Rhetoric R In Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania, I propose a way of seeing the Communist times through visual rhetoric, namely, a visuality that acts as a transformative lens for analyzing images, artifacts, and cultural productions of Communist regimes. I use the plural term “rhetorics” to indicate that I refer to both rhetorics of power and of resistance, which are significantly different. “Rhetorics” also denotes a plurality of discourses rather than a single technique, and, semantically, I use the term to mean both discourses and narratives, which may occur interchangeably. Rhetorically, distinguishing between discourses coming from power and those from people who respond to them helps in the analysis of resistance tactics in those times. I call rhetorics of power those discourses that supported and served the regime by enabling its oppressive strategies, and rhetorics of

93  The First World–Third World binary has been problematized with replacement rhetorics to the “Third World,” such as “emerging,” “non-Western,” or “minority” (see Moore, 2001, p. 111). 94  Borcila, p. 10, states as follows: “I employ the terms ‘post-communist’ and ‘post-communism’ at points interchangeably with Eastern Europe and/or the Balkan, though I do draw attention to the specific naming that is performed in the actual commentary or narrative and […] the specific intersections and complications of Balkanist and Eastern Europeanist discourses. I am fully aware that by employing these very terms, I could be reproducing the certain ‘lag time’ that essentially characterizes Western representations of Eastern Europe and of the Balkans post-1989. On the one hand, the U.S. television coverage of the events of 1989 immediately proclaimed the end of the Cold War, the triumph of capitalism, the collapse of communism, and the emergence of a new world order. On the other hand, the allochronicity of Eastern Europe and the traumas of the Balkans appear linked to communism’s effects.” 95  Kristen Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019).

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resistance those that sought to avoid being heard or seen by the authoritarian state in order to avoid coercion. Communist At the time I was growing up, the terms Socialism and Communism were used interchangeably in Romania, although Communism was a goal society aspired to, supposedly attained in the future. However, in this book, I use the latter term for a totalitarian single-party system to differentiate it from other leftist or center-left regimes. Similarly, I refer to Socialist Romania’s regime as Communist to mean that it was Communist totalitarian. Consequently, I posit that all the one-party Socialist regimes to date have been Communist totalitarian, while Socialist parties may exist in multi-party, free-market socioeconomic systems. Socialist ideology was at the root of these states’ political economy and informed their propaganda, whereas the planned socialist economy compounded with the single-party politics made them Communist. Kristen Ghodsee explains her use of similar terms in her book as follows: Defining the words “socialist” and “communist” during the Cold War period is a tricky problem. Although no twentieth-century country ever achieved true communism in the Marxist sense of the term (i.e., the state had withered away) the Western countries always referred to them as communist. To be technically correct, these countries were socialist or state socialist, because they understood that they were still in the socialist stage of their development. But because communism was the ultimate goal, the leading parties were called communist parties, and most activists referred to themselves as communists. Complicating this are the democratic socialist states of Scandinavia and the democratic socialist parties throughout the west that also call themselves socialist.96

Additionally, when I use the term post/Communist, it is meant to incorporate both Communist and post-Communist, and may be used in contexts that refer to both historical periods, demarcated as they are in Europe by 96  Ibid., p. 250. Ghodsee clarifies her decisions to use terms connected to this topic in Note 5, p. 250 of her book: “Throughout this book, I employ the terms ‘socialist,’ ‘state socialist,’ and ‘communist’ to refer to countries with a one-party state striving for a communist future where the state would supposedly wither away. I use the three terms interchangeably, since many of my informants used them this way, and that is how they were used during the historical period with which I am concerned.”

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the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989–1990). I follow the same pattern for terms such as post/totalitarian and post/colonial. Second World The Communist visual rhetoric I elaborate in this book extends important discussions from/about the improperly called First and Third Worlds to less discussed Communist and post-Communist spaces, often called at the time the Second World. The First World–Third World binary often neglects the Second World, which used to include countries of the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as countries where the Communist regime was or is still in place, namely China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. Given the scarcity of attention given to life behind the Iron Curtain, this book aims to bring the region in the line of vision and to offer a framework for engaging in dialog with rhetorics from/about it. State Apparatus In such societies, the Communist Party fused with all the state’s institutions to form an authoritarian entity called the “state apparatus,” a term I also use in the book to mean Communist Romania’s type of regime, a political system prominently marked by an unequal balance of power where opposing views were not allowed. The Communist Party took over the state, and thus, I agree with Michel Foucault when he states that the totalitarian state (whether Nazi, Fascist, or Stalinist) is not the same as the welfare state: the characteristic feature of the state we call totalitarian is far from being the endogenous and intensification of the mechanisms of the state; it is not at all the exaltation but rather a limitation, a reduction, and a subordination of the autonomy of the state, of its specificity and specific functioning—but in relation to what? In relation to something else, which is the party. (emphasis mine)97

Throughout the book, I also refer to this type of state with Giorgio Agamben’s98 term “state of exception” when I emphasize its aspect of being in crisis. Totalitarian regimes are those in which the political overtakes all the aspects of the state, including the public, private, and intimate spaces, as this book demonstrates. 97  Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, Trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 190. 98  See Agamben, 2005.

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 pistemology, Ontology, and Biopolitics E In Communist Romania, the Party colonized the state and the socialist ideology, which created a type of episteme or paradigm of the state apparatus. Foucault (cited in Spivak) calls the episteme the “‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation not of the true form false, but of what may not be characterized as scientific”;99 in this book, I make a distinction between the state’s treatment of the population along epistemological (ideological) and ontological (lived experience) lines to evince the significance of both. Consequently, the analysis I employ in this book looks at these hypostases in what Karen Barad calls ontoepistemology or “the study of practices of knowing in being.”100 In a regime that excluded overt discursive (epistemological) resistance, the body (the ontological) becomes the site of resistance. Examining the “epistemology/ontology split” by resuscitating underrepresented knowledges (and beliefs) is at the heart of the visual rhetorical theory I construct in this book. In the absence of language itself, rhetoric becomes embodied because totalitarian censorship excludes linguistic ways to express dissent in the public space. I investigate the usefulness of a post/Communist rhetorical framework vis-à-vis rhetorical analyses of the epistemological (ideologies, knowledges, viewpoints, mentalities) and the ontological (biological, physical existence, human experience, body) in the material world. Therefore, I seek to contribute to what Powell et al. call the contemporary turn in rhetoric and composition studies that moves towards investigating intellectual frameworks bifurcated by conventional notions of rhetoric, like the split between rhetoric/poetics or between epistemology/ontology, recuperating structures of knowledge production and consumption, and investigating the usefulness of rhetorical frameworks. (emphasis mine)101

99  Gayatri C.  Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (London, UK: Macmillan, 1988), p. 298. 100  Barad, p. 185. 101  Powell et al., p. 4556.

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For example, as a woman of the decreeling generation, my being and knowing organically intertwined under Romania’s totalitarian regime, as they usually do in one’s youth. How did ideologies affect the human body? In my analysis, the female body is the locus where the epistemological and the ontological bearings are in fact inextricable, although not entirely indiscernible through analysis. Consequently, in one of my case studies I call for more attention to the ontology of the woman because she is subjected to legislation that targets her body (see Chap. 6).102 This connection between legislation and the body is at the root of biopolitical approaches. Visual Rhetoric This highly dynamic term is at the heart of this book. Sonja K. Foss gives a double definition that most scholars of rhetorical studies adhere to. According to her, visual rhetoric is used to mean both a visual object or artifact and a perspective on the study of visual data. In the first sense, visual rhetoric is a product individuals create as they use visual symbols for the purpose of communicating. In the second, it is a perspective scholars apply that focuses on the symbolic processes by which visual artifacts perform communication.103

Subsequently, visual rhetoric is anything but a fixed concept: it has a transformative potential, especially because the image has increasingly demonstrated its versatility in persuasion and unfortunately even its potentiality to forge misinformation. Moreover, both these senses involve aspects of visuality and visibility that are critical to my visual rhetorical theory; for instance, what we see in an artifact is notably contingent upon elements its creator(s) intended to be seen, at the same time as external factors in the environment that surrounds it adds fingerprints to it— whether cultural, educational, political, economic, social, etc. All these bearings can alter meanings and perceptions. Next, the human factor impacts or obscures, and can itself be hidden or implied in the material object’s visual rhetoric. The object (image, propaganda material, etc.) is subject to multiple gazes that are at play in the public space, such as the 102  See also Barad’s (2007) call for a more ontological approach within the highly epistemological context of the sciences. 103  Sonja K. Foss, “Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory.” In Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, 303–13. (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 304.

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gaze hailed and returned by propaganda artifacts; the gazes of authors/ artists from Romania as they look back at the time of Communism to recuperate untold stories; and the gazes we return by looking at these representations from a different historical time.

References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Kevin Attell, 2005. Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Seventh edition. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1962. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New  York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014. Bal, Mieke. Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto, 2002. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Bonnell, Victoria. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Borcila, Andaluna. American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives. New  York and London: Routledge, 2014. Breu, Christopher. Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Bugan, Carmen. Burying the Typewriter: A Memoir. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2012. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Codrescu, Andrei. The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991. Deletant, Dennis. Romania Under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Drakulic, Slavenka. Café Europa Revisited. New York: Penguin Books, 2021. Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

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Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-­ Structuralist Reader, edited by Robert Young, 48–78. Boston, London, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1981. Foucault, Michel. Society must be defended. Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976. Trans. David Macey. New York, NY: Picador, 1997. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Foss, Sonja K. “Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory.” In Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, 303–13. New York: Routledge, 2009. Ghodsee, Kristen. Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019. Gradea, Adriana. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Cluj.” The Romanian American Journal for the Humanities, 1, no. 1 (2017), Retrieved from http://rahjournal. org/journal-creative-expressions. Accessed November 2022. Gradea, Adriana C. “Post/Communist Visual Rhetorics of Power and Resistance.” PhD diss., Illinois State University, Normal, IL, 2019. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites. “Visual Tropes and Late-Modernity Emotion in U.S.  Public Culture.” Poroi, 5, 2 (2008): 47–93. https://doi. org/10.13008/2151-­2957.1015 Hill, Charles A. and Marguerite Helmers. (Eds.). Defining Visual Rhetorics. New York: Routledge, 2009. Katz, Steven B. “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust.” College English, 54, 3 (1992): 255–75. Kligman, Gail. The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Knoblauch, A.  Abby. “Bodies of Knowledge: Definitions, Delineations, and Implications of Embodied Writing in the Academy.” Composition Studies, 40, 2 (2012): 50–65. Leidig, Michael. “Romania Still Faces High Abortion Rate 16 Years after Fall of Ceauşescu.” BMJ: British Medical Journal, 331, (Nov 2005): 1043. Linz, Juan J. Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder, CO and London, UK: Rienner, 2000. Lucaites, John Louis and Robert Hariman, Robert. “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture.” Rhetoric Review, 20, 2/1 (2001): 37–42. Metz, Christian. “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited by Philip Rosen, 35–65, New  York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

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Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Moane, Geraldine. “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision.” In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, edited P.  Kirby, L.  Gibbons, and M.  Cronin, London: Pluto Press, 2002. Moore, David Chioni. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique.” PMLA, Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies, 116, 1 (2001): 111–28. Ornatowski, Cezar M. “‘The Future Is Ours,’ Or Is It? The Rise and Fall of Totalitarian Rhetoric in Poland (and Elsewhere).” In The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, edited by Smith M. and Warnick, B., 345–48, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2010. Powell, Malea, Stacey Pigg, Leon Kendall, and Angela Haas. “Rhetoric.” In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.), edited by Marcia Bates and Mary Niles Maack, 4548–56. London, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2010. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 36, 2 (2003): 148–67. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L.  London, UK: Macmillan, 1988. Ştefănescu, Bogdan. Postcommunism. Postcolonialism. Siblings of Subalternity. Bucharest, Romania: Editura Universitătii din Bucuresti, 2012. (In English) Tismaneanu, Vladimir. The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012. Ward, Mark. The Ethic of Exigence: Information Design, Postmodern Ethics, and the Holocaust.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 24, 1 (2010): 60–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651909346932 Zizek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. London and New York: Verso, 2001.

CHAPTER 2

Living in the Totalitarian World

I was born in times of an antiabortion decree. This puts my existence (and that of many others) under the specter of nonbeing. A presence that implies an absence.1 Growing up as a child of Communism in Romania, I knew little at the time about the reasons why I was a decreeling or part of the country’s largest generation in history. It was a state of fact, for a long time, and I rarely thought about my being in the world or the way I came to be. My journey toward understanding my embodied knowledge started with feelings of physical belonging, which included my identification with the visuals of the Communist propaganda, for example, when I had to wear specific attire to show appurtenance to sociopolitical structures, such as the Pioneer Organization. I later learned the significances and implications of the antiabortion Decree 770 of 1966, which was passed at a time when abortion had been the only legally available method of birth control, with four abortions for every live birth. After the decree became effective, the

 I had discussions with many friends in this large generation, who recall hearing from their parents that abortion had been discussed or considered before their births. 1

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birth rate doubled in 1967, before it slowly dropped again. The result was a so-called “short, baby boom”2 or the decret ̦ei generation (1966–1972).

Decree 770 of 1966 The antiabortion Decree 770 was in effect between 1966 and 1990. It resulted in the decret ̦ei generation,3 the largest in Romania’s history, also called by Donatella Meadows “the cohort of ‘67.”4 With this law, the government intended to decrease the previous high abortion rate and to increase the country’s population. Although the Marxism-informed governments within the Second World provided women with certain egalitarian rights (e.g., in labor rights, paid maternity leave, subsidized daycare), natalist legislations paradoxically complicated the women’s condition; Communist states often resorted to measures of drastic control of natality (see, for instance, the case of China, where the number of children was controlled in the opposite direction5). Decree 770 also undermined a proclaimed equality for women under Communism, which offered women equal pay, access to education, and a workplace. Women continued to carry the burden of economic hardship in a society where they still had traditional roles such as that of feeding the family when food was not available because of rationing. Despite these apparent contradictions, the decree was in line with the totalitarian practice of ruling by fiat; rhetorically, it aligned to the nationalist idea.  Decree 770 was not passed for health, ethical, or religious reasons, but to advance the authoritarian agenda and to increase the country’s labor force. By regulating women’s bodies and sexuality, it objectified the body politic consisting of women and disregarded their voice in the country’s larger political arena.  Donella Meadows, “Ceaușescu’s Longest-Lasting Legacy: The Cohort of ‘67.” In The Donella Meadows Archive: Voice of a Global Citizen. Sustainability Institute, 1990, http:// www.donellameadows.org/archives/ceausescus-longest-lasting-legacy-the-cohort-of-67/ (accessed March 2021). 3  Indeed, director Mungiu and the two female characters (who we know existed, as Mungiu states the story was real) in the film are part of the same generation. Additionally, these issues are personal to me as a witness to the communist totalitarian regime, given Decree 770’s role in my life (as part of the decreeling generation, and a woman coming of age in a time when thousands of women died in illegal abortions, including a young woman I knew personally). 4  Meadows, n.p. 5  China’s 35-year-long “one-child” demographic policy, designed to slow down the population’s rapid growth, was also a biopolitical intervention within the Second World spaces of communism. 2

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In a conservative estimation  and accepting only officially recorded cases, over 10,000 women lost their lives because of such practices, although many sources provide considerably higher numbers. I now understand it was part of biopolitics6 (or politics that addresses and regulates the human body). The Decree is still associated with Ceausescu’s name because it was passed the year after his access to power, and it remained in effect for all his presidency of almost a quarter of a century; the practice of illegal abortion remained in place even after 1990 because people’s behaviors do not change overnight. In everyday life, the Decree’s presence meant more for women, as Valerie Palmer-Mehta and Alina Haliliuc explain: The decree criminalized abortions and restricted birth control for all healthy women younger than 40 years old who had fewer than four children. Supplementary measures guaranteed the enforcement of Decree 770: secret police teams staffed hospitals to monitor the activities of doctors and the medical personnel, at the same time that Securitate agents accompanied doctors in factories for mandatory bi-annual gynecological exams. […] Contraceptives were nearly impossible to acquire, as they were rare and expensive black market items […]. The risks were extreme, however, and women died by the thousands from complications: according to official statistics and estimations of nondeclared pregnancy interruptions, abortion became the leading cause of mortality among fertile women between 1966 and 1989.7

Adrian Ot ̦oiu also offers examples of oppressive practices in Communist Romania of the late-Communist period: the blurred borderline between the public and private spheres also placed people’s lives on the edge of survival: the [P]arty “demographic policy” required gynecological control of every female patient; home consumption of electricity, gas, and food was strictly regulated by means of artificially-­ induced shortages; phones were bugged, typewriters were recorded with the police; home videos were regarded as a threat to “communist ethics.”8

 Biopolitics is the sociopolitical intervention in managing life and living bodies.  Valery Palmer-Mehta and Alina Haliliuc, “The Performance of Silence in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.” Text and Performance Quarterly, 31, no. 2 (2011): 111–29, p. 114. 8  Adrian Oţoiu, “An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: The Postcolonial, the Postcommunist, and Romania’s Threshold Generation.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23, no. 1–2 (2003): 87–105, p. 93. 6 7

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At the same time, motherhood was a preponderant propaganda trope and one of the country’s ideal hypostases for women. Likewise, the Communist Woman was depicted as a worker, a scientist, and a promoter of Romanianness, to name a few of the preestablished molds the regime prepared for her. Moreover, the regime created the “Heroine Mother” Medal after the Soviet one instituted in 1944. In Romania, it was created in 19519 and was awarded to women who had ten children and in recognition for carrying through the grand nation ideology by increasing the country’s population. During the 25 years of Ceaușescu’s version of Communism, women continued to be observed and periodically “checked” for pregnancies in ad hoc mandatory doctor’s visits monitored by the secret police (called Securitate). I remember those visits, as does my mother. All this contributed to the regime’s political terror and to the violence enacted on women. The presence of police in medical institutions ensured pregnancies were not hidden, intentionally misdiagnosed, or illegally terminated.10 I argue that the Securitate men present in doctor’s offices were the extension of the totalitarian patriarchal and male gaze—an extra layer of surveillance. Most importantly, for a large part of the population, all these factors became entangled with aspects of everyday life. Expectedly, an active underground black market for abortions developed: doctors and nurses risked their freedom by performing improvised abortions in unsanitary conditions, and women risked their lives to have them. Additionally, one cannot discuss the consequences of Decree 770 of 1966 without mentioning Romania’s orphans, who were born but not cared for because the regime had little regard for human rights or the well-­ being of unwanted newborns; the orphanage crisis of the 1990s was highly mediatized (especially in the West).11 Figure  2.1 shows children in an orphanage in Cluj, Romania (courtesy of the Minerva Archive). At the time of the regime, the population was largely uninformed about the orphanage crisis because the media never talked about it—a syndrome of 9   See the image of the Heroine Mother Medal at https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Mam%C4%83_eroin%C4%83#/media/File:Mama_Eroina_RPR.jpg. 10  I was checked myself at the beginning of my post-secondary studies, together with all the women in the year, in a doctor’s office where we were taken impromptu, en masse. I remember the plain-clothes men that were the police keeping an eye (their gaze) in such offices. My mother tells me this happened with women regularly, as they were periodically mandatorily escorted from their workplace to doctor’s cabinets for such reasons, during the work hours. I was present when Mother was interviewed for the organization Doctors Without Borders about these issues (I worked as an interpreter for the Transylvania office in Cluj at the time, in 1990). 11  Cf. Borcilă.

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Fig. 2.1  Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1987-1991_c2_c6r10_003)

deliberate invisibilities available to the authorities through media control. However, when images of orphanages exploded on television after the fall of Communism, they became subject to the collective gaze, together with other events that Andaluna Borcila calls “an assemblage of sites of ‘history happening.’”12 The West depicted the Romanian orphanage crisis as a “pseudo-clinical discourse,”13 on which the U.S. media focused after the  Ibid., p. 4.  Ibid.

12 13

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Revolution of 1989. Through this lens, Figure 2.1 also reveals the trauma of the orphans by another set of interlocking gazes: under the outsider’s gaze, the children gaze back to a media that had ignored them during Communism, and back to a country that had failed them. Therefore, although Decree 770 appeared to ban abortion to promote life, it instead led to tragic loss of life. Thousands of women died. By the 1980s, the practice of illegal abortions was widespread, and women’s preoccupation with avoiding pregnancy was pervasive. A writer of samizdat literature about the Ceaușescu regime, well-known and beloved Romanian poet Ana Blandiana14 wrote the following poem called Children’s Crusade in 1984, when Decree 770 had been in effect for almost two decades; it implies that many pregnancies were unwanted, especially because of the Decree, and that many unborn children were seemingly forced into life: An entire nation, Still unborn, Yet doomed to birth, Ranged in battalions before birth, Foetus next to foetus, A whole brood Unhearing, unseeing, ungrasping, Yet advancing Through the writhing gore of mothers Unconsenting.15

The poem was not made known to the public, but word about Blandiana’s dissidence traveled. As Irina Grigorescu-Pana explains, “writers were already in exile, translating their work into allegories”16 in an effort to hide from the authorities’ censorship because Communism allowed no criticism. 14  Ana Blandiana’s work was samizdat as she was banned from publication during the communist regime. Here is the poem in the original:  “Cruciada copiilor/ Un întreg popor/ Nenăscut înca/ Dar condamnat la naștere,/ Foetus langa foetus,/ Un întreg popor/ Care n-aude, nu vede, nu înt ̦elege,/ Dar înaintează/ Prin trupuri zvârcolite de femei,/ Prin sânge de mame/ Neîntrebate.” 15  This translation is by Daniela Sorea; both the poem and the decree are analyzed in Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill’s book The Language of Protest (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 171–90. 16  Grigorescu-Pana, Irina. The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature. (Berne: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 10.

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After the fall of Communism, however, artists could indeed return the gaze and inspect the past with newly discovered freedom. For example, the documentary Children of the Decree (2005), directed by Razvan Georgescu and Florin Iepan, did the work of resuscitating memories by uncovering sites of trauma that we—the Romanian population at large— did not know existed or could not openly discuss. Most importantly, this aspect of life obscured from sight in Communism should be understood together with other realities that were deliberately hidden from sight. Children of the Decree is a documentary that chronicles the dark, extreme consequences of the Decree and the plight of women under this restrictive law. A powerful cinematic production, both visually and in terms of what it makes visible, made in post-Communism with more objectivity and the clarity of hindsight, the film gave voices to those who could not talk at the time. For this documentary, according to Marie-Louise Paulesc, Florin Iepan consulted archives; he interviewed women who have undergone illegal abortions; he talked to doctors, nurses, and quacks who have performed them; he traced unwanted and abandoned children; he located families who have been used by the propaganda machine as proof of the decree’s success, such as “the family of the 20th millionth Romanian.” He chronicles the terrible conditions of illegal abortions, describing (with clinical details) the methods used, reports on the thousands of deaths caused by inadequate abortions, reveals the police’s harassment of doctors and women, and depicts a larger picture of women’s life, family, and sexuality under Communism. With this film, Iepan scripts, as it were, history.17

This documentary shows how the propaganda machine praised the generation of the “New Men” resulted from this biopolitical legislation— propaganda that was visible, audible, and palpable for me as a child and which I analyze in this book. Propaganda managed to keep invisible those women obligated to submit to this law, and by so doing, it constructed 17  Marie-Louise Paulesc, “Film, History, and Memory in the Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu.” Film Criticism, 41, no. 2 (2017), n.p., https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/ fc/13761232.0041.204/%2D%2Dfilm-history-and-memory-in-the-autobiography-of-nicol ae?rgn=main;view=fulltext&fbclid=IwAR2z4STuosA7NQFgrbymqlxoSMW8EA1-29OEb iG1egsOZ2OWqp1CNIdhAKI#N3.

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their apparent nonexistence. This book focuses on the liminal place of absence (underrepresentation, lack of voice) as well as the presence in the public space. * * * When I learned about the decreeling generation, I banished to the darkest corner of my mind the thought that I might belong to a group of unwanted, superfluous children. Could my very existence be questionable? Because it conflicted with official propaganda, I did not know how to deal with this possibility. My family of good people with golden hearts undoubtedly loved me and saved my childhood from the often hard life under the Communist regime, through years of various shortages, power and heating outages, and food rations. And many families did the same. I was still to find out, however, what being a “decreţel” actually meant, and what it meant to those children who were truly unwanted, whose lives were different, and who, in time, filled orphanages we knew nothing about. In this book, I ask: How did this intrusive ideological intervention on women’s bodies act as violence? How should we understand the biopolitical, ontological, or epistemic aspects of this violence? When I thought about it, I began to wonder if I was also a product of Romania’s Communist regime. Was I indestructibly tethered—both ontologically and epistemologically—with a state ideology? I now see the term “decreţel” as a label that carved legislation on my life; if not on my body, then on my overall being. The government’s legislation appropriated our generation through political power and circumscribed it within the regime’s goals while denying our existence outside this totalitarian ideology. As a linguistic inscription, it defined us in reductionist terms of appurtenance to a group that was important to the regime. Within the regime’s paradigm, we were expected to perform the task of achieving “the bright Communist future,” according to a propaganda slogan of the time repeated insistently in the media. We had to perform a role the regime assigned to us. Karen Barad states as follows: A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is

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precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real.18

Performativity connects to later events also, such as the revolutionary events of December 1989. Then, belonging gained further significance when I witnessed the violent Romanian revolution that started with college students, namely, the baby-boom generation I belonged to, aged 18 and 23 years old at the time. I first heard it implied in the Western media of the time that it was precisely the “children of the Decree” that overturned Ceaușescu’s regime, before I later read it in books. Indeed, Dennis Deletant’s 2019 book Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration (a referential history book) points out the irony in the fact that “many of these young demonstrators would not have been present but for the impact of Ceaușescu’s decree of 1966 outlawing abortion, and that, in a sense, he was to be overthrown by the generation he himself created.”19,20 It took courage to protest in the streets against armed police and military shooting at people. Although not everyone could confront the government’s guns, in spirit we were all there. We belonged.21 A generation that the government groomed to become empowered and entrusted with building Communism, who learned in competitive schools to be better than their counterparts in the West, had now taken life by the 18  Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” in Material Feminisms, ed. S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 123. 19  Dennis Deletant, Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration  (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), p. 493. 20  See also my article (Adriana Cordali Gradea, “The Exigency of a Communist Totalitarian Pedagogy in the United States,” The Romanian Journal for the Humanities, http://rahjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Adriana-Cordali-Gradea.pdf), where I discuss this argument pertaining to assertions in the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (New York: Harper Collins, 2005). In short, the authors argue that the generation born of the 1966 decree was more violent because of the abortion ban. I explain there the larger historical context that contradicts their conclusion. 21  Many forces that wanted to preserve the status quo existed in the country, however, which should not be neglected. The idealism of a revolution is visible similarly on the waves at the surface of a flowing river; underneath that fast-moving layer, though, slower and viscous water mixed with sand advances imperceptibly almost obstructing the river’s progression. Reactionary forces were at play, hindering the revolutionary ideas from manifesting. All this became evident a few months after those events of December 1989.

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horns to prove precisely all that. I discuss the participation of my generation in the 1989 Revolution in Chap. 5, where I elaborate on the reversal of the visual rhetorical categories of the absence and presence.

Toward a Visuality of Communism In this section, I argue for the need of a visual rhetorical theory of Communism, or a visuality of that time, which, complemented by a countervisuality, can provide a bigger picture. From my experience growing up during Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime (which spanned 1965–1989) and witnessing the Romanian Revolution of 1989, I know that the Communist state, when constructing its ideological knowledge, controlled what the population could see. When people started conversations about how the past was possible, questions have arisen about what sustained the regime, why resistance was not more poignant, who and what made it possible, what was good and bad in Communism or Socialism in general, and what these experiences could teach us. This visuality of Communism aims to contribute to existing conversations extant within totalitarian studies and visual rhetoric studies, by establishing operational angles and lenses for better comprehending that historical time. Imagery and Visuality I unpack the methods in which Communist Romania intentionally eliminated elements while emphasizing others, through practices of deliberate visibilities, invisibilities, and visualities. What role do images play in society? What can they reveal about historical periods in their splendor, or about people’s lives in times of oppression? How do images create a story or a counter-story? How do interventions on the visible from hegemonic power structures affect people’s lives? If, to paraphrase Michel de Certeau, power is contingent on its visibility, with which it is intertwined,22 how does this affiliation take place in totalitarianism? I return to these questions throughout the book. Visual rhetorical analyses rely on methods that reinforce the Western ocular epistemology and a phenomenological ontology; therefore, rhetorical analyses of material artifacts (as well as bodies) showcase the way visibility and visuality create and contest meanings in three-dimensional  Certeau, p. 36.

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environments.23 Drawing upon visual rhetorical scholarship that combines visual culture and visual rhetoric approaches, I extend the inquiry into the larger cultural and historical implications of visual signs and their interpretations.24 For example, Angela Haas25 offers an exemplary visual cultural rhetorical examination of artifacts showing that non-alphabetic media (such as visual materials and even bodies) have been ignored by the West, which may perpetuate systemic discrimination and colonialism in the case of native Americans. Haskins and Zappen interpret Soviet posters through “totalitarian visual monologue” employing a Bakhtian dialogic method of understanding the “pervasive totalitarian rhetoric of the Soviet state.”26 And various other works27 offer other salient examples on how visuality constructs meaning in media and even geographical sites. Seminal works in rhetorical28 and discourse29 theory add to this framework of examining

23  Cf. Amy D.  Propen, Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics: The Map, the Mill, and the GPS. (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2012). 24  Lee Brasseur, “Florence Nightingale’s Visual Rhetoric in the Rose Diagrams.” Technical Communication Quarterly, 14, no. 2 (2005), 161–82; Angela Haas, “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 19, no. 4 (2007), 77–100; Propen (2012), Adriana Cordali Gradea,  “Embroidered Feminist Rhetoric in Andrea Dezso’s Lessons from My Mother.” Rhetoric Review, 33, no. 3 (2014),  219–43; Adriana Cordali Gradea,  “Communist Authoritarian Discourses and Practices in Romanian New Wave Cinema.” In Commanding Words: Essays on the Discursive Constructions, Manifestations, and Subversions of Authority, ed. Lynda Chouiten (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). 25  Haas (2007). 26  Ekaterina V. Haskins and James P. Zappen. “Totalitarian Visual ‘Monologue’: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40, no. 4 (2010): 326–59, p. 326. 27  See John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture.” Rhetoric Review, 20, no. 2–1 (2001), 37–42; Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips, Graphic Design: The New Basics.(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008); Alan Manning and Nicole Amare, “Visual-Rhetoric Ethics: Beyond Accuracy and Injury.” Technical Communication, 53, no. 2 (2006), 195–211; and Propen (2012). 28  See Kenneth  Burke,  Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 1968); and Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Third edition. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984); Ralph H.  Johnson, “The Principle of Vulnerability.” Informal Logic, 17, no. 2 (1995), 259–269; Paul  Prior,  Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy (New York: Routledge, 1998); and Cezar Ornatowski, “‘The Future Is Ours,’ Or Is It? The Rise and Fall of Totalitarian Rhetoric in Poland (and Elsewhere).” In The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, ed. M. Smith and B. Warnick (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2010). 29  Michel  Foucault, The Order of Discourse. In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed.  Robert Young, 48–78. (Boston, London, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1981).

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the rhetoricities of visual images, symbols, and signs pertaining to post/ Communist regimes. Moreover, images circulate within cultures and regions, being  supported and distributed by various media. Consequently, to construct a visuality of Communism as a way of seeing history and rhetorical practices through imagery, I look at objects of propaganda of the time. Although the twentieth-century linguistic turn was “central to theoretical understandings of human experience that dominated intellectual history,” during the New Rhetoric movement, the contemporary cultural, material, and visual rhetorical turns in the discipline have cleared a path for more diverse rhetorical representations to shape our intellectual future.30 Then, the so-called pictorial turn in visual culture came in close connection to the spatial turn, which further interknits the concepts of space and visuality. When W. J. T. Mitchell wrote Picture Theory in 1994, he defined the “pictorial turn” as a “shift”: In Anglo-American philosophy, variations on this turn can be traced early on in Charles Peirce’s semiotics and later in Nelson Goodman’s “languages of art,” both of which explore the conventions and codes that underlie nonlinguistic symbol systems and (more important) do not begin with the assumption that language is paradigmatic for meaning. In Europe one might identify it with phenomenology’s inquiry into imagination and visual experience; or with Derrida’s “grammatology,” which de-centers the “phonocentric” model of language by shifting attention to the visible, material traces of writing; or with the Frankfurt School’s investigations of modernity, mass culture, and visual media; or with Michel Foucault’s insistence on a history and theory of power/knowledge that exposes the rift between the discursive and the “visible,” the seeable and the sayable, as the crucial fault-line in “scopic regimes” of modernity.31

Nicholas Mirzoeff clarifies that visuality is a discursive practice: Visuality is an old word for an old project. It is not a trendy theory word meaning the totality of all visual images and devices, but is in fact an early nineteenth-century term meaning the visualization of history. This practice 30  Powell et al., “Rhetoric.” In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.), dited by Marcia Bates and Mary Niles Maack. (London, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2010), p. 4548. 31  W.  J. T.  Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media.”  In The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 7–14 (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

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must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images, and ideas […] Despite its name, this process is not composed simply of visual perceptions in the physical sense, but is formed by a set of relations combining information, imagination, and insight into a rendition of physical and psychic space. I am not attributing agency to “visuality” but, as is now commonplace, treating it as a discursive practice that has material effects, like Foucault’s panopticism, the gaze or perspective.32

Images take shape in people’s imagination or what Mirzoeff calls above “psychic space.” However, every society uses visual enframing differently, including in non-Western spaces that have largely and historically been considered as “the Other.” Totalitarian power relations at play complicate things because of heightened degrees of oppression and a fear of consequences of free speech. I emphasize context because, as Victoria Bonnell states, “Images mean nothing by themselves, taken in isolation from their historical context.”33 In a society where the totalitarian political establishment is invested in controlling the conversation, and has the instruments to do so, the construction of meaning may become corrupted by politics. This predicament should not be neglected in present examinations of how people resist totalitarianism. Imagery surrounding Eastern Europe’s Communist past exists, but it is still to find the place it deserves in the Western imaginary, mainly because iconic images circulate within social visual contexts. The significance of the few iconic Eastern European images recognizable throughout the world is often reduced to clichés. Additionally, as Kiewe and Houck rightfully state, “the very cultural designation of an image such as a photograph as iconic is always already a measure of rhetoric’s effects.”34 To build the Communist visuality, I begin with W. J. T. Mitchell’s proposition to put the visual at the “center of the analytic spotlight”; I do this concomitantly with the consideration for rhetoric. According to Mitchell, sight became a “sovereign” sense and gained the part as “the universal scapegoat, from the ‘downcast eyes’ that Martin Jay has traced, to Debord’s ‘society of the 32  Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 2, 3. 33  Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 19. 34  Amos Kiewe and Davis W.  Houck  (Eds.), The Effects of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Effects: Past, Present, Future. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2015).

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spectacle,’ Foucauldian ‘scopic regimes,’ Virilian ‘surveillance’ and Baudrillardian ‘simulacra’”; Mitchell explains as follows: Like all fetish objects, the eye and the gaze have been both over- and underestimated, idolized and demonized. Visual culture at its most promising offers a way to get beyond these “scopic wars” into a more productive critical space, one in which we would study the intricate braiding and nesting of the visual with the other senses […]35

Indeed, sight does not function in a vacuum. In this theoretical framework, in addition to sight, I include sound to emphasize the importance of silence (or lack of sound) in the social dialog. Moreover, visual culture perspectives should be coupled with rhetorical theory if we are to demystify the visual rhetoric of everyday materials and the ideologies they bring into the observable visible spectrum. Visual and material culture, cultural studies, and cultural theory approaches coupled with visual rhetoric would benefit the visual rhetoric studies in general, as well as the visual rhetoric of specific totalitarian regimes. Books in the field of visual culture, such as What Do Pictures Want? and Picture Theory by visual theorist W.  J. T.  Mitchell, foreground principles that contribute to robust approaches in visual rhetorical studies. I add to these books Michel Foucault’s examination of the “gaze” and “panopticon” and Laura Mulvey’s conceptualizations of the “male gaze” in feminist visual rhetorics,36 as well as Michel de Certeau’s37 theory of the practice of everyday life to argue that visual rhetoric is more than the mere rhetorical reading of images or the analysis of design elements in informational documents—although these perspectives are also necessary and ongoing. For example, Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics, to which I return throughout this book, provides a fine lens for zooming in on people’s enactment of discourses in society, especially in totalitarianism where they become embodied. This understanding explains people’s resistance to oppression in Communism, namely, that it consisted in tactics, or what Certeau calls the “art of the weak.” The tension inherent in a society’s dialogic discourses should be seen through Foucault’s explanation  Mitchell, p. 13.  See Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009). 37  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). 35 36

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while not forgetting that the totalitarian regime has more measures at its disposal to suppress voices: There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy.38

In totalitarianism, however, the discourses do not flow freely, but in fact blocks of obstacles hinder them. Consequently, the art of disentangling said discourses takes rigorous method. A visuality based on the rhetoric of images adds to the bigger picture of a historical time. A Countervisuality Countervisuality brings to the visible spectrum what the authority had strategically made invisible previously. It adds to the understanding of the regime’s larger picture. Visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff conceptualizes the plantation, imperial, and military industrial “complexes of visuality,” explaining that, together with practices of “countervisualities,” these are not always visual or discursive39 but indeed strategic and tactical.40 This insistence on praxis alongside lines of power reminds of Certeau and equally applies to other restrictive societies. Lacking from Mirzoeff’s account, the Communist totalitarian regimes have their own complexes of visuality. Therefore, conceptualizing countervisuality as the opposition to the establishment’s visuality, we can offer a model for a more encompassing tableau of the Communist regime. More specifically, Mirzoeff posits that, within the imperial context, dominant visuality “sutures authority to power and renders this association ‘natural,’”41 while countervisuality, on the other hand, offers a counterhistory designed to reevaluate and disrupt hegemonic visualization practices meant to change the paradigm. He explains this connection in terms of political and social power and distinguishes between two types of 38  Michel Foucault (1981) qtd. in David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, And Imperial Administration, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 11. 39  Cf. Mirzoeff. 40  Cf. Certeau. 41  Mirzoeff, p. 6.

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visuality that lie at the basis of his account of countervisuality applied to imperialism. In fact, Mirzoeff starts from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s descriptions of two modes of history: History 1 is “predicated by capital for itself ‘as a precondition’ to its own existence,” whereas History 2 should be configured as “a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.”42 Namely, he adapts conceptualizations of history to define Visuality 1 as belonging to the “domain of authority,” which uses visuality to “supplement its deployment of force” and describes it as one that is “proper to the docile bodies demanded by capital.” The authority invented new methods to discipline, normalize, and order vision for the purpose of what Guy Debord called the “‘spectacle,’ that is to say, ‘capital accumulated to the point where it becomes and image.’”43 Therefore, while Mirzoeff admits Visuality 1 is familiar to the global West and North, I posit that it similarly describes the authority in totalitarian Communism, where it may differ in degree, length of time, and due to  local sociocultural specificities. Subsequently, the visuality of Communism I create molds on what I envisage as the visual rhetoric of power, which indeed relies on the panoptic principle and the surveilling gaze coupled with the ability to disseminate propaganda because of the high degree of social politicization. Originally observed as a result of a prison structure designed by the English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon is a tower placed in the center of a prison compound to allow for the surveillance of inmates at any time. Its purpose was so that, whether someone was there to watch or not, inmates would participate in self-regulation.44 Next, Mirzoeff’s Visuality 2 pictured “the self or collective that exceeds or precedes that subjugation to centralized authority” and was not “invisible to authority” but was deemed as barbaric or uncivilized within imperialism.45 When looking at the Communist regimes through Mirzoeff’s explanation, we can immediately see that Communist rhetorics and practices of power exclude the “Others” by calling them, not “barbaric” like in the colonial order, but the “enemies of the people.”

 Chakrabarty quoted in Mirzoeff, p. 22.  Mirzoeff, p. 23. 44  Sturken and Cartwright, pp. 106–107. 45  Mirzoeff, pp. 23–24. 42 43

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Born from this “divided visuality,” Mirzoeff’s countervisuality is what he calls “the claim for the right to look,” and in his book, he follows it from slavery to imperialism and global counterinsurgency.46 Similarly, the visual rhetorical theory of Communism I construct in this book is rooted in the local history and culture, and it is complemented by visualizations of resistance practices, which in totalitarianism should be sought in places of apparent absence. Therefore, the main argument in this book centers on the rhetorical practice of exclusion in Communism that results in a presence/absence dynamic with parts that reinforce each other. Akin to Mirzoeff’s Visuality 2, the rhetoric of resistance in Communism offers a countervisuality that evinces the specific ways in which  silenced people could become a presence, as demonstrated in Chaps. 5 and 6. Consequently, seeing these layered rhetoricities in terms of systems of visuality sheds light on subtle aspects and relations that might otherwise remain unnoticed. One such category the totalitarian government intently obscures is that of the ontological, where rhetorics of resistance often reside when they take nondiscursive forms. Contributing to this trajectory, Julie Jung proposes a systems rhetorical theory that “recasts systems science” by coupling “language and materiality in ways that do not subordinate one to the other.”47 Jung cites Sara Ahmed’s new materialism as “an effective selection if one wants to notice how and why elements within systems (collectives, assemblages, ecologies, networks, webs, etc.) can be blocked as well as flow: not everything is circulating, because not everything can.”48 For instance, in totalitarianism, the propaganda discourses are often disconnected from the practices employed by the authorities; given this, the discursive and the nondiscursive may become disconnected, although not indiscernible. While discourses from power may, at times, render borders between power and resistance as blurred, the totalitarian order further intensifies this tension. At times, because bodies and material objects coexist in the public space and the environment, they become one with it in the eyes of the regime. When the Communist regime excluded the “enemy” from sight, it neglected that, over time, it would be left without its object. We inhabit places, but they are in turn shaped by people and  Ibid., pp. 23, 24.  Julie Jung, “Systems Rhetoric: A Dynamic Coupling of Explanation and Description.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture (2014).  Available at http:// www.enculturation.net/systems-rhetoric. 48  Ibid.; emphasis in the original. 46 47

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ideologies. Therefore, I account for the ontological because the body is sociopolitically situated: its rhetoric is still visible through an undeniable materiality, even when—and maybe precisely because—spoken resistance is forbidden. In the visual rhetorical analysis of propaganda materials, distinctions are comparatively easier to draw. Furthermore, visualities include more than materials per se: they involve perceptions and perspectives, elements surrounding and informing people’s everyday life, and positionalities within the interlocking gazes of forces that act as supporting or subverting the power. Apart from expanding established concepts, in what follows, I also coin terms for future rhetorical and post/Communist inquiry. Specifically, given the heavy reliance on ideology and emphasis on the Communist episteme in Communist Romania, I adapt the concept of “epistemic violence” from postcolonial theory. To connect this concept to visual rhetoric, I refer to the type of violence that visuality artists use in depicting the violent rhetorics of power and resistance as a visual epistemic violence because it has the potential to change our knowledge (and imagery) of the Communist period (see the next chapter). Ultimately, writing about the post/Communist regimes is necessary not only because, as Borcila points out, they bring “us closer to the complexities of so-called post-Communist countries but rather to an understanding of the mapping, ways of seeing, and discursive constraints that have limited our understanding of them.”49 In these disciplines invested in a better cognizance of global systems, a lot can be learned regarding the rhetorical, social, political, and economic situations in the post-­Communist periods of “transition.” In addition to situating my book in relation to my embodied knowledges as a post/Communist subject, I place it in conjunction with current interdisciplinary conversations that approach the analysis of images from cultural perspectives. Cultural theory can reveal critical relationships between places, spaces, bodies, and rhetorics in Communist Romania. It is important to account for layered ideologies, rhetorics, and power dynamics at play. Moreover, sight is part and parcel of embodiment. Thus, central to my analysis are visuality, visibility, and the force of visualization, notably in light of the censorship of language and expression extant in totalitarianism.

 Borcila, p. 7.

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In designing a more comprehensive visuality of the Communist era, I offer methods of discerning the features and visual tropes of the Communist visual rhetorics after explaining the role played by historical, political, and cultural vantage points. Based upon this stratified foundation that relies on sociopolitical events, in the following chapters, I identify the rhetorical features and then the visual tropes of Communist propaganda that contained the germs of the ideology of that time. At the basis of this construction, however, lie the historical events that determined these visualities.

The Importance of History Grandpa Constantin was on a train, in his Romanian Army officer uniform, when he suddenly heard from behind: “Don’t move or I’ll shoot you!” Grandpa froze and thought he’d die. It was a zealous young Russian soldier. The Russian Army came after Romania turned against Germany in 1944. But it turned out the Russians didn’t know Romanian military ranks and couldn’t tell Grandpa was noncombatant. It seemed like an eternity before the soldier took the gun away from Grandpa’s head: the Russian soldier’s superior came and let my Grandpa go. Grandpa Constantin was a handsome, quiet, green-eyed man, who painted for pleasure and to escape depression. But, after Sunday dinners, he had war stories. With Germans and Russians, with bombs and shelters, stories about running for cover when the siren blared in the 1940s. I still remember stenciled messages, in black, pointing to shelters, on the city walls in Cluj. They were there well into the late 1970s. Grandpa once fell into a ditch full of tar in the panic of running for cover. Grandpa Constantin was in the Romanian Army. In 1940, Hungary annexed Northern Transylvania by the Second Vienna Award, and the Hungarian Army led by Nazi-sympathizer Admiral Miklos Horthy occupied the territory, which included Cluj. So my relatives became refugees to a different part of the country. Tens of thousands were expelled or left on their own. They returned to Transylvania after the war.50

* * * Visuality should be contextualized to history. In this section, I offer an understanding of historical events that acted as the substructure for the

 Personal account.

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propaganda efforts. In this analysis, to use Marxist terms,51 I emphasize history as the base (or substructure) for the superstructure that consists of the visual rhetorical analyses I employ. In other words, in the edifice of knowledge, the visual rhetorical spectacle does not happen in a void but on solid ground provided by the materiality of history and sociopolitical practices. Although the tools of the visual rhetorical analyses have certain universal features, the production of knowledge takes place around ideologies and historical circumstances. The Communist Party in Romania excluded certain groups from dialogue, the public space, or the political stage. In the periods in Romanian history this book is concerned with, the violent changes in regime and society at large constitute a foundation for understanding the features of propaganda I examine in various post/Communist visual materials. Indeed, Romania became increasingly totalitarian after WWII; however, before Communism, there was Fascism in the country; therefore, state-­ sponsored violence, both in rhetoric and practice, functioned as a political instrument, on a continuum. In twentieth-century Europe, the political center had collapsed, and the two extremes competed to take over all the structures in a country. Both types of European totalitarian regimes were disciplinary and, to quote Vladimir Tismaneanu, “forged their own versions of modernity,” having been “founded upon immanent utopias rooted in eschatological fervor.”52 Although violence exists in the world and in any political regime, it takes center stage in totalitarian systems. Moreover, the takeover of the state by a political extreme has consequences people in democracies can hardly imagine. For purposes of this analysis, Romania’s Communist propaganda can be divided into two large periods: 1948–1965 and 1965–1989. Certainly, these parts can further be classified in subperiods, depending on the lens we use, given that, rhetorically and propagandistically, things changed every decade. The developments started when Communism affirmed its “total domination” with the extension of Soviet Union’s influence to the satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe immediately after WWII.  Historically, however, Romania had a Fascist regime before and 51  See Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, (Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1977). Notes by R. Rojas Marx. 52  Vladimir Tismăneanu, The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012), p. 19.

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during WWII and before it was swept under the Soviet influence after 1944. In Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration, Deletant, who is an expert in Romanian history, explains that before WWII the Communist Party played a minor role on the political stage as it was unpopular and considered “a tool of the Soviet Union,” “became part of the Moscow-based Communist International (Commintern),” and was even outlawed on April 11, 1924.53 King Michael’s coup in August 1944 against the Germany-supported regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu, was a patriotic act meant to align Romania with the Allies. In fact, both the historical events and “the King’s crucial act in ordering the arrest of Marshal Antonescu on 23 August 1944, were largely unknown in Romania before the overthrow of the Communist regime.”54 In 1944, there were less than 1000 Communist Party members, probably because the Communist Party had been banned. After the war, the Party’s role was central in first, neutralizing the existing means of maintaining the social order, namely the army, judiciary and police and redesigning them to the Soviet model; second, creating mass support, which the [Romanian Communist Party] totally lacked, and which would provide the new regime with the necessary theoretical legitimation. Both activities involved reliance on fear.55

From the start, fear and manipulation of public opinion were at the crux of the Soviet application of what Deletant calls the “totalitarian blueprint.” At the time, the “war against the Axis still in progress was widely accepted as an ‘anti-Fascist’ crusade […] there were many in Romania who, in some sense or other, qualified as ‘Fascist’ […]. Events soon demonstrated that, in practice, Fascist came to mean what the Communists said it was.”56 This attitude soon led to purges: under Nicolae Rădescu’s government (December 6, 1944–February 28, 1945): “780 officers (i.e. employees of the Interior ministry) out of a total force estimated at 14,000, were purged.”57 After Radescu’s dismissal due to his critical 53  See my review of Dennis Deletant’s book, Adriana Cordali, “Book Review. Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration.” The Romanian America Journal  for the Humanities (2020). http://thersaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ Deletant_CordaliReview.pdf (last accessed March 2021). 54  Deletant, p. 42. 55  Ibid., p. 49. 56  Ibid., p. 52. 57  Ibid., p. 55.

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speeches against Soviet Russia’s “puppets” such as Ana Pauker, King Michael had to accept the “Soviet choice,” namely, Rădescu’s deputy, Petru Groza. The King feared a coup and reluctantly accepted Groza. Under the Groza government, the Communists accomplished a “total submission of the forces of order” starting with the replacement of 1000 magistrates with “pliant zealots” in April 1945: the threat of retribution was deployed to pressure people to become tools of the Communists. Groza himself told the British journalist Archie Gibson on 23 May 1945 that in the two months since he had taken office 90,000 Romanians had been arrested, but there is no information to hand to confirm this figure. For some there were good grounds for arrest. […] For others the opposite was true.58

Purges continued in the military, the police, political parties, and the justice department; other changes included the creation of the “Patriotic Guards” and, soon after that, the agrarian reform resorted to mass collectivization of land and resources. People were sent to the gulag, to Siberia, to other regions in their own countries; or they were imprisoned for years without a trial; and peasants were shot for not giving up their farms for collectivization. Communism was slowly but violently planted in postwar Romania, despite King Michael’s pleas for help from Britain and the United States. In fact, the Moscow Conference of December 1944 made Romania subservient to Soviet Russia, with the Western powers’ tacit approval. The newspapers of National Liberal and National Peasant Parties ceased to appear in 1945 after the newly installed Communist power called them “reactionaries.”59 New “free” elections were held in November 1946, which have since been established as having “prefabricated” results.60 King

 Ibid., p. 59.  Ibid., p. 54. 60  Ibid., p. 61. 58 59

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Michael was forced to abdicate on December 30, 1947,61 when the republic form of government was declared and “the foundations of the totalitarian state could be put in place.”62 The King and his family lived in exile without being allowed to return until after 1990. The Soviet Army had troops in Romania until 1958. The royal family’s exile exemplifies the feature of exclusion at the center of my analysis. However, exclusions continued when “No members of the ‘former exploiting classes’ were to be admitted” in the new Romanian Workers’ Party.63 The Party became a presence after sending into absence those elements that threatened its self-affirming feature. As a consequence, its presence increased to a “combined membership of 1,060,000.”64 In 1948, those to be excluded were called “enemies,” “saboteurs,” and “hostile elements.” They continued to be hunted because Gheorghiu-Dej stated they had to be “eradicated without mercy.”65 Repression was legalized by a February 1948 amendment to the Penal Code that was modeled on Soviet legislation in order to consolidate the Communist political power.66 To better visualize the results of the repression, Deletant states that “By the end of the year [1948], some 4500 arrests had been made, while a further 1162 Guardists were placed under surveillance,” ammunitions and guns were confiscated, “but the arrests merely steeled the ­determination of those who were prepared to transform their opposition into armed resistance, and in furtherance of their aims they took to the mountains.”67 Another decree followed in August, by which over 1000 officers were  The persecution of the “intellectuals” had started as early as 1947, when the communist government (installed by election fraud) forced King Michael to abdicate. They threatened to otherwise kill more than 1000 students who were already in prisons. They warned the king there would be bloodshed. King Michael of Hohenzollern was about 26 at the time and, until his death in 2017, he was one of the last living royals who had participated in World War II. He abdicated in December 1947 and fled the country to be allowed to visit only 50 years later. Subsequently, the communists took over and nationalized people’s assets. After the nationalization, nobody could own more than one piece of real estate at the most, not even as a family. Also, to be an intellectual and not a peasant or a proletarian meant you had an “unhealthy origin” and did not have certain rights. Father could only get a maximum of 8 points out of 10 in his high school entrance exam precisely because he was not a child of peasants and proletarians who had priority and their places secured. 62  Ibid., p. 63. 63  Ibid., p. 64. 64  Ibid. 65  Ibid. 66  Ibid. 67  Ibid., p. 65. 61

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arrested were replaced with “Communist Party appointees.”68 An “investigation” that lasted from November 1948 until May 1950 “removed from the Communist Party 192,000 ‘exploiting and hostile elements,’” which increased the “sense of terror” among the Romanian population. Deletant underlines that “[t]his purge, aimed at creating an elite, coincided with the Party’s programme of revolutionizing agriculture, industrializing the economy and of transforming society.”69 This politicization of society was paralleled by the introduction of Stalin’s version of Marxism– Leninism in schools. The nationalization in June 1948 of industrial, banking, insurance, mining and transport enterprises not only allowed the introduction of centralized quantitative planning but destroyed the economic basis of those stigmatized as class enemies. […] On 2 March 1949, the ownership of land was completely removed from private hands. […] The land, livestock and equipment of landowners who possessed property up to the maximum of 50 hectares permitted under the 1945 land law was expropriated without compensation. Virtually overnight the militia moved in and evicted 17,000 families from their homes and moved them to resettlement areas. The confiscated land, totaling almost one million hectares, was either amassed to create state farms or was organized into collectives which were in theory collectively owed but in fact state run since the Ministry of Agriculture directed which crops were to be grown and fixed the prices. […] Resistance to collectivization resulted in some 80,000 peasants being imprisoned for their opposition, 30,300 of them being tried in public.70

Deletant continues by saying that, “[t]he destruction of the opposition parties was followed by the liquidation of their press, as the media came under total state control,”71 and that education and the Church were similarly purged and reformatted to align with the Party’s ideological agenda. This “totalitarian blueprint” was not unique to Romania, however. To provide a wider view, I offer Hannah Arendt’s explanations about what happened in the geopolitical area that would become known as the “Soviet bloc”; namely, the installation of Communism began with a sham parliamentary system, proceeded quickly to open establishment of one-party dictatorships in which the leaders and members of the formerly  Ibid.  Ibid. 70  Ibid., p. 66. 71  Ibid., p. 67. 68 69

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tolerated parties were liquidated, and then reached the last stage when native Communist leaders […] were brutally framed, humiliated in show trials, tortured, and killed under the rulership of the most corrupt and most despicable elements in the party, namely those who were primarily not Communists but agents of Moscow. It was as though Moscow repeated in great haste all the stages of the October Revolution up to the emergence of totalitarian dictatorship. The story, therefore, while unspeakably horrible, is without much interest of its own and varies little: what happened in one satellite country happened at almost the same moment in all others from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic.72

Historically, the use of violence as a political instrument similarly to the manner in which Communist regimes were installed in Eastern Europe is not exclusively specific to these regimes; indeed, the previous Fascist regime engaged in pogroms and the Holocaust atrocities. Additionally, European totalitarianisms had a reciprocal, indeed dialectical, connection between discursive rhetoric and political practice; these regimes informed each other. It is well known that Nazism led to episodes of the uttermost violence humanity has known. Many works concerning totalitarianism73 focus on the social forces at play in totalitarianism in general, as well as in Communism in particular. Anne Applebaum shows that “the creation of concentrated camps was actually the final stage in a long process of dehumanization of these objectives—a process which began, at first, with rhetoric.”74 The nexus between rhetoric and political action is understood; however, in the case of abusive regimes, scrutinizing precisely the impact of rhetoric and discourse on both state actions and people’s mentality is revelatory. The twentieth-century European totalitarianisms—where I include both Nazism and Stalinism—are more related in their overemphasis on ideology and disastrous effects on human life than, for instance, Stalinism and democratic socialism are. Structurally, totalitarianism is a higher degree of authoritarianism: Totalitarian regimes seek total economic, 72  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Seventh edition. (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1962), p. xxxviii. 73  Cf. Arendt; Juan J.  Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes  (Boulder, CO and London, UK: Rienner, 2000); Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History. (New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004); Tismăneanu; and Slavoj Zizek,  Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion  (London and New  York: Verso, 2001). 74  Applebaum, p. xxxvi.

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political, and societal control, and enact drastic restrictions of civil liberties. However, as a matter of gradation, not all authoritarian regimes are totalitarian in nature (see Arendt;75 Linz76). Indeed, Juan J. Linz also specifies that massive coercion and political terror distinguish totalitarian regimes from other authoritarian regimes. In characterizing a system as totalitarian, Linz includes as follows: an ideology, a single mass party and other mobilizational organizations, and concentrated power in an individual and his collaborators or a small group that is not accountable to any large constituency and cannot be dislodged from power by institutionalized, peaceful means.77

Acknowledging that totalitarianism is a highly contested term, Linz explains that it has sponsored “some of the worst violations of human rights” even though not always leading to the same type of terror and repression, and that the “mechanisms of control probably differentiated totalitarian regimes as much as the more obvious horrors of repression.”78 Terror and repression79 can be highly traumatic and have the potential to influence greatly the rhetoric and practices that transpire within—and in relation to—totalitarian power. Nicolae Ceauşescu came to power as the Romanian Communist Party’s General Secretary in 1965 and stayed in power until 1989, when he was executed during the 1989 Revolution. During his regime, practices of exclusion still happened, but they were less reflected in the rhetoric of late-­ Communism, when enemies allegedly did not exist anymore. Later, the violent change of the 1989 Revolution brought into the visible spectrum topics that had been taboo for decades, including Romania’s true history prior to the Communist regime. In schools, Romania’s twentieth-­century history had been rendered invisible when Communist propaganda replaced it with that of the Communist Party, established in 1921. After the Revolution, history that had never been taught needed to  Cf. Arendt.  Linz. 77  Ibid., p. 67. 78  Ibid., p. 25. 79  To be clear, resistance took many forms, from people who withdrew to the mountains immediately after the Soviet occupation to people who resisted collectivization and were thus shot. This dissertation focuses on only one type of resistance during the late years of the regime. 75 76

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be brought to light: revealed, revisited, rediscussed, redefined, and in the end, hopefully, properly understood. In such times of turmoil, at long last, people started conversations about how the past was possible, what sustained the regime, why resistance was not more poignant, who and what made it possible, what was good and what was bad about Communism or Socialism in general, and what could be learned from all these experiences.

References Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Seventh edition. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1962. Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In Material Feminisms, edited by S.  Alaimo and S. Hekman, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. Bonnell, Victoria. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Borcila, Andaluna. American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives. New  York and London: Routledge, 2014. Brasseur, Lee. “Florence Nightingale’s Visual Rhetoric in the Rose Diagrams.” Technical Communication Quarterly, 14, no. 2 (2005): 161–82. Burke, Kenneth. 1968. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Third edition. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). Haas, Angela. “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 19, no. 4 (2007): 77–100. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Codrescu, Andrei. The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991. Cordali Gradea, Adriana. “The Exigency of a Communist Totalitarian Pedagogy in the United States.” The Romanian American Journal for the Humanities, 2019. Retrieved from http://thersaa.org/wp-­content/uploads/2019/11/ Adriana-­Cordali-­Gradea.pdf (accessed November 2022). Cordali, Adriana. Book Review. Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration. The Romanian American Journal for the Humanities, 2020. Retrieved from http://thersaa.org/wp-­content/ uploads/2020/12/Deletant_CordaliReview.pdf (last accessed March 2021).

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Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-­ Structuralist Reader, edited by Robert Young, 48–78. Boston, London, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1981. Gasaway Hill, Mary Lynne. The Language of Protest: Acts of Performance, Identity, and Legitimacy. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Grigorescu-Pana, Irina. The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature. Berne: Peter Lang, 1996. Gradea, Adriana Cordali. “Embroidered Feminist Rhetoric in Andrea Dezso’s Lessons from My Mother.” Rhetoric Review, 33, no. 3 (2014): 219–43. Gradea, Adriana Cordali. “Communist Authoritarian Discourses and Practices in Romanian New Wave Cinema.” In Commanding Words: Essays on the Discursive Constructions, Manifestations, and Subversions of Authority, edited by Lynda Chouiten. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites. “Visual Tropes and Late-Modernity Emotion in U.S. Public culture.” Poroi, 5, no. 2 (2008), 47–93. https://doi. org/10.13008/2151-­2957.1015 Haskins, Ekaterina V. and James P.  Zappen. “Totalitarian Visual ‘Monologue’: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40, 4 (2010): 326–59. Iepan, Florin and Razvan Georgescu. (Directors). Children of the Decree. (Das Experiment 770: Gebären auf Befehl), 2005. 1 hr, 7 min. Kiewe, Amos, and Davis W. Houck (Eds.). The Effects of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Effects: Past, Present, Future. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. Levitt, Steven D. and Stephen J.  Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: Harper Collins, 2005. Linz, Juan. Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder, CO and London, UK: Rienner, 2000. Lupton, Ellen and Jennifer Cole Phillips. Graphic Design: The New Basics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Johnson, Ralph H. “The Principle of Vulnerability.” Informal Logic, 17, no. 2 (1995): 259–269. Jung, Julie. “Systems Rhetoric: A Dynamic Coupling of Explanation and Description.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture (2014). Available at http://www.enculturation.net/systems-­rhetoric Lucaites, John Louis and Robert Hariman. “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture.” Rhetoric Review, 20, no. 2–1 (2001), 37–42.

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Manning, Alan and Nicole Amare. “Visual-Rhetoric Ethics: Beyond Accuracy and Injury.” Technical Communication, 53, no. 2 (2006): 195–211. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1977. Notes by R. Rojas. Meadows, Donella. “Ceaușescu’s Longest-Lasting Legacy: The Cohort of ‘67.” In The Donella Meadows Archive: Voice of a Global Citizen. Sustainability Institute, 1990. Retrieved from http://www.donellameadows.org/archives/ ceausescus-­longest-­lasting-­legacy-­the-­cohort-­of-­67/ (accessed March 2021). Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Mitchell, W. J. T. “There Are No Visual Media.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 7–14. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Moane, Geraldine. “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision.” In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, edited by Kirby, P., Gibbons, L., and Cronin, M.  London: Pluto Press, 2002. Ornatowski, Cezar. “‘The Future Is Ours,’ Or Is It? The Rise and Fall of Totalitarian Rhetoric in Poland (and Elsewhere).” In The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, edited by M. Smith and B. Warnick, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2010. Oţoiu, Adrian. “An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: The Postcolonial, the Postcommunist, and Romania’s Threshold Generation.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23, no. 1–2 (2003): 87–105. Palmer-Mehta, Valery, and Alina Haliliuc. “The Performance of Silence in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.” Text and Performance Quarterly, 31, no. 2 (2011): 111–29. Paulesc, Marie-Louise. “Film, History, and Memory in the Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu.” Film Criticism, 41, no. 2 (2017). Retrieved from https:// quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc/13761232.0041.204/%2D%2Dfilm-­history-­and-­ memory-­in-­the-­autobiography-­of-­nicolae?rgn=main;view=fulltext&fbclid=Iw AR2z4STuosA7NQFgrbymqlxoSMW8EA1-­29OEbiG1egsOZ2OWqp1CNId hAKI#N3 (accessed March 2021). Powell, Malea, Stacey Pigg, Leon Kendall, and Angela Haas. “Rhetoric.” In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.), edited by Marcia Bates and Mary Niles Maack, 4548–56. London, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2010. Prior, Paul. Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy. New York: Routledge, 1998. Propen, Amy D. Locating Visual-­Material Rhetorics: The Map, the Mill, and the GPS. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2012. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L.  London, UK: Macmillan, 1988.

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Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Tismaneanu, Vladimir. The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012. Zizek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. London and New York: Verso, 2001.

PART II

Visual Rhetorics of Power: The Communist Gaze

CHAPTER 3

Communist Propaganda: Imagery, Propaganda, and Rhetorical Grounding

This book foregrounds both the rhetoric of power and that of resistance in Romania, as well as their relationship. The former established the limits for the latter, and the latter had to know how to avoid that perimeter.1 This chapter establishes the connections between ideology, rhetoric, and imagery, and expounds the constitutive features of the Communist rhetoric of power on which propaganda relies. Knowing that they are grounded in history, I organize these features of Communist propaganda around the two extreme hypostases of totalitarian rhetoric: presence (i.e., abundance, plenitude, bountifulness) and absence (i.e., lack, void, gap, vacuum, blankness). One of the misconceptions in the West is that totalitarian discourse and slogans are not different from nondemocratic regimes. People living in democracies often call political discourse “rhetoric” when they want to emphasize a lack of substance; some people even accuse political rhetoric 1  I thank the reviewer, Cezar Ornatowski, who remarked as follows: “But then we have such capacious notions of rhetoric as Judith Butler’s: rhetoric as ‘concerned with the question of how communication works, how reality becomes presented in language (the language of literature, of law, and of film, for instance), and how we come to accept and transform our sense of reality through the means by which it is presented’ (‘Letter from the Chair.’ Rhetoric and Film Studies (newsletter of the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley) 1 (2000–2001), my emphases). Totalitarian manipulation of symbols certainly fits this notion of rhetoric.” This statement connects to the rapport between language and embodiment in that resistance to authority is often in excess of language.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cordali, Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18806-0_3

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of being totalitarian by definition; yet others maintain that rhetoric is inapplicable to totalitarian regimes to begin with. Rhetoricians may also define rhetoric in terms of democratic citizenship, according to which public disagreement is necessary. In that sense, “totalitarian rhetoric” sounds like a contradiction in terms. However, totalitarian rhetorics have existed and still do, so long as such regimes continue to exist (e.g., North Korea). Analogously to other totalitarian systems, the one-party regime in Romania created a specific environment with rigorously controlled discourses. Totalitarianism’s rhetoric is, therefore, of a significantly different nature from the rhetoric in a free society, and it can be discerned as an integral part of the specific social, political, and economic system that allows it. Above all, totalitarian rhetoric’s aim is obtaining or maintaining political power at any costs.2

The Nature of Totalitarian Rhetoric To articulate the rhetorical grounding of visual propaganda in a scopic regime, I propose accounting especially for the place where discourses originate within the power structures because ethos permeates the message. Politicization in totalitarianism corrupts the classical rhetoric modes of persuasion of ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos, which in Romania became disproportionately overemphasized. Ethos is the credibility of the place where messages originate. Logos pertains to the message itself, which is conveyed in political speeches, public addresses, and communication, as well as legislative texts, rhetorical acts writ large, and material culture artifacts: these are heavily informed by both larger ideologies and everyday practices within a culture. Messages, however, are being created, distributed, and sometimes preconstrued at the very  top in the hierarchy of power in a totalitarian system. Consequently, ethos and logos in totalitarian regimes are indisputable: propaganda’s rhetoric “knows best,” “knows everything,” and is highly didactic. Thus, rather than earned, ethos or credibility is built in as the propaganda’s default, and it is presented as the indisputable “truth” of the Communist Party. In the context of Communist regimes, the Communist Party’s mere place in the ideological structures of power confers it and its message more weight than if it were positioned in a nondominant role, for example, as one of a number of political forces 2  My experiences have made me always resonate with Franz Kafka’s strikingly accurate prose.

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in a democracy. What the Party proclaims requires no demonstration, does not need to earn trust, and becomes hegemonic and unquestionable. Regarding the pathos or audience, in the totalitarian rhetoric, the reliance on a divided population creates an irreconcilable “us versus them” dichotomy. As such, only the “good citizens” that make up the collective “us” are accepted and worthy to be addressed from positions of power. This rhetorical insistence on fissures was more pregnant in the first period of the totalitarian state, when the new regime forged fractures in society to mold it into a new shape.3 Authoritarianism had begun with an infliction that forged a wide division between population groups, only to forcefully annihilate and obliterate its dissenters over time. Totalitarianism monopolizes the public sphere, and renders its rhetoric perverted in all its modes of persuasion. Ethos and pathos were corrupted by the rhetorical situation of the Communist single-party system, and slogans were seemingly reduced to their message or logos. Logos links to ideology, hegemonic knowledge, and episteme. The logic of the ruling class could not be questioned. The establishment was not held accountable for things said or done, as it acted on behalf of the proletariat. Indeed, although these slogans were displayed throughout the public space, dialog was not desired or invited, and responses could only transpire in private, safe spaces, away from the totalitarian gaze. The difference between democratic and totalitarian discourses consists in more than degree. The Communist regimes installed after World War II in Eastern Europe diverged from democracies: in addition to their disregard for human rights and the state of law, their power to distribute and circulate propaganda in the absence of opposition effected remarkable changes. After having overtaken all the media institutions, in a nation it controlled, the Communist Party in Romania could easily disseminate propaganda everywhere in public spaces. To do this effectively, the Party’s representatives had designated offices in all the workplaces, took part in all decision-making, and supervised the implementation and accomplishment of the Communist 5-year political-economic plan. In discussing Ceaușescu’s presidency Gail Kligman observes in her book The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania that “Propaganda was highly fetishized and formulaic in Ceaușescu’s Romania, and was reproduced homologously throughout the system at all

3

 I confer here Donald Trump’s discourses of division in U.S. politics.

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institutional levels.”4 As rhetoric scholar Cezar Ornatowski clarifies, the “specific intensification, amplification, and persistence combined with cultural, historical, and institutional factors and regime-specific characteristics […] make a particular rhetoric ‘totalitarian.’”5 In fact, this control of counter-discourses in turn shapes and limits the population’s ability to engage in debates, dialog, and acts of resistance, although it cannot annihilate it. Both this knowing and these practices are informed by positionality because those who disseminate messages (e.g., individuals, social groups, institutions, bodies of laws, etc.) exist within intricate socio-political networks. Positionalities within power structures influence the production of knowledge because “individuals know, create, and invent within the ever-­ shifting and dynamic social, political, and economic contexts in which they operate.”6 This statement lays bare the critical nature of the totalitarian frame of reference. Because ideology and propaganda colonized the public space with political discourse, everything rang differently in Communist Romania. Messages (ideologies, material culture artifacts, legislative texts, or rhetorical acts writ large) are created, distributed, received, and construed within blended epistemological and ontological landscapes, as I show throughout the book. The various positionalities that individuals inhabit, within intricate socio-historical realities, inform the rhetorical acts they engage in; more importantly, positionalities are infused with sociopolitical power. Additionally, this acceptation of rhetoric and rhetorical theory is further enriched by material realities and embodied rhetorics. Consequently, kairos, which in classical rhetoric means the opportune moment or place for argumentation, plays its part in propaganda’s efficiency. Ideally, the message should be disseminated when the rhetorical situation is ripe for the population to receive it and perceive it as intended. Communist propaganda became less kairotic with time, if it ever was in Romania, and, thus, the opportune moment for a retort is never there. Kairos loses its importance since genuine dialogue is missing. Propaganda  Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 118. 5  Cezar Ornatowski, “‘The Future Is Ours,’ Or Is It? The Rise and Fall of Totalitarian Rhetoric in Poland (and Elsewhere).” In The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, ed. M. Smith and B. Warnick. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2010), p. 342. 6  Malea Powell, Stacey Pigg, Leon Kendall, and Angela Haas. “Rhetoric.” In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.), ed.  Marcia Bates and Mary Niles Maack, 4548–56 (London, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2010), p. 4548. 4

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never stays in step with the changes in society, and the failure to reinvent itself contributed to the attrition of the message. The post/Communist visual rhetoric framework I build in this book makes clear that rhetoric often constitutes the very starting point of oppression and dehumanization, and that dehumanizing rhetoric is violence. Concentrated camps and Gulags were the most extreme form of intervention on the ontological, and rhetorics (and the ideologies informing them) were instrumental to their instantiation. Anne Applebaum connects, with a straight line, historical events and the rhetoric that allowed their instantiation when she explains that “the creation of concentrated camps was actually the final stage in a long process of dehumanization of these objectives—a process which began, at first, with rhetoric.”7 In fact, George Orwell refers to the 1946 political chaos in Europe as being linked to the “decay of language,” emphasizing the connection between the corruption of thought and that of language: “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”8 In what follows, I identify and discuss the features9 of the Communist propaganda. Although I do not discuss nationalism as a separate feature, I know that it infused the political rhetoric in Central and Eastern European countries of the time; however, Ceaușescu’s nationalist propaganda was increasingly stronger. Elements of hyperbole and cult of personality are present in most of the pictures depicting propaganda in this book.

Presence and Absence: Hypostases of the Totalitarian Communist Rhetorical Landscape In constructing the visual rhetorical theory for analyzing Communist propaganda, I probe how propaganda reflected the regimes’ practices in terms of visuality. Visualities of power and resistance in totalitarianism share features rooted in political methods, such as that of exclusion and the epistemic violence associated with it. The political establishment neglected, excluded, or otherwise silenced certain undesired voices in public, private, and civic spheres of influence, which paralleled practices of physical exclusion. Cezar Ornatowski observes the “problematic of erasure (also 7  Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004), p. xxxvi. 8  Quoted in Cezar Ornatowski, p. 340. 9  I thank my doctoral dissertation director and mentor, Dr. Angela Haas, for suggesting I identify, and elaborate on, the features of the Communist propaganda.

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existential and visual at the same time—the ‘invisible’ were also ‘erased,’ sometimes literally (through arrest, banishment, or murder), sometimes merely through lack of professional opportunities, opportunities for participation, consignment to menial and provincial jobs, and so on).”10 As expected, the political habits worked together with the rhetoric, especially in the early stages of Communism. At first sight, the two hypostases in the relational pair presence/absence appear to be mutually exclusive. However, they also reinforce each other, are reciprocally defined, informed, and constructed, and are reminiscent of the dyad subject/object. As Stijn De Cauwer states, acts and forms of doing are “intertwined” with forms of “undoing, “just as any refusal to act can entail the affirmation of something else.” Furthermore, De Cauwer also clarifies that Lenin’s question “What is to be done?” should be understood as its “opposite, namely as a call to undo certain institutions,”11 which best explains the early stages of the Communist regimes. In terms of visuality, Kenneth Burke’s statement that “a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus on object A involves a neglect of object B”12 illustrates how political power structures sponsored rhetorical exclusion. In fact, the very selection of what censorship allows is politically charged and a highly rhetorical act. For example, not only in the political but also in the nonpolitical discourses of the arts or entertainment, censorship forbade positive representations of capitalism, America, or the West. Most Communist totalitarian features appear together in propaganda materials and thus are hard to dissociate. For example, the cult of personality may appear with hyperbolic and self-affirming elements; militaristic aspects may be self-affirming and hyperbolic; and so on. In the following sections, I discuss some of the characteristics and exemplify them with photographs of the time, wherever possible (courtesy of the Minerva Archive). Then, Chap. 4 presents more detailed analyses of images through visual rhetorical methods. The place of absence can be called by many names, from void to gap to negative space. However, it is from that place of subtraction that resistance erodes the abundantly hypervisible power. An example of how the rhetorics 10  Cezar Ornatowski, personal communication. I am grateful to Ornatowski for a close reading of the book manuscript and valuable feedback. 11  Stijn De Cauwer, “Potentiality and Uprisings: Georges Didi-Huberman in Dialogue with Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021), 186–99. 12  Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Third edition. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 49.

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of power rendered rhetorics of resistance invisible by way of exclusion was the case of Decree 770: Because the law addressed women in Communist Romania through hegemonic/ideological/totalitarian vocabulary, women were marginalized, that is, not spoken to but at most spoken about in the legislative text. While women had other opportunities in the public sphere that socialist ideology conferred them, the government discriminated against them in terms of reproductive rights. I argued elsewhere that “legislation was part of the totalitarian state’s hegemonic rhetoric, which treated women as a subaltern category similar to what Spivak calls the ‘subaltern woman,’” and that the woman became “rhetorically invisible or a subaltern without a voice.”13 Therefore, women’s resistance to the Decree emerges from within the subaltern community, from where they respond in subversive ways. Spivak’s conceptualization fits here because Communism has been compared with imperialism and colonialism14 in that the former was similarly an outside imposition in Central and Eastern Europe after World War II. Relying on this analogy, I use the concept of the “Other” with significations borrowed from postcolonial theory. In Chap. 6, I will return to elaborate on the women’s resistance in Communist Romania in these terms and through the notion of biopolitics. “Us Versus Them” At 3:00 a.m., on the night of December 15, 1952, they came into the house and took my Grandpa Ioan away. No explanations. No one in the family knew where they took him. Subsequently, his 30-year-old wife, whom I called my Other Grandma or Bunica Valerica, lost her job and was forced to divorce him, vacate the house, and move out of town with her two daughters, 1 and 3 years of age. Grandpa Ioan was 39. They put him in prison with no trial and he was then released seven years later with no apologies. It was too late by then; he was a broken man. He had been a handsome man and I remember him as a warm, kind presence, with loving blue eyes. I only have one memory of him. He came to see me once and brought me a beautiful piece of store-bought cake I had never seen before. I was his only grand13   Adriana Cordali Gradea,  “Communist Authoritarian Discourses and Practices in Romanian New Wave Cinema.” In Commanding Words: Essays on the Discursive Constructions, Manifestations, and Subversions of Authority, edited by Lynda Chouiten (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), p. 110. 14  Bogdan Ştefănescu, Postcommunism. Postcolonialism. Siblings of Subalternity. (Bucharest, Romania: Editura Universitătii din Bucuresti, 2012), presents the various stances that exist in research today regarding this comparison.

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child. He walked ever so slowly. The Communist prison life, with hours of standing in cold water up to the knee level, among other terrible things, as I learned later, had left him ill and disturbed. They told me he had water in his knees and lungs. I had no idea what that meant, but for the five year old I was, it explained the way he walked. My only other memory about him was his funeral a few years later. 15

* * * I had so little interaction with my Grandpa Ioan that I do not remember calling him in any way. Bunica Valerica was already remarried to my fifth grandparent, Bunitata, a name I thought was a Transylvanian way of calling grandpas who spoke Hungarian. He was a Hungarian-German, a minority in Romania, where the largest minority is the Hungarian one (especially in Transylvania) and the German minority used to be larger in some regions. Bunitata’s name was Jozsef (Joska for short) and he was a tall man, with a red face and graying blond hair, wrinkled hands, and a big heart. He was very industrious and often worked carpentry in his cellar. I remember a clever joke he used to say when we had tea. He put sugar in his tea and asked me, “Do you know how the Germans dance? Like this,” and he stirred the liquid with his spoon, clockwise. Then he continued, “And do you know how the Hungarians dance? Like this,” and he hit the bottom of the cup with the spoon, making short, up and down movements. “And the Romanians, do you know?” I shook my head, smiling. “Like this,” he said again, stirring counterclockwise. “But do you know why?” I didn’t know why. “Just so that the sugar melts,” he said happily. He was my fifth grandparent. No one I knew had five grandparents. 16

* * * “Guilty of intensive activity against the working class.” That was the sentence written on Grandpa Ioan’s political dossier. There was no trial. He was released after 7 years. He had been a chief of police in the previous regime, which put him into the enemy category rhetorically emphasized in Stalinist years. In the newly installed Communist regime, one was guilty until proven innocent. In many respects, this mentality has stayed with some people to this day, internalized as it was through decades.  Personal account.  Personal account.

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In the early years of the newly imposed regimes, the establishment identified and then eliminated “enemies,” and the political rhetoric went hand in hand with this practice. As previously stated in the section on history, the transition from authoritarian political systems into oppressive totalitarianism unfolded gradually. Having lasted close to half a century, the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe outside the USSR circulated propaganda in various strategical stages. Hannah Arendt best described Communism’s early phase: the one-party rule that  shows the dictatorial domination of one part over all others with efforts to antagonize social groups and to fight enemies of the people or internal enemies.17 Thus, in the “initial stages when political opposition still exists,” the totalitarian regime employs violence with visibility in order to terrorize people, and later it “replaces propaganda with indoctrination.”18 Inclusion and Exclusion In its early stages, totalitarianism operated by excluding and persecuting the bourgeoisie, landowners, intellectuals, religious clergy, political opponents, or whomever the government deemed as “objective enemies.” The operating slogan at the basis of what Dennis Deletant calls “totalitarian blueprint” was that of division, namely, the “us versus them” mentality, which is at the foundation of practices of othering and discrimination. However, knowing that Communist rhetorics are often egalitarian, what is included or excluded can be extremely ambiguous yet totalizing. For instance, when considering the Communist rhetoric in Poland, Cezar M. Ornatowski rightly observes that the use of the pronoun “we” and the “totalizing category of ‘one enemy’” are inherent in Communist rhetorics.19 This rhetorical strategy allows for categories of people to be included with the “us” or “them” groups according to the necessities of the moment. I call this quality of the Communist rhetoric “meaning through differentiation,”  to denote that a group or individual assumes credibility by differentiating themselves from those they deem as inferior through a certain system of reference. In Communism, the “enemy” was established through the new ideology. As an example, in the early stages of totalitarianism, when the purging of “enemies” took place, a common 17  Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). 18  Ibid., p. 341. 19  Cezar Ornatowski, pp. 345–48.

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slogan was “Those Who Are Not With Us Are Against Us.” Apart from creating a cleavage in society along extreme binaries, this slogan inflicted fear. Those who dared oppose the political establishment contained within the pronoun us suffered the consequences of repression. Likewise, this dissociation between in-groups and outsiders is at the basis of colonial and Nazi regimes where the same exacerbation is at work. However, exclusion as a political and social practice has two immediate rhetorical consequences. First, that which is allowed to exist as a result of exclusion becomes a presence that is constituted as visible, palpable, and self-affirming. As a result of repetition and dissemination, the presence grows increasingly overwhelming, overly self-confident, self-gratulatory, and self-celebratory. Then, these attributes intensify as the presence remains unchallenged in a system with no checks and balances. Second, what is censored or excluded becomes subsequently negated, repressed, and pushed into nonexistence—an absence. What are the consequences of propaganda’s insistence on making presence or absence visible? How do these hypostases mark everyday people’s lives and practices? How do totalitarian circumstances differ from democratic contexts in this sense? How can counterpublic discourses transform their locus of absence into a presence in totalitarian Communism? I posit that what propaganda excludes in totalitarianism is perceivable, to the trained eye, in absence and silence. With time this presence transformed into a hyper-presence, and sometimes it displayed a violent mark. In the second part of the book, I discuss how resistance brews in silence and in liminal spaces. At some point after all “enemies” had been excluded, everybody was included by default. Those included were the “good people” that differentiated themselves from the bad ones. However, those who still disagreed could not manifest their difference. Figure  3.1 is an example of propaganda displayed indoors during a political event, possibly the Communist Party Congress that would take place every 5 years. Apart from being an iconic image of the Communist period, Fig. 3.1 clearly shows the rhetorical situation of the sociopolitical stage. Ethos is already established by virtue of the single party; logos is exemplified in the slogan written in capital letters on the banner; and the audience is docile. The two interlocutors of the regime—the speakers (people on stage) and the audience—concur with propaganda’s message, in a spectacle of agreement that was only possible after opposition was erased. Everyone participated with expected cooperation, mimicking a dialog. In fact, the political establishment engaged in a monolog, as I show in what follows.

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Fig. 3.1  Propaganda meetings. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1971_c3_ c5r1_002)

Otherness Operational in postcolonial theory, alterity or otherness also became enmeshed with the programmatic installation of the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Understanding the negative sense of the Other as that which cannot be assimilated to the Self is necessary when establishing Communist propaganda’s constitutive categories of inclusion, exclusion, and otherness. In fact, one of the inherent contradictions in the Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe was that, despite a

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proclaimed, declarative equality and inclusion, the regimes were built on the violent exclusion of population categories. The Other is often expressed through language. Referring to the Communist rhetoric in Poland, Cezar M. Ornatowski explains the relation between rhetorics and political regimes, showing that totalitarian rhetorical features are more intensified in conjunction with “cultural, historical, and institutional factors and regime-specific characteristics”; he identifies discursive features such as the “totalizing category of ‘one enemy’” and the forced mass identification inherent in Communist rhetorics.20 Historically, society excluded alterity under the pretense of improving the life of the majority. Exclusion was performed on “insane people,” those with special needs, and even politically inconvenient opponents. The concept of the Other was first theorized in philosophy by G.W.F. Hegel and Emanuel Lévinas. Then, it became “a key term in cultural studies, postcolonialism, ethnic studies and, by extension, postcommunist studies. The other can be a possible perception of a stranger, positioned contrastively with respect to the self as a mere function of different ways of seeing the world.”21 Othering in the context of the imperial discourse appeared in relation to the colonial “Others” and is “based on reductive definitions of human diversity, according to which the ‘others’ (women, natives, non-­human beings) are labeled as intrinsically different on the basis of sexist, racist or ethnocentric assumptions that lead to hierarchical or stereotypical thinking.”22 The Other in Colonial and Communist Contexts The postcolonial alterity and its post/Communist counterpart have commonalities and differences because of local conjunctures. In Central and Eastern Europe, Communist discrimination was primordially based on class; debasing of the Other happened in terms of religion and ethnicity as well as race, though to a lesser degree (e.g., toward Roma communities).  Ornatowski, pp. 342, 345–48.  Monica Bottez, Alina Bottez, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Ruxandra Rădulescu, Bogdan Ștefănescu, and Ruxandra Vișan. Postcolonialism/Postcommunism: Dictionary of Key Cultural Terms (Bucharest, Romania: Editura Universităt ̦ii, 2011), pp. 230–31; emphasis in the original. The quotation continues as follows: “The definition of the term in current postcolonial theory is rooted in the Freudian and post-Freudian analysis of the formation of subjectivity, most specifically in the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan [where] the other can be associated with the image outside oneself perceived and identified within the Mirror-stage [...]. Otherness is common in the way people relate in everyday life. However, processes of othering are highly problematic when they gain cultural significance as ways to dominate, control and colonize groups of people assumed to be inferior to a center of power identified as the same, simply on the basis of their being different from it.” 22  Bottez et al., p. 232. 20 21

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Indeed, in Communism, anyone could become the enemy, irrespective of ethnicity, race, or other factors. Moreover, both colonialism and Communism used violence in establishing the colonial and Communist Others, respectively. Chandra Mohanty observes that colonization “implies a relation of structural domination and the suppression—often violent—of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question.”23 Therefore, I argue that the colonial and the Communist Others were debased and used for political expediency in comparable ways (see also David Chioni Moore24). Alterity was at the center of Communist regimes after WWII and remained in place in the Second World spaces well into the late twentieth century, when other parts of the world were becoming postcolonial, postmodern, and increasingly distrusting of modernist master-narratives. Although postcolonialism and the beginning of decolonization coincided with Soviet Union’s rise to power, these movements were not going in the same direction. Nicholas Mirzoeff insightfully shows that the entanglement with modernism further muddled the understanding of the Communist project and its aftermath, especially in the West: The emergence of the Cold War division between the United States and the Soviet Union almost immediately forced metropolitan and decolonial politics into a pattern whereby being anticolonial implied communist sympathies and supporting colonial domination was part of being pro-Western. This classification became separation in almost the same moment, at once aestheticized as “freedom.” The Cold War quickly became a conflict so all-­ enveloping by 1961 that even President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual” of what he called “the military-industrial complex.”25

As one coming from the former Communist space to tell my stories, I learned, upon arriving to the United States, about a preconceived mindset, according to which being anti-Communist necessarily means an affinity for the right-wing political stance. I warn against this preconception as it is reductive and superficial (see Chap. 7 where I discuss perceptions of left and right politics in the aftermath of Communist regimes). 23  Chandra T.  Mohanty,  Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 18. 24  David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique. PMLA, Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies, 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–28, pp. 112, 114. 25  Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 18–19.

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Despite a relative discursive success in claiming it stood for freedom from imperialism, the Soviet Union assumed the very practices of modernity, including the overemphasis on language’s power of representation inherent in the political propaganda, which is part of the epistemological quality of Communism. Although this was done under the umbrella of internationalism as opposed to imperialism, at the foundation of totalitarian propaganda stood the modernist focus on the culture of language, which is tied to structuralism, and its power of creating a “reality” (and a reality principle in Freudian acceptation) that could subjugate the Other (and the Other’s desires). Mirzoeff rightly states that the focus on “culture as language” and “on the interpretation of the ‘signs’ produced by both the ‘primitive’ and the ‘modern’” characterized imperial visuality.26 Totalitarianism’s epistemic countenance lies in this focus on language because of the connection with logos, message, and ideology. The regime’s totalizing aim glued together the visual expression of the propaganda with the discursive forms of text and language. In the aftermath of such regimes, this entanglement needs unpacking, although not in an absolute separation of forms, but rather as a search for the interstices where resistance could brew away from the Communist gaze. Given that Communist propaganda colonized language, David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire (1993) can be a model to follow when examining the Communist discourse of power. Spurr offers  insights into colonial rhetoric, and his explanation of power relations applies to totalitarian Communism, especially when he states that within the colonial order colonial rule itself continually creates its own crisis of authority. The anxiety of colonial discourse comes from the fact that the colonizer’s power depends on the presence, not to say consent, of the colonized. What is power without its object? Authority is in some sense conferred by those who obey it. That they do so under extreme forms of constraint does not change their place in the balance, their indispensable role in granting authority its proper value. Hence the uneasiness, the instability, the frequent hysteria of colonial discourse. (emphasis mine)27

In Communism, this intrinsic crisis of the hegemonic discourse is undeniable; however, it only works for a certain length of time, namely as long  Ibid., p. 15.  David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 11. 26 27

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as it acts within kairos or an opportune timeframe, whether justified or provoked. In the end, the “hysteria” of such a discourse runs its course, falls out of its kairotic moment, and as I show in this book, fails to reinvent a dialogic message to keep up with the times. The result is propaganda’s irrecoverable attrition. Specifically, Spurr identifies patterns of rhetorical tropes that he analyzes across a wide range of colonial discourses and texts. Among the 12 rhetorical features he discusses in his book are surveillance, debasement, negation, and affirmation,28 which imply the existence of a counterpart constructed as “the Other.” Spurr identifies debasement as a colonial rhetorical trope, or the rhetorical construction of the “horror of the Other,”29 where colonization is justified by constructing the Other as the “scapegoat”—“the constant threat to a precariously established order serves to intensify, in rhetoric as well as in more material forms of oppression, the obsessive repudiation of the Other.”30 The debasement and exclusion of the Other in Communist Romania happened both rhetorically and in social and political acts. Spivak defines the colonial project as an epistemic violence, following Foucault (see my discussion in section “Can Epistemic Violence Be Visualized”).31 Soviet Union’s colonial aspect resides in its imposition of a regime both within and outside its borders. After WWII, Stalin instituted the Marxist-­ Leninist plan by means of foreign intervention and puppet governments in Central and Eastern Europe.32 It is possible that this strategy was different from Communism’s stance in the Soviet Union, where socialism grew more organically, politically speaking. However, the alterity of the “enemy” class was constructed on similar antagonist bases. I am aware of the ongoing conversation among researchers of post-Communism regarding the comparison with postcolonialism. In forging together these theories, 28  Spurr identifies and articulates the following features of the rhetoric of empire: surveillance, appropriation, aestheticization, classification, debasement, negation, affirmation, idealization, insubstantialization, naturalization, eroticization, and resistance. 29  Spurr, p. 79. 30  Ibid. 31  To remind, Spivak states that epistemic violence was “the remotely orchestrated, farflung and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other” (in Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. London, UK: Macmillan, 1988, p. 280). 32  See Dennis Deletant, Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).

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many aspects resist or remain entirely outside of any comparison—from the apparent lack of a racial constituent in Eastern Europe to the different conceptualizations of “imperialism” and “colonizers” in these theories. As Adrian Ot ̧oiu points out, whereas colonialism “produced a rhetoric of difference, constructing the Other as antagonistically different; the latter [Soviet Communism] employed an egalitarian discourse and purportedly aimed to abolish all difference. Race and ethnicity issues are central in the colonial other, but seldom appear in the official Communist agenda.”33 Ornatowski points out that “self-same peoples” were colonizing and therefore Communist “colonization” is entirely different than the kind that could establish alterity through race. I consider this an even more pervasive problematic in the way Communism could be resisted (see Chap. 7). It is true that Communism was maintained by “same” people once Communism was installed through puppet governments. However, at the time of installation, the new regime had a high degree of foreignness that made it be perceived as invasive. Consequently, when I compare visual rhetorical practices and discourses of post/colonialism and post/totalitarianism (post/Communism), I merely propose one type of a foundation for further inquiry. How are rhetorics of power similar in various colonial and Communist regimes? How does the population respond to the colonial and Communist practices of power? My insistence on such comparative efforts focuses on the consequences suffered by the population, that is, the responses that the rhetoric of power and ideology trigger and impact people’s everyday practices. In other words, I compare the ontological aftereffect of the establishment’s epistemological intervention.34 The point of inflection between these theories consists in their effect on people’s psychology and comportment in the aftermath of oppressive strategies (in Certeau’s sense) of discrimination, control, and coercion. The new Communist authority first rhetorically identified the political and ideological opponents as “objective enemies,” and then it debased them in public discourse before imprisoning, deporting, or killing them. To purify  Adrian  Ot ̧oiu, (2003). “An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: The Postcolonial, the Postcommunist, and Romania’s Threshold Generation.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23, no.  1–2 (2003), 87–105, p. 91. 34  Cf. Geraldine Moane, “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision.” In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, ed. Kirby, P., Gibbons, L., and Cronin, M. (London: Pluto Press, 2002); Moore (2001). 33

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society of inimical elements and to create a more homogenously dependable class, groups such as religious clergy, people deemed as bourgeois, intellectuals, and villagers who resisted collectivization were uprooted and transmuted to different regions (mostly Siberia within the USSR, although each country had its own regions used for this purpose), forced-labor camps, Gulags, mental hospitals, or other prisons-like institutions. Begun with rhetorical debasement of these categories as the ideological schema required, this colonialist-like discourse, however, was perpetuated by Communist oppressive practices. It also continued a colonial legacy from the time when Romania’s territories had belonged to various empires throughout history before the nation state first formed in 1859 and then enlarged again in 1918 by the incorporation of Transylvania.35 The Communist colonial bearing only added to behaviors created in those times, and they continue today in various forms, including feelings of helplessness and distrust of authority in people who have internalized the discourse of alterity. Therefore, interrogating the coloniality36 of the Communist setup could illuminate people’s understanding of the region’s history and would help with efforts to decommunize—that is, to move away from Communism and detach from its problematic legacy in post-Communism. The Other in Nazi and Communist Totalitarianisms The two kinds of European totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (Nazi and Bolshevik) inspired each other by enacting exclusionary rhetorical and political practice in comparable ways, irrespective of Left or Right orientations. In fact, the “enemies’ identity” could easily change “according to the prevailing circumstances—so that, as soon as one category [was] liquidated, war may be declared on another.”37 Works concerning with 35  In history classes I took in Romanian schools, when learning of the important nationforming historical events, the emphasis was mostly on the process of liberation, emancipation, independence, and national/ethnic affirmation, but never in a post/colonial context as we understand it today. The empires (Ottoman, Habsburg, Austria-Hungary) were simply something from which “we as a people” emerged to become an independent nation. Surprisingly, public discourse still sees no need for post/colonial concepts, terms, or explanations to help advance the understanding of identity formation in Romania. 36  Subsequently, when I employ what Mieke Bal (Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto, 2002) calls “traveling concepts” between theories, I do so fully aware that selecting and framing concepts are highly rhetorical actions. I engage in this selection to serve my theoretical purposes, in non-absolutist ways. 37  Arendt qtd. in Applebaum, p. xxxvi.

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totalitarianism (c.f., Hannah Arendt, 1962; Juan J.  Linz, 2000; Anne Applebaum 2004; Vladimir Tismaneanu, 2012; and Slavoj Zizek, 2001), focus on the social forces at play in totalitarianism in general as well as in Communism. Equally marked by modernity’s ideas, European totalitarianisms evinced a reciprocal, dialectical connection between discursive rhetoric, based on structuralism, on the one hand, and political method, on the other hand. Nazism led to episodes of the uttermost violence humanity has ever known. Although some researchers understandably resist comparisons between Nazism and Communism, I posit that similarities between the two should be analyzed in order to identify common features of exclusion and propaganda. It is indubitable that the Holocaust was one of the most horrendous episodes in history and that the totalitarianisms of the Left and the Right are not the same. Still, commonalities between the two types of totalitarianism as versions of paroxysmal modernity have been productively examined. Hannah Arendt and Francois Furet discussed totalitarianism in its two facets, Bolshevism and Nazism, and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s 2012 book The Devil in History emphasizes the genocidal frenzy of the two totalitarian systems among other significant points of confluence. He quotes Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer’s assertion that “The phenomenon of the gulag as a manifestation of Soviet state violence and the Holocaust as the central site of Nazi terror conveys the unmistakable message that the two regimes were bent on genocide.”38 Tismaneanu also maintains that “both Stalinism and Nazism emphasized the need for social integration and communal belonging through the exclusion of specific others” and cites historian Richard Overy who called the two regimes “all holistic dictatorships” that relied on “creating complicity, just as they operate[d] by isolating and destroying a chosen minority, whose terrorized status confirm[ed] the rational desire of the rest to be included and protected.”39 In Nazi Germany40, for example, coercion was “against social categories without consideration of guilt for specific acts.”41 38  Quoted in Vladimir  Tismaneanu, “Unflinching Stalinism: Communism in Romania. Virtual Exhibits on Communism.” (n.d.) Retrieved from http://romania.museumoncommunism.org/content/history-0 (accessed March 2012), p. 8. 39  Ibid., p. 11. 40  Cf. Arendt (1998); Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, CO and London, UK: Rienner, 2000). Slavoj  Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 2001); Applebaum (2004), and Tismaneanu (2012). 41  Linz (2000), p. 102.

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The Nazis persecuted the Jews, the Roma populations, members of religious sects, the “biologically unfit,” certain prisoners of war, or populations of occupied territories. On the other hand, the Communist regimes persecuted those “belonging to certain social categories that could be labeled counterrevolutionary, like landlords, the clergy, and kulaks, and […] members of ethnic groups on the basis of collective guilt.”42 Terror was a purpose in itself, in both kinds of totalitarianisms, in addition to the gruesome crimes and assassinations. I return to comparisons with the Nazi regime throughout the book. Self-Affirmation and Monologism The totalitarian propaganda performed a self-asserting role, similarly to the rhetoric of empire, of which David Spurr states that it “must always reaffirm its value in the face of an engulfing nothingness” where it “validates its presence.”43 In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s rewriting of history, the destruction of older books, and the 1938 publication of a “new official history” of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party were part of a “superpurge” that had annihilated a generation of Soviet intellectuals and promoted the idea of the New Man.44 Stalin’s declarative elimination of all enemies in 1938 also marked a shift in the propaganda strategies in the Soviet Union, a phase that was reached in the Eastern European regimes at later times, generally in the decade after Stalin’s death in 1953. By the time Nicolae Ceaușescu45 came to power in Romania in 1965, internal enemies were no longer the subject of rhetorical invocation, at least not as much as in the Stalinist period (also called the obsessive decade). Certainly, Ceaușescu continued a foreign policy that disagreed with Moscow at the same time as he antagonized the “threat” of the external enemy represented by the West. By the time I was coming of age in Romania (1970s–1980s), indoctrination and rhetorics of self-affirmation were hyperbolical by the 1980s. Although “enemies” were not mentioned  Ibid., p. 103.  Spurr, p. 109. 44  Arendt, The Human Condition. See also Manuela Marin, “‘For Our Beloved Leader’: Nicolae Ceausescu’s Propaganda Portraits,” in The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power, ed. Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone (New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2020), p. 193. 45  Nicolae Ceaușescu was the President of Socialist Romania and Romanian Communist Party Leader. He ruled from 1965 to 1989 and was executed during the December 1989 anti-Communist uprising in Romania. 42 43

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anymore, older generations who had lived through Stalinism could remember slogans vilifying groups such as the bourgeoisie. I recall my grandparents reciting such slogans that to me seemed out of place and out of character at the time. For example, slogans such as “The 5-Year Plan: We’re Building Socialism Without the Bourgeoisie and Against It” clearly identified those who had to be excluded from the new society.46 What I do remember from personal experience is that propaganda penetrated all levels of society, including our schools, where special mandatory classes called “Ideology” and “Political Economy” focused on the regime’s accomplishments and taught us to “read” society through certain political lenses. Propaganda’s self-affirmation and monologism features thrive after the exclusion of opposing voices in society. Communist rhetoric’s self-affirmation functions similarly to colonialism’s affirmation. Discourses of power in totalitarian regimes colonize the public space, completely engulfing it and attempting to control the conversation. Again, similarly to colonial rhetoric, Communist rhetoric becomes increasingly self-affirming once the Other has been physically and rhetorically excluded (imprisoned, killed, or otherwise annihilated). The Other’s implied existence remains necessary even when not acknowledged in speech because affirmation cannot exist without negation, the same way as light presupposes darkness (see Figs. 4.3 and 4.4 where I inverse one image’s light and where I present visual rhetorical analyses of tropes and motifs in images). As Spurr explains, affirmation is a form of “performative utterance—that which makes itself true by virtue of its being written or spoken,”47 which is reminiscent of the self-referential characteristics of Communist propaganda. When Communism installed itself through an imposed revolution (as opposed to a grassroots one), the new regime forcefully dislocated the previous knowledge (ideology, religion, value system, judicial administration) and replaced it with a new imposed ideology (episteme), although dislocation was also enforced on people. Foucault best explains this dimension of totalitarian discourse as follows: “the will to truth […] increasingly attempts to assimilate the others, both in order to modify them and to

46  See my dissertation, “Post/Communist Visual Rhetorics of Power and Resistance,” Illinois State University, Normal, IL, 2019, where I analyze this slogan and its representation on a poster. 47  Ibid., p. 124.

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provide them with a foundation.”48 The “truth” in this case is established by the political power. As shown in the section on history (in Chap. 2), political changes in Communist Romania triggered rhetorical changes, and throughout the Communist regime, political actions and rhetoric continued to inform each other, as it usually happens in any society. Once the purge of “enemies” ended (Stalin declared that phase over in 1938 for the Soviet Union, but it ended at later times in countries of the Communist bloc outside of USSR), the propaganda began addressing a seemingly compact and compliant audience in which everyone belonged and no one resisted. Stalin died in 1953, but the so-called “obsessive Stalinist decade” lasted longer in Romania because Ceaușescu’s predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who was still a Stalinist, died in 1965. After delineating what is and what is not rhetorically acceptable in public spaces, exclusionary rhetorical practices created visibilities and invisibilities—of people, messages, and rhetorical practices, and by the time I was coming of age, the country had entered a more stable phase. By the 1980s, exclusionary rhetorics were less circulated, and the rhetoric of power focused on the country’s successful advancement toward Communism’s “bright future.” In the self-asserting phase, exclusion and purges still happened; however, they were not overtly spoken about or used for intimidation through state propaganda as it had been done in previous stages. Similarly to imperialism, rhetorics of power in a totalitarian order are hegemonic, dominant, and functioned as strategies designed to control and indoctrinate the population.49 Opposition was largely and increasingly not permitted as a result of exclusion; nonpolitical issues were similarly censored; and the political grasp on the public space attempted to also control nonpolitical spaces. In a totalitarian regime, the political interlocutor is annihilated, and in the absence of dialogic interaction, propaganda engages in a monolog that results from a lack of dialog and a monopoly over the public conversation. I call this feature of the Communist rhetoric of power monologism to contrast it with Bakhtin’s dialogic theory that 48  Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, 48–78 (Boston, London, Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1981), pp. 55–56. 49  Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010) calls “a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships” employed by “a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution)” (pp. 35–36; emphasis in original). He defines a tactic the “calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus [...] in short, the art of the weak” (p. 37).

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assumes at least two interlocutors. Every society has dialogic conditions where discourses and counter-discourses compete, run together, exist in parallel, or oppose each other. More importantly, all these discourses coexist, listen and respond to each other, and advance the conversation in the public space, allowing for ideas to be put to the test and run their course, as if in a free market environment; it is the mark of democratic societies.50 The expectation that the ones making an argument “respond to objections and criticism from others”51 is disavowed by the Communist rhetorics of power that come from positions of absolute authority. In totalitarian regimes, this flow is hindered by political forces in a greater measure because of the different leverage structure. As I have previously shown elsewhere, the single-party system enables these rhetorics to be “ubiquitous, monologic, and detrimental to dialogue [but] they are also extremely visible, as well as conspicuously audible.”52 Given the clearly defined parameters in Communism, the feature of self-referentiality both derives from and mirrors society’s conjuncture. In The Archeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault suggests that in, general, discourses are “practices that systematically form the object of which they speak,”53 and posits that we cannot know anything without constituting it as an object of discourse, that is, without seeing it through a certain grid of rules and practices that make it knowable to us. In the case of Communism, Slavoj Zizek (whose insight is informed by having lived most of his life in Communist Yugoslavia) best explains the Communist regime’s predications and tautological nature when he describes the “classical case of the Stalinist Communist”: when [the Stalinist Communist] recognizes himself as the instrument of the “objective necessity of the historical progress toward communism,” he misrecognizes the fact that this “objective necessity” exists only insofar as it is created by the Communist discourse, only insofar as Communists invoke it as the legitimization of their activity.54 50  In a certain sense, the freedom of speech resembles the free market, where ideas can and should compete; a totalitarian state such as the Communist one-party system eliminates the free market concept, both in economics and in language. 51  Ralph H. Johnson, “The Principle of Vulnerability.” Informal Logic, 17, no. 2 (1995): 259–69, p. 259. 52  Gradea (2016), p. 105; emphasis in original. 53  Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, (New York, NY: Random House, 1982), p. 49. 54  Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. (Durham: Duke University Press., 1993), p. 73.

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Communism, as I realize now, was a highly contained and self-­referential socio-political environment in which propaganda promoted its own version of reality. Roberto Esposito’s definition of power in general as “disputable and resistible” illustrates how politics cannot function without an interlocutor; he states that “The defining number of politics is not the ‘one’ of sovereign power, but the ‘two’ of debate and of why politics cannot function with one interlocutor the clash between factions and parties.”55 However, in a one-party system, the lack of an interlocutor explains the distortion in dialogic principles, which leads to monologism. Communist rhetorics of power rendered visible in materials of public address are monologic because they dismiss objections from others and obliterate issues deemed unworthy of debate. Hence, at the same time they were commanding and self-assertive, messages engaged in monolog. Richard Johannesen describes monologic discourse as follows: A person employing monologue seeks to command, coerce, manipulate, conquer, dazzle, deceive, or exploit. Other persons are viewed as “things” to be exploited solely for the communicator’s self-serving purpose: they are not taken seriously as persons. Choices are narrowed and consequences are obscured. Focus is on the communicator’s message, not on the audience’s real needs. The core values, goals, and policies espoused by the communicator are impervious to influence exerted by receivers. Audience feedback is used only to further the communicator’s purpose. An honest response from a receiver is not wanted or is precluded. Monological communicators persistently strive to impose their truth or program on others; they have the superior attitude that they must coerce people to yield to what they believe others ought to know.56

Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that “in rhetoric there is the unconditionally innocent and the unconditionally guilty; there is complete victory and destruction of the opponent.”57 In visual rhetorical sense, the rhetoric of power created its spectatorship and made clear what was expected of it, as I will show in the next chapter. Thus, although apparently inclusive due to the presupposed leftist ideology, Communist propaganda did not connect with all the segments of the audience, and, instead, it imagined a fabricated,  Roberto Esposito, “Unfinished Italy,”, 76, no. 2 (2021), 128–34.  Richard L. Johannesen, Ethics in Human Communication. 4th ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1996), p. 69. 57  Ekaterina V. Haskins and James P.  Zappen. “Totalitarian Visual ‘Monologue’: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40, no. 4 (2010):  326–59, pp. 329–30. 55 56

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compliant one. In this sense, Communist and Fascist totalitarianism are similar in that, in the single-party system, the propaganda’s pathos consisted in the appeal to the Party’s political and ideological values and ideals, which had to be accepted by default. Over time, the Party created its own ruling class, and society was not truly communitarian, collectivist, or egalitarian, despite claiming to be so. Unlike in democracies, in totalitarianism, the sociopolitical context resituates the slogan’s function within the web of what Hesford calls intercontextualities,58 which in this case are based on material realities where the flow of rhetoric is distorted. Represented in the media and displayed on banners everywhere, the concise quality of the Communist propaganda slogan rendered it pervasive and memorable. Figure 3.1 features the smallest part of the larger propaganda of Communism: the slogan on a banner. These banners performed rhetorics of self-affirmation59 by inundating the public space with symbols of Romanian nationalism and Communist ideology tropes, as I will discuss in the next chapter. In fact, the self-affirmation characteristic is also represented in the aggregation of propaganda materials, the build-up of which has the desired effect of hyper-presence. Consequently, all the figures in this chapter evidence the self-affirmation aspect of propaganda. Here, it reads in capital letters “Long live the Romanian Communist Party led by its Secretary General, Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu.” The slogan rings differently in a totalitarian state, both in nature and in social trajectory. Communist Romania’s rhetorics of power used the slogan to colonize language with formulaic phrases and ideology on various platforms throughout the public sphere. The slogan was often a cliché of the Communist language that made up the so-called “wooden language”: an ideologized language through which the political establishment easily reached everyday people. Given that all opposition has already been excluded, the slogan grows into an increasingly self-affirming presence. As a self-affirming, self-celebratory, and selfsufficient political catchphrase, it is intended less for persuasion and more as a command or, in this case, a powerful reminder of ideology and political establishment at the root of propaganda. On the other hand, the most fundamental difference when compared with its counterpart in a democratic system is that it is not meant for debate. As Spurr shows about the affirmation feature in his book, the colonial discourse combines the narcissism of the author/writer of making a mark 58  Cf. Wendy S.  Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 59  See Spurr.

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in the world (a ‘fundamental narcissism in language”) with the “rhetorical strategies of repetition and self-idealization” to “establish a political and ethical order”; Spurr explains that the rhetoric of affirmation “is deployed on behalf of a collective subjectivity which idealizes itself variously in the name of civilization, humanity, science, progress, etc., so that the repeated affirmation of such values becomes in itself a means of gaining power and mastery” and that “the primary affirmation of colonial discourse is one which justifies the authority of those in control of the discourse through demonstrations of moral superiority.”60 Spurr shows that Darwin’s concept of the “cultivated man” in The Descent of Man is a “figure of ennobled subjectivity defined by enlightened human ideals rather than by the narrow interests of a tribe” (emphasis in the original).61 The similitude between the “cultivated man” of moral superiority over the Other represented by the “savage” in colonial situations with the “New Man”62 of the Communist ideology is not negligible. The latter is also morally superior to his unenlightened counterpart in capitalism or those belonging to the wrong classes of the new Communist order. In a book positioned at the intersection of “cultural history, historical sociology and the sociology of culture, cultural anthropology, and art history,”63 Victoria Bonnell states that the Bolsheviks intended to rebuild the “individual citizen so that eventually everyone would think, speak, and act Bolshevik as well.”64 The “New Man” must affirm his political reach and assert his value in the new society, and, therefore, the Communist Party engages in self-affirmation to conquer the undecided in the process of colonizing the public space. Propaganda’s failure to reinvent itself contributes to its eventual demise. Monologism connects to the Communists’ “monolithic view of the truth.”65 In Fig. 3.2, the parade celebrates the anniversary of Romania’s insurrection against the Axis, August 23, 1944, the date when Romania started fighting alongside the Allies. The figure is replete with slogans and the portraits of Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena. The slogans read, in capitals: Long Live the Romanian Communist Party—the Leading Political  Spurr, p. 110.  Spurr, p. 111. 62  It is important to mention here that Romanian language has a noun for “human being” (“om”) which is used in this expression: Omul Nou (New Man/Human). Although it has a masculine grammatical form, it includes both sexes. The word is of Latin etymology (homo). 63  Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 17–18. 64  Bonnell, p. 3. 65  Bonnell, p. 3. 60 61

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Fig. 3.2  Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1985_c2_c5r1_004)

Force of Our Socialist Society! And: [The Anniversary of] Romania’s Antifascist and Anti-Imperialist Liberating Revolution! Our Respect and Pride: Ceaușescu—Romania! These were well-known slogans, repeated incessantly. Again, the participants and the spectators have a monologous conversation in which they say the same things. Caușescu’s portraits are present on both sides of the spectacle. This parade was in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in November 1989, a month before the Revolution. Schools and workplaces forced people to take part in such parades. They were meant to please the leader and to advance the cult of personality. On that

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occasion, however, they intended to intimidate the population even more than usual, especially knowing that the Berlin Wall had fallen earlier that month and changes seemed imminent. Mikhail Gorbachev, USSR Communist Party Secretary, had already signaled the desire to change the hard line of the Communist regime and to start reforms; however, Ceaușescu wanted to continue the status quo and became more akin to Brezhnev in 1989 (see Deletant’s book66). The more self-affirming the propaganda, the emptier the message becomes; slogans lose their meaning through endless repetition. David Spurr explains that in the case of colonialism, “the rhetoric of affirmation has this curious feature, that the intensity of its repetition […] increases as its authority “loses its grasp”. It begins to protest too much.”67 However, rhetoric of power (including the visual rhetoric of Communism) becomes tarnished by constant crisis. Spurr also explains that the “frequent hysteria of colonial discourse”68 needs to create its subject in order to maintain authority, which sheds light on the crisis that ensued in Communist systems after the elimination of enemies. In the end, propaganda’s forceful self-affirmation undermined its very position of power in the state apparatus. Hyperbole, Militarism, and Cult of Personality The instatement of Communism by military force in Central and Eastern Europe after World War II was sponsored by systematic and systemic violence on grounds of “revolutionary” action. Even though a genuine revolution did not exist, militants and activists played the roles of revolutionaries, imitating the sentiments of the Bolshevik Revolution. Best described as an excess manifested in a structure of emotion, activism, and hyperbole worked to co-opt the population into the so-called “revolutionary spirit.” Although during my youth in Communist Romania in the 1980s propaganda had moved away from hunting enemies, it continued to mention the revolutionary spirit of the early years in slogans that made little sense to me in late-Communism. The hyperbolic dimension is identifiable, for example, in the abundance of propaganda materials in the public space, the oversized portraits of the Party leader (see Fig. 3.1), and grandiose shows and parades, which also  Deletant.  Spurr, p. 124. 68  Spurr, p. 11. 66 67

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Fig. 3.3  A May 1st parade: celebrating Romanianness. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1970_Agrare_c1_c10r4_009)

had a military presence. Celebrating the nation, the Communist Party, the proletariat, or the victory over Nazism in WWII, the parades were also highly nationalist: People in traditional costumes represent “Romanianness” (see Fig. 3.3) and the farmers as a preferred social class, and the ideological trope of socialism that emphasized the fraternity between the working class and the farmers. In Fig. 3.3, the occasion is May Day celebrating the proletariat (see 1 May banner on the theater building). The country and the Communist Party flags are symbols of Socialist Romania. On the

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National Theater and Opera building in the background, Lenin’s portrait indicates that Marx and Engels are also displayed, although obscured, because the founding fathers of Marxism-Leninism always came together. These early Socialists’ portraits indicate that the event in the photograph took place before 1972 when Ceaușescu ordered their portraits replaced by his own.69 An expression of proper militarism was the country’s enrollment of all youth in nationwide organizations such as the Falcons, the Pioneers, and the Communist Youth. In fact, this mandatory participation continued in high school, universities, and workplaces. Regular shooting practice and “preparation for homeland defense” were part of the military readiness. Belligerent undertones in the Cold War public rhetoric existed and were directed toward the West. When engaging in such militarized practice, our uniforms and insignia mirrored those of the proper military, as did the discipline and the hierarchy; mandatory participation in public organized events such as the bestowing of the red scarf at the point of frontier with Hungary (illustrated in Fig. 1.5 in Chap. 1) inculcated a sense of patriotism and belonging in the organization. By choosing the border checkpoint with Hungary, we were supposed to understand that we should defend the country from outsiders. We did not question this state of facts but aligned to it, and accepted propaganda as part of everyday life. Part and parcel of the Cold War mentality of preparedness to fight the Western enemy, these activities seemed unnecessary to most of us at the time; we did not take them seriously but followed instructions knowing we had no choice. Apart from these militarist practices and rhetoric, no overt explanation of a conflict with a foreign or internal enemy existed in the late-­ Communist times. On the contrary, in fact, Ceaușescu’s rhetoric was ostentatiously promoting “Peace” (see Fig. 4.7 in Chap. 4), and this paradox was never debated. In fact, the “Fight for Peace,” as it was called in propaganda’s rhetoric, was just as militaristic, and the rumor was that Ceaușescu intently militated for it to be granted the Nobel Peace Prize. The competition with the West contained a seed of militarism, but it was buried under aspects of nationalism and hyperbole, which infused the propaganda surrounding this apparent race. First, the revival of Romanian historical figures who were often depicted alongside Ceaușescu artworks and other representations hyperbolically rendered him as the legitimate

 See Manuela Marin.

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successor of past leaders as well as the “guarantor of independence and national unity”; Manuela Marin states that A number of past Romanian leaders were used to strengthen Ceaușescu’s public image. Their deeds were reinterpreted, or their significance ­accentuated, in order to present the figures as forerunners of the country’s patriotic aspirations. […] As well as endorsing Ceaușescu’s actions, these figures indicated that the “First President” was worthy of a place in the national pantheon.70

Secondly, when Romanians won various international competitions (in education, sciences, sports, etc.), the Communist regime used images of their success to enhance its ethos and to legitimate its righteous stance against the (Western) world from behind the Iron Curtain. The image of successful, high-performing youth became intertwined with this ideological battle. Hyperbolic nationalism inculcated in our generation the belief in the country’s Communist mission. The best example in this sense was world-renowned gymnast Nadia Comaneci. Although born a few years before Decree 770, she was a national symbol of hard work and perseverance for our generation when she made history by obtaining the first perfect 10 scores at the Summer Olympics in Montreal in 1976. Propaganda took advantage of her world success, and the state-controlled media pushed her visibility on television as a positive identifier for the country’s female youth. We, decreelings, were happy to emulate her and to buy the Nadia dolls. As with many other issues, the entanglement of her success with self-affirming nationalist propaganda appealed to everyone. I concur with Mihaela Wood who posits that the success in sports “became Romanians’ ultimate expression of ‘Romanian-ness’ during the Cold War years” and when she argues that Romania “fashioned elite women’s gymnastics as a key way to (1) fashion a sense of national pride and national community at home, (2) legitimize the socialist regime as a successful state, both internally and externally, (3) project positive images of Romania abroad in order to secure international recognition and prestige. During the Cold War, Romanian women gymnasts became cultural, national, and socialist heroes.”71  Marin, pp. 204–5.  Mihaela A. Wood. “Superpower: Romanian Women’s Gymnastics during the Cold War.” PhD Dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. https://www.ideals. illinois.edu/handle/2142/16106 (accessed November 2021). 70 71

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Third, combining hyperbole, militarism, and nationalism, in Romania the so-called “Singing to Romania Festival” (Festivalul Cântarea României) was a televised show replete with patriotic songs celebrating the Nation, Homeland, and Romanianness. In line with other similar events in totalitarian regimes, and blended exaltations about Communism, the Festival took place between 1976 and 1989 and employed many people, including school children. I place the Festival at the intersection of hyperbole and nationalism, and I consider its execution militaristic because it involved a large participation and grandiose shows on stadiums. Figure 1.3 in Chap. 1 is an early example of an homage show in the same vein— albeit at a smaller scale—as the Singing to Romania Festival. Although showing a street parade, Fig. 3.3 offers a glimpse into the Festival if one imagines the same spectacle elements on a stage. Militarization meant an emphasis on discipline, and Fig. 3.4 eloquently exemplifies it with perfectly aligned young men, emanating conviction. The New Men are represented as ready for the “victories of Communism.” Of all the features of the totalitarian propaganda, hyperbole appeals to people’s emotion in the most obvious manner. In visual materials, it is noticeable in oversized figures and superdimensional propaganda tropes. A figure that is represented larger than normal in comparison with other surrounding elements underlines the cult of personality, which is a direct consequence of hyperbole and allegory. The oversized shows performed for totalitarian dictators such as Soviet leader V. I. Stalin, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung (who was a model for Nicolae Ceaușescu after a visit to North Korea), and Ceaușescu himself can also be read through an analogy with colonial and imperial times. Hyperbole and cult of personality blended into a specific conglomerate of Communist propaganda in Ceaușescu’s case. As Bottez et al. explain, in addition to being part and parcel of the “totalitarian personality cult characteristic of many socialist states, [they] made use of allegory in a way that could be considered an instance of mimicry of the imperialist practice of glorifying monarchs through it (which degenerated, however, into mammoth displays of ideologized flattery)” (emphases in the original).72 The cult of personality consisted mainly in the display of the presidential portrait. As Manuela Marin shows, Ceaușescu’s “increasing personal hold over the party and state apparatus” brought about new rules in 1972, according to which  Bottez et al., p. 23.

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Fig. 3.4  Youth in a parade.  Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_ 1966-1972-c1-c16-003) The effigy of the Head of State was to be displayed in all government buildings, as well as in classrooms. The display of the effigies of all members of the Permanent Presidium, on the other hand, was obligatory only if there was room for them. The portraits of the founding fathers of Marxism-­ Leninism were to be exhibited only at party institutions or at ‘international […] events of a revolutionary character”.73  Marin, p. 195.

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This shift toward the cult of personality prompted Juan J. Linz to call Ceaușescu’s regime “sultanistic,” explaining that in such cases the loyalty to the ruler is not based on “tradition, or on him embodying an ideology […] but on a mixture of fear and rewards to his collaborators […] The personalistic and particularistic use of power for essentially private ends of the ruler and his collaborators makes the country essentially like a huge domain.”74 Moreover, some scholars believe Romania had not gone through a process of genuine de-Stalinization (e.g., Vladimir Tismaneanu), while others (e.g., Dennis Deletant) see a change toward Stalinism toward the end of Ceaușescu’s regime. Indeed, Deletant stresses that Ceaușescu opposed Brezhnev’s old style of Communism in the 1960s only to become more Brezhnev-like in the 1980s when Gorbachev initiated the glasnost or a lighter version of socialism.75 Ceaușescu’s portraits were present in the public space, in books, and in mass rallies, to name a few places. Understandably, the idealization propaganda engaged in soon made a discordant tone with everyday life, and the allegorical aspect came into contradiction with reality. By the end of the 1980s, the country and the population were ready to leave Ceaușism behind. At the time of the 1989 Revolution, the presidential portrait became the first artifact to be angrily defaced and destroyed. The Gaze, Panopticism, and Surveillance By definition, “totalitarian states marry rhetorics to the oppressive practices of the secret police—a necessary force totalitarian regimes rely upon heavily,” as I show somewhere else.76 Therefore, I look at the power relations between the authority and its subjects in Communist Romania through the societal power relations that intended to make the population feel controlled. First, common to psychoanalysis and visual culture, the concept of the gaze refers to a variety of situations; it is contingent on the power dynamics at play, and it involves a relationship between parties that engage in “looking.”  Linz, pp. 151–52.   See Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration. (London and New  York: Routledge, 2019) and Cordali Gradea, Adriana. “Book Review. Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration.” The Romanian American Journal  for the Humanities, 2020. Retrieved from http://thersaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Deletant_CordaliReview.pdf (accessed March 2021). 76  Gradea (2016). 74 75

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Next, in my reading of visual material artifacts of Communist Romania’s propaganda, I rely on philosopher Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist concepts of panopticism, inspecting gaze, and internalized gaze77 to illustrate how totalitarian power structures pair the employment of rhetorical terror with panopticon-inspired surveillance, put in place and maintained during the Communist rule. Defined as the “feeling of being seen,”78 the surveilling gaze is intended to objectify and regulate bodies in society, and it links conceptually to the panoptic principle. Part of an oppressive structure and its efforts to regulate minds and bodies, the “panopticon mechanism” is described by Foucault as “putting someone in the center—an eye, a gaze, a principle of surveillance—who will be able to make its sovereignty function over all the individuals [placed] (sic) within this machine of power […] None of my subjects can escape and none of their actions is unknown to me.”79 David Spurr cites Foucault when he explains the panopticon in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison: Michel Foucault recalls the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-­ century design for a circular prison divided into individual cells, all of which could be observed from the single vantage point of an enclosed central tower (1977:200–228). This architectural design has served as the model for modern prisons […], as well as for other institutions where discipline and productivity are most economically monitored by an arrangement where the eye can survey an entire operation at a glance […]. Hence the widespread use of the panoptic principle in schools, libraries, hospitals and factories.80

Thus, in Communist Romania, political artifacts such as the street banners and posters may (explicitly or implicitly) exclude or debase through textual rhetoric. Moreover, the hypervisibility of Dictator Ceauşescu’s portrait enacts a visual rhetoric of surveillance and renders the individual as a “product of power.”81 Indeed, in Romania, the strategic design of 77  Cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Second edition (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995). 78  W.  J. T.  Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” In The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 7–14 (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 12. 79  Foucault (2007), p. 66. 80  Spurr, p. 16. 81  Foucault as quoted in Michelle  Ballif, Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 104.

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Ceauşescu’s ubiquitous authoritative image and inspecting gaze placed in public spaces had similar effects on Romanian people during his reign because, as Michelle Ballif explains, “the gaze constructs the individual, disciplines the individual, normalizes the individual, individualizes the individual, for the sake of the polis.”82 Ceauşescu’s inspecting gaze is ever-­ present, material, and indeed an extension of a “machine of power”83 as it attempts at shaping the polis’ feeling of being controlled (see Figs. 4.8 and 4.9 in Chap. 4). The gaze—in fact, the mere threat of the gaze or the fear it instilled—was enough to obtain the intended result. Communist Romania’s “complexes of visuality” and practices of “countervisualities” were always already shaped by Communist dominant rhetorics and practices of surveillance. Similar to Spurr’s understanding of colonial surveillance practices and Foucault’s poststructuralist panopticon, Nicholas Mirzoeff explains that a “system of visualized surveillance” enforced by authority “counters desire and produces a self-conscious subject who experiences both internal desire and external constraint as ‘reality,’” and he attributes “this doubled complex to be the product of history, as opposed to a transhistorical human condition, specifically that of the violence with which colonial authority enforced its claims.”84 This holds true in the Communist regime in as much as it was a result of an outside imposition and because of layers of politicization. The presence of a portrait has a surveilling quality only if coupled with the oppressiveness of the regime. For example, in Great Britain, HRH Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait is ubiquitous on money and other everyday items, but the population does not perceive it as oppressive; this shows that, in the absence of tyranny, the practice of making her image a presence is not necessarily a surveillance measure. In Chap. 4, I analyze that, on the contrary, Ceaușescu’s portrait held the power to intimidate within a totalitarian order. This was also proven in the population’s fury to destroy his effigies when the 1989 Revolution came.85 By stating that the authority enforces a certain visuality, Mirzoeff refers to both the strength of the gaze, which is enhanced by the authority’s positionality, and to the subject of the gaze who should internalize it. The  Ballif (2000), p. 10.  Michel  Foucault,  Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978. Trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 66. 84  Mirzoeff, p. 10. 85  See Manuela Marin, pp. 204–5. 82 83

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gaze is at once embodied and beholding of knowledge. The feeling of being controlled, even by a gaze, modifies people’s behaviors, regulates their bodies, and is therefore linked to governmental biopolitical practices. Biopolitics is an extreme type of ontology, often born from and informed by modernist ideas, such as that of perfection, concerning the biological existence. The “other” in the negative sense is that which cannot be assimilated to the self, and it is usually expressed through language that emphasizes the alterity. Having been discussed for the Nazi context,86 this concept can be further examined within the Communist regime as a type of violence that is at the same time epistemic and ontological, discernible in discursive and visual rhetorical acts, as I will show in Chap. 6, where the Other is the Woman. Figure 3.4 is taken from a window of the local government building in Cluj. The window opens to a parade with masses of people on a sunny day. The red-and-yellow flag of the Communist Party is in the foreground, partially obscuring from sight the beautiful building of the Court of Justice; the symbolism of this photograph should not go unnoticed. It is a street of my childhood where my grandparents lived and where all the schools I attended are situated. Figure 3.5 shows a parade. This time, the National Theater and Opera in Cluj displays Ceaușescu’s picture and a slogan that reads, in capital letters: The Ceaușescu Era—The Golden Era of Socialist Romania! There is a disproportionate scale at play as the leader’s portrait sits above the people who are aligned in front of the theater. The presence of Ceaușescu’s picture fits into the tradition of the ocular symbolism intended by the regime: people become part of the propaganda and of the surveilling gaze at the same time as they are surveilled themselves. Figures 3.5 and 3.6 show the discipline and obedience required by the regime, in a powerful demonstration of order. In both figures, people are dressed the same to show uniformity, an egalitarian socialist trope. I also consider the multiple, layered gazes presupposed by post/ Communist political artifacts: the inspecting gaze or the internalized gaze; the gaze hailed and returned by propaganda artifacts; the gazes of authors/ artists from Romania as they look back at the time of Communism to

86  Cf. Giorgio  Agamben,  Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford (CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Giorgio  Agamben, State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013).

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Fig. 3.5  A May 1st parade in the center of Cluj. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1970_Agrare_c1_c10r4_026)

recuperate untold stories (e.g., rhetorical velocity and delivery87); and our returning gaze as we look at these representations. I consider the positionality of the people involved in the watching process because the message changes with each different positionality assumed. What are the rhetorical 87  Jim Ridolfo and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (Kairos A), 13, no. 2 (2009).

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Fig. 3.6  Men celebrating as part of a parade.  Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1985_c2_c6r3_051)

roles of the photographer (journalist or private individual), the designer of propaganda, and the receiver of it? The gazes that were returned at the time as well as after that Communist period are not the same. In fact, in this difference we can find nuances that had not been allowed by the Communist censorship. I examine the gazes trapped between the rhetorics employed by totalitarian political regimes and those in resistance to them. Secondly, the body is the site of the surveilling gaze which lingers on the body in an attempt to visually define it, but which the body can

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resist and indeed return. Through this lens, authority’s gaze can be construed both as the male or the patriarchal gaze when the subject of the gaze is the woman, as in the case of Decree 770 that addresses the female body in Communist Romania (see Chap. 6 in this book where I analyze the Romanian film). Although this list of features of the Communist propaganda is not exhaustive, it offers a glimpse into that historical time and how propaganda organized itself. Apart from these characteristics, propaganda had secondary determining factors, such as proscription and its more extreme aspect: violence.

Can Epistemic Violence Be Visualized? Can violence be seen as intrinsic to the propaganda materials employed by the Communist regime? If there was violence in discursive propaganda, how was it discernible in visual materials? As a survivor of, and witness to, this regime, I now consider it all as an epistemic violence in action. Bridging theorizations of spectacular visual violence in rhetorical studies88 and visual cultural rhetorics with Spivak’s epistemic violence concept in postcolonial theory, I define visual epistemic violence as the visual subjugation of one way of knowing (or system of beliefs) and its forcible replacement by another. When the Communist ideology became the new episteme, it forcefully excluded undesirable groups and erased the values of old ideologies in the process. It was epistemic in that it was ideological in nature in that it intended to replace a thought/belief system with another. And it was violent in that it acted with force, militantism, and exclusionary practices to effect this change. The genealogy of the epistemic violence concept sheds light on the violence in the Communist regime. Elaborated within postcolonial theory, the concept is understood as the subjugation of one system of knowledge/beliefs and its forcible 88   Cf. Wendy  Hesford (Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), who decries the “pervasiveness of the spectacle in human rights politics” and “seizes the spectacle’s moral ambiguities and contradictions to engage them critically” (p. 23). She shows that the terror of spectacle and the human rights spectacle “organize perception around the experience of shock and propel the identification of history as trauma—a metanarrative that is problematic insofar as it detracts attention from the scenarios of power that structure history” (p. 24). In Communism, however, the effort was done in the opposite direction: once the purge took place, the hyperbole of a perfect society was emphasized in the visual rhetoric.

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replacement by another (cf. Michel Foucault). Gayatri C. Spivak defines epistemic violence in the colonial contexts as the undermining of non-­ Western knowledges and the replacement of the autochthonous value/ knowledge/belief system with that of the colonizer’s. Subsequently, in the Communist order, epistemic violence pertains to the forceful ideological regime change when it similarly attempted to replace the knowledge/episteme (again, this happened both at the installation of Communism after WWII and during the 1989 anti-Communist Revolution). Gayatri C. Spivak calls the “imperialist epistemic, social, and disciplinary inscription” a violence and argues that “the remotely orchestrated, far-flung and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other” is an instance of large-scale epistemic violence; she continues by citing Foucault from Power/Knowledge: This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subject-ivity. It is well known that Foucault locates epistemic violence, a complete overhaul of the episteme, in the redefinition of sanity at the end of the European eighteenth century. But what if that particular redefinition was only a part of the narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies: What if the two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine? Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as “subjugated knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.”

Visualizing the violence of the regime in materials should follow the rhetoric; similarly to the base-superstructure framework, the visibility of violence is based on political practices. More than a mere representation of violence in materials, the epistemic violence is inherent in the very existence of propaganda that is abundant, ubiquitous, self-affirming, and hyper-present in the environment. If the presence of propaganda in the public space could convey surveillance and elicit self-regulation in the population, it could also remind of the regime’s violence in various degrees of subtlety. If in the beginning the “enemies” were invoked and depicted, when propaganda became self-affirming, violence against opposants became implied even when not overtly stated. Hannah Arendt explains that the lingering threat about people who can disappear at the hand of the abusive

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totalitarian government is in fact an instrument of terror.89 The rhetorical exclusion of political opponents through propaganda correlated with the exclusion in practice when large categories of population were imprisoned, dislocated, dispossessed, or killed. In Romania under Communism, Dennis Deletant elaborates on the role of the Securitate Secret Police in Romania, by enumerating the actions it enforced, such as arrests without warrants, purging “enemies of the people,” mass deportations from certain areas of the country,90 and acts of resistance by peasants opposing collectivization. Deletant chronicles the repression in a chapter called “The Romanian Gulag,” and discusses the prisons as well as the Pitești experiment (or phenomenon) where what was called the prisoners’ “re-­ education” was in fact cruel torture designed to be inflicted by fellow prisoners. Deletant calls the Pitești experiment an “enormity,” “of grotesque originality,” and “the nadir of deliberate degradation.”91 Started on December 6, 1949, under Alexandru Nicolski of the Securitate, the Pitești prison lasted until August 1952; to this day, the truth about this experiment remains fairly unknown to the West. However, violence is not a feature specific or exclusive to one ideology or historical period but is rather a silver lining running alongside everything that happens in society, at times visible, at other times latent, and usually activated in times of upheaval and change. The Communist propaganda was imbued with violence, although at times in rather subtle ways and not directly observable with the naked eye. What Mirzoeff calls the “entanglements and violence of counterinsurgency”92 happen throughout history, irrespective of the type of revolution, in a dynamic of action and reaction. When I articulate the main features of the rhetorics of power in Communism (above) or the propaganda’s visual tropes (in the next chapter), I do not include violence as a characteristic of Communism—not because it is not important, but precisely because of its undisputed role and irreducible character in any regime. In fact, violence was present at both ends of the Communist regime (1947–1989) because two revolutions framed that period: The first one when Communism was imposed in Romania after World War II, and at the time of the 1989 uprising, when people showed agency in toppling the regime and its dictator. The  Hannah Arendt (1962), p. 435.  Deletant, p. 105. 91  Ibid., p. 184. 92  Mirzoeff, p. 19. 89 90

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violence perpetrated at both times of regime change is comparable in itself, although the goals differed. People participating in the 1989 Revolution resorted to violent methods to dislocate the regime, in similar ways as the regime had dislocated the previous regime when Communism was installed (see Chap. 5). To understand how both the installation of the Communist regime in Socialist Romania and the Revolution that toppled it were epistemic violence, I return throughout this book to Roberto Esposito’s explanation of “the law as violence” which can be understood in general terms and also in times of extreme regimes; it is particularly pertinent to times of regime change: (1) law is always founded at the beginning by a violent act (one that is legally unfounded); (2) once established, it excludes any other violence external to it; (3) but this exclusion can only be carried out by means of further violence, no longer to institute but rather to preserve the established power. In the final analysis, this is what law is: violence against violence in order to control violence.93

Present throughout the Communist state’s various stages, state violence began in the Stalinist period and between 1944 and August 1958 when Soviet troops occupied Romania after King Michael I of the Hohenzollern family (18 years old at the time) was forced to abdicate from the Romanian throne. Then, the replacement of thousands of magistrates with Party loyalists when the Romanian justice system was rewritten to follow the Soviet model illustrates the violence of the epistemic kind. In examining the political “iconography of power” in the Soviet Union, Victoria Bonnell states that the enemies were heavily represented between 1917 and 1957: But beginning in the 1930s and continuing in the 1940s, the representation of enemies expands to include a multiplicity of new images corresponding to the categories of transgressors concurrently introduced into verbal political discourse. These images of “the other,” the negative figures against which Bolsheviks attempted to define their positive heroes and create models for acceptable thought and action. Such images served to reinforce a Manichean

 Esposito, (2013), p. 29.

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view that divided the world into two camps (analogous to the forces of good and evil), which existed in a state of irreconcilable conflict.94

The regime’s violence included that perpetrated against women: Decree 770 of 1966 led to a minimum of 10,000 deaths over 25 years. The next step in the visible political violence was the 1989 Romanian anti-­totalitarian revolution, which was the only blood bath in the region, during which approximately 1000 people died violent deaths at the hands of the Communist regime that shot at them. As I witnessed the Romanian Revolution of 1989, it marked my life, but the violence continued in the following months when ethnic conflict erupted in the streets of Târgu Mureș between Romanians and Hungarians (in March 1990), and then again when the coal miners came to Bucharest, called by the government to inflict terror in the population. The Communist forces continued to use typical measures glorifying the proletariat to intimidate the new voices assertively calling for an end to the Communist regime. This witnessed violence has had long-lasting effects on people. In the end, and because of all this violence, Communist Romania ranked one of the most oppressive totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe in repressive strategies and limitations of individual or collective freedoms. Ornatowski explains how Communism functioned differently than colonialism in the way it limited free expression: Communism was not a replacement of a “native” or local way of knowing with an alien or different one, as in colonialism; if anything, the “epistemic violence” (a very fitting expression indeed!) of communism lay in the necessity to belie the very evidence of one’s senses and one’s feelings, for instance, in having to refer to feeling oppressed, intimidated, and delimited as “freedom,” in having to celebrate, in word and performance, a regime one hated or at least felt dominated by, in having to “voluntarily” participate in enforced activities under threat of punishment for non-compliance, and so on. This was indeed epistemic violence perpetrated on the mind and on the very language, which no longer expressed anything meaningful.

Occasioned by the abrupt changes in society, epistemic violence was unleashed as part of, or in reaction to, the violence inherent in governmental practices. At once perpetrated by the regime and by those who resisted it, violence marred society. It was a traumatic experience that was  Bonnell, p. 9.

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also cathartic at the time of the 1989 Revolution, as revolutions always are. Chapter 5 focuses on materials from the Revolution and the months following it.

References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Seventh edition. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1962. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Bal, Mieke. Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto, 2002. Ballif, Michelle. Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Bottez, Monica, Alina Bottez, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Ruxandra Rădulescu, Bogdan Ștefănescu, and Ruxandra Vișan. Postcolonialism/ Postcommunism: Dictionary of Key Cultural Terms. Bucharest, Romania: Editura Universităt ̦ii, 2011. Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Third edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Cordali Gradea, Adriana “Book Review. Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration.” The Romanian American Journal for the Humanities, 2020. Retrieved from http://thersaa.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/12/Deletant_CordaliReview.pdf (accessed March 2021). Gradea, Adriana Cordali. “Communist Authoritarian Discourses and Practices in Romanian New Wave Cinema.” In Commanding Words: Essays on the Discursive Constructions, Manifestations, and Subversions of Authority, edited by Lynda Chouiten. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. De Cauwer, Stijn. “Potentiality and Uprisings: Georges Didi-Huberman in Dialogue with Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 186–99. Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration. London and New York: Routledge, 2019.

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Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Esposito, Roberto. “Unfinished Italy.” Italian Studies, 76 no. 2 (2021): 128–34. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-­ Structuralist Reader, Edited by Robert Young, 48–78. Boston, London, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1981. Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Second edition. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Haskins, Ekaterina V. and James P.  Zappen. “Totalitarian Visual ‘Monologue’: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40, no. 4 (2010): 326–59. Hesford, Wendy S. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Johannesen, Richard L. Ethics in Human Communication. 4th ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1996. Johnson, Ralph H. “The Principle of Vulnerability.” Informal Logic, 17, no. 2 (1995): 259–69. Kligman, Gail. The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Linz, Juan J. Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder, CO and London, UK: Rienner, 2000. Manuela, Marin. “‘For Our Beloved Leader’: Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Propaganda Portraits.” In The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power, edited by Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone, New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2020. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Moane, Geraldine. “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision.” In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, society, and the global economy, ed. Kirby, P., Gibbons, L., and Cronin, M. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Mohanty, Chandra T. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Moore, David Chioni. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique.” PMLA, Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies, 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–28.

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Ornatowski, Cezar. “The Future Is Ours,” Or Is It? The Rise and Fall of Totalitarian Rhetoric in Poland (and Elsewhere). In The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, edited by M. Smith and B. Warnick, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2010. Powell, Malea, Stacy Pigg, Kendall Leon, and Angela Haas. “Rhetoric.” In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.), edited by Marcia Bates and Mary Niles Maack, 4548–56. London, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2010. Ridolfo, Jim and Danielle Nicole DeVoss. “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (Kairos A), 13, no. 2 (2009). Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L.  London, UK: Macmillan, 1988. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Ştefănescu, Bogdan. Postcommunism. Postcolonialism. Siblings of Subalternity. Bucharest, Romania: Editura Universitătii din Bucuresti, 2012. (In English) Tismaneanu, Vladimir. The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012. Tismaneanu, Vladimir. “Unflinching Stalinism: Communism in Romania. Virtual Exhibits on Communism.” (n.d.) Retrieved from http://romania.museumoncommunism.org/content/history-­0 (accessed March 2021). Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Zizek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. London and New York: Verso, 2001.

CHAPTER 4

Visual Rhetorical Analyses of Propaganda in Late-Communist Romania

A visual rhetorical theory of Communist propaganda—and of the responses to it—implies discerning the visual tropes informed by the features of Communist rhetoric presented in Chap. 3. In this chapter, I theorize the visual tropes (or stylistic motifs) and discuss the principles of design I use to analyze the propaganda in Communist Romania.

Visual Tropes of Communist Propaganda Materials While the Communist propaganda features explicated in Chap. 3 have many similarities to totalitarianism in general, as well as a commonality with Nazi regimes, the motifs and central themes used in Communist propaganda visual materials connect with the Socialist ideology and its rhetorical features. Sociologist Victoria Bonnell states that, in Russia, visual propaganda’s purpose was to offer “a visual script, an incantation designed to conjure up new modes of thinking and conduct, and to persuade people that the present and the future were indistinguishable”.1 As such, it contained specific messages and symbols to exalt this message. I base the visual rhetorical analyses in this chapter on the following list of visual tropes or symbols present in propaganda materials in Romania’s late-Communist stages, in no particular order: 1  Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 14.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cordali, Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18806-0_4

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• Country, nation, nationalism, and Romanianness: the Romanian flag, folklore costumes, country’s emblem, and images of volunteer work done as a patriotic duty. • Military preparedness for homeland defense: military parades, the Pioneer Organization, regimented participants in various grandiose shows. • Symbols of Communism: the red flag, the Communist Party flag, the Communist symbols (sickle and hammer). • Class: the supremacy of the proletariat and the peasantry; symbols of industry and agriculture such as scaffolds, furnaces, factories, fields of wheat, haystacks; masses of people in proletarian or folklore attire; labor competitions; the five-year plan. • Cult of personality tropes: the leader(s) portraits, juxtaposition of the leader(s) figures and masses of people (often in size disparity emphasizing the leaders), rallies for the leader, and parades, including military parades. • Symbols of science and technology: superiority of science over religion, the new over the old. • Symbols of the New Socialist Man: working men; men in factories, science, and technology environments; men assembled in masses and acting in unison; men ready to fight for the country. • Symbols of the New Socialist Woman: working women (as factory workers or farmers); mothers and motherhood; women in science and technology; women in agricultural and in industrial environments, individual or in groups. This is not a comprehensive list by any means. However, at least one of these tropes can be identified in all the propaganda materials, and often more than one. In this chapter, I exemplify with some images created by designers for magazines of the time and also with photographs of the time. To some extent, the designer of propaganda materials had some degree of agency in using tropes such as the figure of the woman as a symbol of social progress (as a mother, a worker, a farmer, or a scientist), the color red representing Communism or the Party, and symbols of farming (wheat, folklore costumes), proletariat (sickle and hammer), and festivity (the color gold) became part of the design. Generally, the repetitive use of the same symbols rendered propaganda rigid, and, with time, the motifs lost novelty. In late-Communism, when I was growing up, Communist propaganda had dropped tropes of the early stages (e.g., class animosity and enemy

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invocation) and focused on motifs relating to nationalism, the proletariat and peasantry, and so on, which went on to carry comparable messages. I exemplify here with some images created by designers for magazines of the time. Figure 4.1 represents a cover of the Sănătatea (Health) magazine from 1971 where the propaganda designer put together a few visual tropes:

Fig. 4.1  San̆ ătatea (Health) magazine cover. (Used with permission from Orlando Balaș. (color))

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The figure of the woman is central and flanked by a child; the child accentuates the idea of motherhood at the same time as she represents the future; and the seemingly working man wears a Lenin-style hat. Above these characters, the Communist party emblem featured in yellow, the sickle-andhammer symbol of Communism, and the wheat wreath stand for the ideological fraternity between the workers and the peasantry, the two social classes socialism relied on; and in red, the initials PCR stand for the Romanian Communist Party, the society’s colonizing political force. Flowers are present to evoke celebration, and the Romanian national and Communist Party flags underline the hyper-presence of nationalist propaganda in what claims to be an everyday yet staged situation. The year 1921 placed on the upper-left is when the Romanian Communist Party was created, and 1971 to the right signals that this celebration is about the Party’s 50th anniversary. Next, Fig.  4.2 shows the cover of the Femeia (Woman) magazine, November 1985 issue, portraying a woman holding a wrench in a factory, which illustrates the trope of the female worker, one of the roles Communism assigned to women. Historically, the so-called emancipation of women, also defined as the first wave of feminism, coincided with the rise of socialist ideas. At that time, women militated for the right to vote, their ascension into the work force, and a more prominent role in the public space. I remind of Judith Butler’s assertion that women are situated at the “multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections,”2 a statement that talks to the third wave of feminism when women’s roles have started to account for less reductionist situations. Despite the Marxist feminism of the time, during Communism, women still had traditional roles (e.g., feeding the family, even when food was not available to buy), but the image of the New Woman as a worker and supporter of science and technology was more promoted in the public space. In fact, as I show elsewhere, United Nations time-use studies clarify that “East Central European women and women in the former Soviet Union ‘worked more hours than women anywhere in the world.’”3 The Socialist policies for the emancipation of women intended to bring them into paid jobs and to relieve them from domestic responsibilities, although the second objective was less successful. However, in 1983 when Ruthchild wrote the article  (cited in Gradea, 2014), “the number of female engineers in the 2  Judith Butler, p. 19, cited in Adriana Cordali Gradea, “Embroidered Visual Rhetoric in Andrea Dezso’s Lessons from My Mother.” Rhetoric Review, 33, no. 3 (2014): 219–43. 3  Robbins cited in Gradea.

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Fig. 4.2  Femeia (Woman) magazine cover. (Used with permission from Orlando Balaș)

U.S.S.R. surpassed that of male engineers in the United States […]. Any discussion of feminism in the region, therefore, requires a different starting point than it would in the West.”4  Rochelle Ruthchild, “Sisterhood and Socialism: The Socialist Feminist Movement.” A Journal of Women’s Studies, 7, no. 2 (1983): 4–12 (cited in Gradea, p. 220). 4

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These visual tropes connect to larger Enlightenment and modernist ideas where Socialism originated. Given the span of the Communist period, both modernism and postmodernism are historically and conceptually crucial to analyses of Socialist ideology. Communism became modernism-­ infused and heavily dominated by master-narratives in the public sphere where the dominant rhetorics of power resided. Modernist imperialist ideology and rhetoric infused the very practices Soviet Union deployed during the Cold War, despite declarative, rhetorical, and propagandistic language that claimed the opposite: While bashing colonialism, the USSR colonized places and effected epistemic violence.5 Chronologically, movements originating in the West always reached Eastern Europe much later, a disparity necessarily accounted for in sociopolitical and economic studies. Conceptually, modernism has been rhetorically present in Romania (as well as Russia) and has always meant the tendency to align with Western Europe, whose influence was at various levels, including societal, political, economic, educational, and so on. Throughout the second part of the twentieth century, during the Communist time, the scientific and technological affirmation and the ideological design of the new society were paramount and often included in the concept of the “New Man” that was common to both Fascist and Communist totalitarianisms (see the discussion in Chap. 3 about its connections to Darwin’s concept of the “cultivated man” in The Descent of Man that David Spurr also discussed in The Rhetoric of Empire 6). Drawing upon Enlightenment, modernist binaries such as civilization/barbarism, center/periphery, and culture/anarchy persisted throughout the Communist period, in various discourses, mainly because of Communism’s feature of meaning through differentiation (us vs. them). As part of modernity, the late nineteenth-century liberation of Eastern European peasantry and lower classes, which continued with Soviet Union’s communization efforts, coincided with the emancipation from poverty and illiteracy. Although necessary and one of the most successful endeavors of the time, these emancipation efforts were construed as a way to leave behind what modernism dubbed as “primitivism” (e.g., religious thought, illiteracy, superstition) which was put into binary opposition with “progress,”  Cf. Anne  Applebaum,  Gulag: A History. (New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004); and Nicholas Mirzoeff The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 6  David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 111. 5

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although in actuality education reform had started before the Bolshevik revolution. What modernity had labeled as “primitive” or “barbarian” (i.e., the uneducated lower class of the nineteenth century peasants and serfs) became “civilized” by virtue of socialism’s transformation of them into the new “proletariat class” (or the “New Man”), which was declaratively empowered by the Communist ideology with class consciousness.

A Visual Rhetorical Exercise To bridge the features detailed in Chap. 3 with the visual tropes at the beginning of this chapter, I propose an exercise that emphasizes the role of composition in photography. Principles of design taken together with the visual tropes are analytical tools in the visual rhetorical analyses of this chapter. As shown in Chap. 3, the presence and absence hypostases7 at the core of the Communist discourse emphasize, presuppose, and reinforce each other.8 In design, color contrast and light versus dark areas act in the same manner within the economy of the composition’s frame. Designers and propaganda creators can engage in what I call deliberate acts of making in/visible. As already mentioned, historically, after having purged the “enemies” in the negation/absence phase, the regime moved to denying that resistance even existed, which resulted into a rhetorical silence about what had been excluded. The Communist Party excluded “enemies” both rhetorically and in practice, to replace them with faithful sycophants, whose presence acted as a deliberate visibility and was in line with propaganda features discussed in Chap. 3 (e.g., self-affirmation). While self-affirming propaganda emphasized the hyper-presence (e.g., in the abundance of Communist symbols), it then intentionally neglected what it excluded or made it invisible. Therefore, visualizing the rhetorical absence requires a deliberate way of looking with intent beyond what propaganda copiously foregrounds. In this visual rhetorical framework, I argue that rhetorical silence can be visualized by what visual culture and design call the negative space,9 namely, the area void of text or illustration in an image. In fact, the negative space plays its own part in composition and should not  This dyadic relation (presence–absence), at the crux of the regime’s practices from the installation of the Communist regime in Romania, which is yet another paradox as it contrasts with declarative claims to equality and inclusion specific to the socialist doctrine. 8  Cf. the discussion in Chap. 3 about Spurr’s affirmation and negation features of colonial rhetoric. 9  See my analysis of the empty space in the article “Embroidered Visual Rhetoric in Andrea Dezso’s Lessons from My Mother.” 7

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be disregarded in analysis. Rather than being merely a blank space apparently left unpopulated or resulted by chance, this element fulfills important roles: It allows for other components to exist in their plenitude, provides balance in the composition, has aesthetic functions, and thus evokes variegated aesthetic effects, depending on its prevalence, position, and organization throughout a defined bi- or tridimensional space. Given that in this book I examine preponderantly photographs (and a few printed materials) from Romania’s Communist and post-communist periods, I begin by clarifying a few concepts generally applicable to any examination of images, whether iconic, historical, or otherwise. In this section, I take as the object of study Fig. 4.3, which I subsequently compare to its negative, Fig. 4.4. An Image and Its Negative The two configurations of one photograph prove the prowess of visual rhetorics: The juxtaposition of a black-and-white photograph and its would-be negative version, as if on classical celluloid film. Given the argument that the negative space is a visual rhetorical tool in design, the inversion of black and white areas illustrates its importance in emphasizing the plenitude extant in the populated space. In Fig.  4.4, which is the negative of Fig.  4.3, the composition and graphical elements remain in place; however, the inversion of the black for the white alters more than the photograph’s aesthetics. I propose understanding this example as follows: If the black space in the first image represents what was metaphorically excluded from Ceaușescu’s presence on TV, it now shows the same area as illuminated in white, thus facilitating a visualization of how what is excluded can turn into a presence, all by virtue of the simple reversal of tones.10 If in the original photograph (Fig. 4.3), the large dark field around the screen adds perspective to the face on TV and the propaganda it stands for, in the inverted picture (Fig. 4.4), the newly generated white area engulfs the TV screen in a sea of negative space that has lost its gravitas. The change is dramatic: The figure (in seemingly celluloid negative version) appears more intriguingly unrecognizable, which alters the rapport between the viewer and the figure on the screen. Aesthetically, the figure in the first photograph appears more powerful on  Additionally, when the black and the white areas are reversed, the empty space around the screen loses its gloomy connotation, and, furthermore, it illustrates visually what happens when the power dynamic is reversed. 10

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Fig. 4.3  Ceaușescu on TV in a dark room. (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1982_c3_c8r2_024))

account of the unbalanced allotment of the populated area (the TV screen) and the empty space (the dark room). The heavy black segment of the surrounding background seems fulfilling enough to support the small screen. However, it makes the TV appear far away. The background helps direct the eye toward the person in the small square screen because no imagery outside the screen distracts the viewer. The palpable tension between the larger black section and the smaller TV screen puts more than physical distance between the viewer and the screen: There is no closeness but indeed a vast separation between the viewer and the object of the gaze.

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Fig. 4.4  Ceaușescu in the negative of Fig. 4.3. (Photo modified by Aaron Heiner with permission from the President of the Minerva Archive, Prof. Zoltan Tibori Szabo)

As previously mentioned, the surface around the TV set is called in graphic design negative space (evidenced in the inverted photograph, Fig. 4.4). The empty area emphasizes and counterbalances the screen, and the two surfaces also support and emphasize each other, especially because of the black-and-white contrast. Certainly, in this case, a photograph without the empty darkness around the TV screen would render Ceaușescu as closer and more hyperbolic, physically although not necessarily affectively; in that case, his figure would fill out the entire frame of the photograph, overwhelming the image by occupying all the available space. The TV screen would be evidenced, therefore better facilitating the connection between the character (Ceaușescu) and the viewer imitating real life. The viewer would find it easier to look at the photograph and see it more as a genuine TV screen, thus entering the well-known convention of ignoring the surroundings.

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I mages Denote and Connote I caution about assumptions that photography is objective or universal (vs. contextual). Although bidimensional, images can be multifaceted. According to Roland Barthes, a picture denotes (i.e., has a face-value meaning) and connotes (i.e., has social, historical, and cultural meanings).11 Take Fig. 4.3, for example. Denotatively, it shows a TV set in a dark room that in turn contains President Nicolae Ceaușescu’s image while seemingly holding a speech. His bust in the TV square frame asserts a presence both within the TV set’s frame and in that of the photograph itself. Specifically, while the photograph denotes a TV screen in a dark room, its connotations expand to larger circles of contexts outside these frames, for example, the text and message of the President’s speech, its occasion, the audience in the place where Ceaușescu speaks, or the audience outside that predicament, in the room where the photograph is taken or in other homes, given that the medium of television disseminated the image to everyone in the country. One can only speculate about the context in which the photograph in Fig. 4.3 was taken: The Minerva Archive provided the original, which, as I explain at the beginning of the book, contains a large number of photographs taken by photojournalists sometime during Romania’s Communist regime, for whatever purpose. Their work, however, was permeated by the professional ethos of working for the Communist Party media. This understanding helps when contextualizing the photographs. Roland Barthes states that press photographs12 connote and contain codes: on the one hand, the press photograph is an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional, aesthetic or ideological norms which are so many factors of connotation; while on the other, this same photograph is not only perceived, received, it is read, connected more or less consciously by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs. […] The photographic paradox can then be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the “art”, or the treatment, or the “writing”, or the rhetoric, of the photograph).13 11  Roland Barthes, Image—Music—Text, (New York: Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978), pp. 17–19. 12  We should remember that Barthes refers to classical photography, on celluloid, rather than the digital version, which can be more easily manipulated and/or distorted. 13  Ibid., pp. 18–19.

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Acknowledging that in the rhetoric of the photograph the “message develops” while there is no code, Barthes questions the photograph’s capability to be “at once ‘objective’ and ‘invested,’ natural and cultural” and states that the connoted message has a “plane of content” that needs “a veritable decipherment.”14 To this, I add that the act of decoding is further rooted in the viewers’ social, cultural, and even political background. Although the audience’s effective engagement with propaganda visual materials could not be entirely controlled, in the case of Communist propaganda, the authorities expected the audience to understand (even consume) images in a predetermined way.  hotographs Claim Objectivity P The photograph’s apparent claim to objectivity and faithful representation or reflection of reality is a trope that needs challenging. Every framing of an image is a rhetorical act despite the illusion of mechanical objectivity: Both conscious and unconscious decisions contribute to what is included in the frame. For example, Fig. 4.3 is not a TV screen, nor is it the mere representation of a screen (Rene Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” comes to mind, which features the textual statement “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”15 thus illustrating the structuralist differentiation between the signifier and the signified in semiotics). Politics and aesthetics philosopher Jacques Rancière explains that the so-called “objective” aspect of photography as a medium “masks a determined aesthetic relation between opacity and transparency” and that the camera, by virtue of its mechanism, accomplishes a “work of subtraction” and “impersonality,” which is “not the same thing as the objectivity of the camera.”16 To support this point, Rancière cites Jean-Francois Chevrier’s idea of “impoverished ontology” in photography,17 referring to the author’s stance outside of the photograph.

 Ibid., p. 20.  See Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 15. 16  Jacques Rancière, “Notes on the Photographic Image,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 86–95 (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 91 and 93. 17  Roland Barthes points out “the photographic paradox,” stating that a picture has a mythical objectivity and is “exclusively constituted and occupied by a ‘denoted’ message” which he contrasts with the denotation and connotation in the “imitative” arts or the “whole range of analogical reproductions of reality—drawings, paintings, cinema, theatre” (see Barthes). 14 15

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However, I argue that the human element cannot be completely obliterated from the rhetorical situation, irrespective of an assumed cold objectivity of the mechanism involved. The photographer acts rhetorically when holding and pointing the camera at its subject, or in the very action of framing the image. People still hold contradicting beliefs about photographs, some considering them both faithful to reality and misleading at the same time, especially with the advent of digital photography and the technological developments of the twenty-first century. What is important in my analyses is to remember that the photojournalist may be, at the same time, part of the “propaganda machine” and an individual with a critical (metaphorical) lens when framing the shot. Thus, if we were to further speculate on the contextualities around the photograph in Fig. 4.3, we can safely state that, in it, the TV set resembles a window into a world outside the realm of everyday reality. Especially if this photograph was taken for personal use and not meant for the public eye, the author could have seen the dark empty space around the screen as the very place of disjunction between propaganda and the viewer; this would make this intentional framing a subversive act. Micro-­ acts of resistance remained outside of the surveilling gaze. The photograph could well be an absent-minded shot taken in the (literal) dark, out of boredom, or with the prospect of future propagandistic use; additionally, it could have been meant for personal use because the setting seems to be in someone’s home. The photographer was either oblivious to any reasons behind this specific framing or, conversely, perhaps intended to create a meaningful tension between the TV set and the vast dark area around it. We will never know. In any case, the apparent objectivity of the camera seemingly caught an aesthetic dimension of an everyday occurrence. I mages Exist Within a Context Subsequently, and similarly to the definition of rhetoric I employ in this book, namely, that positionality defines the ethos and the parameters in the rhetorical situation, context enhances the message and its reception. Wendy S. Hesford and Brenda Jo Brueggemann clarify this point when they explain that, “The context (history, time, space, location, genre, situation) in which a piece of writing is produced, as well as the context in which it is received, can make all the difference in how it is read, received,

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understood, and acted upon.”18 This signals that the image’s frame is always permeable so that context can bleed through its boundaries. Similarly, Marita Sturken talks about context as that which is necessary in making sense of an image and exemplifies with photographs “created within personal or familial contexts” that gain “a cultural, legal, or historical status.”19 This is the case of many photographs, taken in various historical times, which then have the capability of becoming iconic. Some photographs in the Minerva Archive have this potential. Although we cannot know why the photograph in Fig. 4.3 was taken20 or who its expected viewership was at the time, as we look at it across decades, continents, and cultures, it may acquire cultural and historical status when we further contextualize it to events outside of its original frame of reference.  he Bodily Figure Is a Photographic Trope T In Fig. 4.3, Ceaușescu’s image on television metonymically illustrates how the cult of personality functioned. As part of the larger propaganda, Ceaușescu’s presence as the Communist Party Leader acts as the surveilling gaze that the political power exerted over its people, emphasizing propaganda’s panoptic power, as previously discussed (see Chap. 3). Additionally, Ceaușescu’s image on TV fits what Hariman and Lucaites call “the trope of the bodily figure”: The body represents the person, and the centrality of individual subjectivity is reinforced by positioning this body as the figure in the figure/ground distinction that defines ordinary perception. The visual foregrounding of the individual is a principal convention of visual representation in a modern, liberal society. The individual is sovereign: the unencumbered self, the rights-bearing subject, the single entity through which experience can be defined and to which protections or rewards are given.21

18  Wendy S.  Hesford and Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Rhetorical Visions: Reading and Writing in a Visual Culture (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), p. 164. 19  Marita Sturken quoted in Hesford and Brueggemann, p. 165. 20  In private communication with Prof. Tibori Szabo, he stated that the intent of the photographer was not known. 21  Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Visual Tropes and Late-Modernity Emotion in U.S. Public Culture.” Poroi 5, no. 2 (2008): 47–93, 60–61. https://doi.org/10.13008/ 2151-2957.1015.

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In the paragraph quoted above, the authors discuss a photograph of Phil Mickelson celebrating his first golf tournament win. Ceaușescu’s image in Fig. 4.3 is about something entirely different. The sole figure in the image denoting Ceaușescu holding a speech references the cult of personality, monologism, and self-affirmation. Hariman and Lucaites also name the face as a “most obvious visual trope,” “the most expressive part of the body; the surest expression of individual personality, mood, intention, and response. The face is what we see of the person. […] Thus the face would seem to be the master trope for expressing individual emotion. […] The face is always a place for negotiating the boundaries of public and private life.”22 However, this resonates more strongly when the face is that of a dictator who has been in power for a couple of decades and whose omnipresent gaze is weaponized by the propaganda machine. Ceaușescu’s face is not depicted as an intricate, expressive site, but in its unidimensional aspect: A metaphor for the propaganda and a metonymical presence of the Communist Party. Furthermore, given that emotion and affect are related to pathos (as a classical mode of persuasion), Ceaușescu’s face as a visual trope of the propaganda fits Hariman and Lucaites’s description of the leader’s face trope: The faces of leaders […] become masks that convey personality. They imply that a dialogue among individuals is occurring in media that reach blindly in the lives of millions in environments defined by geometric uniformity and abstraction. The face remains a register for emotional display and reaction; but it also functions as a compensatory device within a system that draws on still more generalized, uniform, or abstract devices. The face becomes a machine, and it functions as one part of a larger machine that exists to manage emotional life within a highly complex, catastrophically interdependent society organized around industrial and economic practices of incredible scale.23

Again, in that essay, Hariman and Lucaites focus on liberal democracy. I draw partially on their discussion of the way “visual images might be articulating a late-modern structure of feeling” and how “an image works emotionally by close readings of its visual tropes and deriving its place within the symbolic field.” Although, as they state, this structure of feeling  Ibid., pp. 72–73, 75.  Ibid., p. 79.

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“can shape policies and events themselves and not just media coverage or public response,”24 totalitarian orders remain in excess of such comparisons: A lot remains outside of debate. The Communist propaganda’s intention was also to appeal to emotions and to solicit specific participation and responses from the public. However, responses were expected but never open for debate from opposing positions. The photograph’s composition helps with the understanding that, knowingly or not, the photographer did not mean it as a purely propagandistic material. Presumably, for propaganda purposes, the face would be properly centered within the screen’s frame, which would be larger, and the portraiture would more eloquently show Ceaușescu fixing the audience with his gaze. Ceaușescu’s face is too far for accessibility, which illustrates the expanse between the leader and his people. Instead, we can imagine the photograph as a snapshot of something anyone in the country could see on TV at that time and in fact almost daily, for decades. This was amplified by the fact that Romania had only one TV channel for the entire country, which broadcast a couple of hours per day (with the exception of a second channel that additionally broadcast for a few hours a day only in the capital of Bucharest). Consequently, the photograph represents what anyone in front of the TV set would see at prime time. In this sense, it appears that the surveilling gaze usually associated with propaganda in totalitarianism is indeed being returned by the photographer of this picture. However, the screen still holds a certain fascination because TV images invite the viewer to become absorbed by the image on the screen. Most of us understand this convention: We extract ourselves from the environment where we watch TV (or any screen), ignore the surroundings, and voluntarily enter the narrative plane offered by the screen, as if it were an alternative reality. As Steven Marsh shows in a film analysis article, “the screen is an emitting receptacle—it receives, produces and transmits (sends) images, as if it were a conduit or passageway.”25 Additionally, J. Hills Miller describes the screen as being “at once a permeable membrane connecting inside and outside, confusing them with one another, allowing the outside in, making the inside out, dividing them but also forming an ambiguous transition between one and the other,” which he also describes as “the  Ibid., p. 84.  Steven Marsh, “The Legacies of Pere Portabella: Between Heritage and Inheritance.” Hispanic Review, 78, no. 4 (2010): 551–67, p. 561. 24 25

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hymeneal bond.”26 Film theorist Christian Metz explained the process of spectatorship as follows: the viewer suspends disbelief in the fictional world of the film and identifies not only with specific characters in the film, but also, and more important, with the film’s overall ideology. This occurs through identification with the position of the camera or with film characters […] [which] puts into play fantasy structures […] that derive from the viewer’s unconscious.27

To a certain degree, still bidimensional images enable the same identification. At the very least, Fig.  4.3 hints at film because its object is a TV screen where the image is in motion. Additionally, the TV in Fig. 4.3 is a frame contained within the larger frame of the photograph, which makes it meta-­referential or a meta-picture. In terms of cinema or photography, this montage is called a mise-en-scene (“setting of the stage”), and the frame-­within-­a-frame composition is a mise-en-abyme (“setting into the abyss”), resembling standing between mirrors. Most of the figures analyzed in this book display this characteristic, especially the photographs of propaganda materials, where layers of framing are discernible. In the next section, to exemplify the Communist propaganda’s visual tropes and their relation to the rhetorical features, I present a visual rhetorical analysis of the Romanian Communist propaganda in its parts as well as analyses of individual materials that work to support the larger propaganda project. Subsequently, I show the effect of propaganda materials in people’s everyday life and how they eventually shaped people’s starting point in resistance tactics in Communist Romania.

Communist Propaganda Materials Through Visual Rhetoric Propaganda constructed its own spectatorship. Communism systematically constructed a subservient subject, who lacked initiative and stood in line with predetermined patterns. Specifically, propaganda expects only one clearly defined type of viewer who participates in the propagandistic spectacle and identifies with its message. Everyone understood the convention and played by the rules. The propaganda consumer learned to  Quoted in Marsh, pp. 563–4.  Christian Metz quoted in Sturken and Cartwright, p. 120.

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show no overt resistance, especially after the purges of the Stalinist years. In this subsection, I analyze the discursive and visual rhetoric of the propaganda in Communist Romania, by focusing on its smallest part, the political slogan as a genre, and then the presidential portrait. The Incessant Repetition of the Political Slogan Communist propaganda used the slogan as a discursive construction brick that contained a distilled form of the only accepted “Truth” in the single-­ party system. Designed to reproduce, legitimize, and enact ideological goals in society, it was circulated through various media and artifacts in the public space. In general, not only in the Communist society, the slogan addresses the public in a short, memorable phrase.28 Although concise in format, because of the manner Communism was brought to Romania, it contained the totalitarian rhetoric’s epistemic violence enforced on people. The regime’s propaganda had colonized various platforms throughout the public sphere to disseminate its message. I particularly remember the hyper-visuality of the slogan represented on banners displayed everywhere in my native town. Here, I identify certain visual tropes that could be found on various materials. Although the Communist features of propaganda discussed in the previous section could also apply to non-­Communist regimes, the visual tropes are more clearly linked to the socialist ideology. I grew up with slogans that used abstract, uplifting concepts of country and nation, as well as idealizations of the country’s past, present, and future. Visual rhetorical tropes accompanied the exulted discursive slogans in propaganda materials, featuring capital letters as the font of choice and 28  For instance, recent slogans in the American political environment, such as “America First” or “Blood and Soil,” can be examined in comparison with past slogans of other historical times or from different parts of the world. “A Short History of ‘America First,’” by Krishnadev Calamur (2017, Jan 21. “A Short History of ‘America First.’” The Atlantic)  explains the slogan’s “darker recent history,” its anti-Semitic connotations, and connections with the America First Committee and “one of the most infamous speeches” given by Charles Lindbergh in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941. “Blood and Soil” is the English translation of the German slogan “Blut und Boden” adopted by Hitler for policies such as the “grotesque pseudo-Darwinian eugenics programs aimed at producing the ‘master race,’ and the horrors Nazis inflicted on the Jews and other peoples,” as Edward Morrissey (“Nothing about ‘Blood and Soil’ is American.” August 15, 2017, The Week) shows. Historian Eric Rauchway (“President Trump’s ‘America First’ Slogan Was Popularized by Nazi Sympathizers.” January 20, 2017, The Washington Post) calls Lindbergh an “enthusiast of fascism” and subtly hints at the similitude of “America First” to the Nazi slogan “Deutschland über ales” in a Washington Post article.

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Fig. 4.5  Ceaușescu’s book Romania on the Way of Building Up the Multilaterally Developed Socialist Society. (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1987_c2_c6r5_005))

exclamation points to underscore propaganda’s hyperbole, conviction, and militant attitude. Some examples I remember from my childhood are as follows (see Fig. 4.5 that shows one such slogan on a book’s cover): • PROLETARIANS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! • LONG LIVE THE MULTILATERALLY DEVELOPED SOCIETY AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF ROMANIA TOWARDS COMMUNISM!

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• WHO IS NOT WITH US IS AGAINST US! • WOMEN, BE HEROINE MOTHERS! • COMRADE NICOLAE CEAUȘESCU RE-ELECTED AT THE TWELFTH CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY! • LONG LIVE THE ROMANIAN COMMUNIST PARTY, LED BY ITS SECRETARY GENERAL, COMRADE NICOLAE CEAUȘESCU! • LET’S FORGE A MULTILATERALLY DEVELOPED SOCIETY AND ADVANCE ROMANIA ON THE ROAD TOWARDS COMMUNISM! • WORKERS, FINALIZE THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN IN FOUR-­ AND-­A-HALF YEARS! In Communist Romania’s highly politicized environment, as part of the larger propaganda’s encompassing project, slogans inundated TV and radio programs, were distributed everywhere in both aural and written form, and were displayed on banners throughout towns, in the streets, and in classrooms. The politicized society celebrated in slogans the superiority of the proletariat, the industrialization process, the “New Man,”29 the woman as mother and worker, and the single political force at play: The Romanian Communist Party. To ensure their effectiveness, propaganda slogans targeted all the available public sphere’s loci—the political, the journalistic, the educational, etc. Relying on a set of extant assumptions and denoting both the political expedience and the acceleration present in the Party’s program, slogans extended significances across space and time by grasping the larger network of contextualities. They helped maximize the ways in which the message was received once it was disseminated. Gail Kligman clarifies how that was possible: The ruling commandments of the Communist Party were enshrined in five-­year plans and laws or other documents with the force of law (i.e., decrees, decisions). These were communicated to the masses through diverse vehicles, including party texts, speeches, mass gatherings, and labor competitions. State institutions at all levels were entrusted with the vanguard task of organizing ideological dissemination. To facilitate their work, 29  See Manuela Marin, “‘For Our Beloved Leader’: Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Propaganda Portraits.” In The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power (New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2020), p. 193.

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each institution had a propaganda section responsible for mobilizational activities ­ ranging from political-educational forums to mass-media pronouncements or institutionally targeted pamphlets and campaigns.30

Despite the overconfident rhetoric of self-reliance, the regime was incapable to renew and reinvent itself in the face of economic failure. The messages of the Communist propaganda slogans should be understood in their historical contexts as they reveal the network of interrelations. Helpful to this understanding is a contextual rhetorical approach blended with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic theory of language because statements exist in conversation with other statements, insofar as a dialog is still possible in a regime. As shown in Chap. 3, Communist propaganda seemingly reflected and engaged with the new sociopolitical realities of the time; however, this engagement was imported as a ready-made revolution. While a semblance of dialog existed at the start of the regime, it morphed into a monolog over time and remained frozen in assumptions that ceased to work precisely because of the closed nature of the Communist society. The creators failed to adapt their messages to the ever-changing larger local and international context. Gail Kligman describes the declining situation of propaganda as follows: Propaganda was constructed from a ritualized set of discursive practices; redundancy was a structural feature of its method. Ritual repetition was important as a consciousness-altering technique. By incessantly and repeatedly bombarding the state’s public sphere with ideological rhetoric and images, propaganda became a naturalized part of the everyday environment in which people lived; seemingly so familiar, it was also then possible not to pay it much attention. The price for inattention was to be exacted in full over the years, and with interest.31

Whether as part of a larger totalitarian propaganda machine or within a democracy, the political slogan should respond to the ever-changing historical, political, and social realities. This adaptability relates to kairos, or the opportune moment in argumentation. In addition to the Aristotelian modes of persuasion of ethos, pathos, and logos, the rhetoric of the slogan requires engaging in sociopolitical dialog, including with other slogans, addressing issues of public interest or offering solutions to various 30  Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 116. 31  Kligman, p. 118.

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problems of the day. Theoretically, and especially in open/democratic societies, the public space is defined as “a physical place, social setting, or media arena—in which citizens come together to debate and discuss the pressing issues of their society.”32 Rather than being monopolized by a single party or a single truth, configured to support this exchange of utterances, in democracies the public sphere functions on principles of open society and market economy, freedom of expression, and plurality of ideas, which usually reflect and adapt to changes. In addition to the tropes outlined in the previous subsection, slogans had design tropes, such as capital letters followed by exclamation points (denoting conviction), faces of leaders (which connects to the totalitarian cult of personality practice), and red, yellow, and blue (representing nationalism as they are the colors of the Romanian flag); these may not be specific to socialist ideology, but they reinforced totalitarian features they accompanied. Additionally, while the visual and design tropes may or may not all be identifiable in a propaganda image, they connect to the features I identified and analyzed in the previous chapter. They also gain layers of significance by virtue of their ubiquity in the public space. An example that combines a series of visual tropes is in Fig. 4.5, a photograph of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s book that displays the characteristics of the hyperbole: capital letters, a long and convoluted title, and most likely the color combination of festive golden letters on a red background. A book serves the purpose of disseminating propaganda in this case, and Ceaușescu’s portrait was included in all school books in fact.33 Although it is hard to say where this slogan appeared first, this book title quickly became well known, which was the case of many phrases uttered by Ceaușescu in speeches, on TV, or Congresses of the Communist Party. Eventually, the slogan “Romania on Its Way to Build the Multilaterally Developed Socialist Society” was inserted in newscasts, interviews with workers, collective farmers, and we even discussed it in school classes of political indoctrination. Books were, therefore, propagandistic materials that contributed to the regime’s ambition of hyper-presence. The Ubiquity of the President’s Representation Propaganda focused on Ceaușescu’s bodily figure was also present in publications. In Fig. 4.6, the cover of the Femeia (Woman) magazine displays  Sturken and Cartwright, p. 248.  See Manuela Marin.

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Fig. 4.6  Femeia magazine cover. Used with permission from Orlando Balaș

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an agglomeration of symbols and depictions of propaganda imagery. A number of the Communist propaganda’s tropes are present on the design of the cover: Ceaușescu’s portrait with a flag (with the Socialist emblem), flanked on all sides by agrarian scenes, farmers in national costume, workers, images of propaganda within images of propaganda, and a culmination of celebration at the bottom of the page. Ceaușescu’s face appears three times on the page, his name is also spelled out in capitals on a banner held by seemingly happy demonstrators, and symbols of patriotism and Communist Party abound. The magazine issue is from 1981, and it reads in capital red letters on yellow background: “Homage on the 60th anniversary,” which references the Communist Party’s anniversary (the Romanian Communist Party was created in 1921). In general, capital letters connote militant attitudes, conviction, and “capital T” truth, and the letters are in the international red color of Communism. Preponderant in these visual materials, the color red also replicates the one-voice paradigm of the sociopolitical system where the Communist Party was the only political force. Mirroring the political stage, no other color challenges the establishment’s red in the chromatic palette of the regime’s propaganda materials, which reinforces the dominant, monologic character of these visual materials. Although red is favored in all the slogans, the addition of yellow and blue is not unusual in visual signs as the Romanian flag is made up of these three primary colors, displayed vertically in that order. They support the nationalist ideology and feelings of Romanianness were overemphasized in those times. However, red was usually present in a comparatively larger quantity because of its ideological significance and association with Communism: It stood for the unchallenged “Truth” of the regime. In the West and outside of politics, red is associated with specific concepts and sentiments: It is emotionally charged as it “has the reputation for stimulating the adrenaline and blood pressure;”34 increases human metabolism and the breathing rate, excites, is linked to war, danger, determination, power, strength, passion, desire, anger, and love, and it “attracts attention more than any other color, at times signifying danger” (see  Color Psychology). In Romania, as in other countries where the Communist flag was red, it represented blood, violent change, militant attitudes and behaviors, fight, and even revolution—all by which Communism came into 34  Jason Beaird, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Second edition. (Canada: SitePoint, 2010), p. 44.

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existence in the world. In people’s lives, the Pioneer organization35 included a red scarf as part of the costume children had to wear on special occasions, so associations with patriotism became evident for people from an early age. From the point of view of image production, when analyzing visual material artifacts, we should remember that what is visually observable has first been allowed to be visible, by designers, photographers, or other creators. Victoria Bonnell explains that “We can try to comprehend the aims of the officials and artists who produced visual propaganda. But whatever the intention, images are almost always polyvalent.”36 At the same time, because of the centralized nature of Communism, complex societal and, in this particular case, political forces similarly contributed to visual materials’ approval and distribution. The image crowded with propaganda tropes is not a mere faux pas on the side of the graphic designer, although it breaks aesthetic rules. I contend that overwhelming the viewer with hyperbole was probably intentional to discourage any possible counter-retort. At the same time, it evokes strength of convictions and enthusiasm. For instance, Lupton and Phillips explain that “a design whose elements all have a similar size often feels dull and static, lacking contrast in scale.”37 I argue that this design choice also evokes the static nature of the slogan, and of the propaganda itself, which failed to change over time or accompany societal changes. Instead, it stayed its course as if its only goal was to stay in power. The designs in Figs. 4.6 and 4.7 evince the same little attention given to scale: The images overwhelmingly occupy all the available space, resembling a colonization. This disallows the existence of blank space that would counterbalance the rectangle’s agglomeration of letters. However, text written in large-scale type and oversized text on a page confer to the “surprising size of the text” a “loud and zealous voice,”38 a hypervisibility, 35  The Pioneer Organization was created for students of ages 10–15 by Vladimir I. Lenin in the Soviet Union in 1922, and Socialist Romania established a local version of it in 1949. This mass youth organization was similar to the Nazi Germany’s Hitler Youth, and as a partycontrolled youth organization, the Romanian Pioneer Organization “worked to educate young people in communist values and to aid the party as it worked to build communism” (Encyclopedia, n.p.). 36  Bonnell, p. 11. 37  Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips. Graphic Design: The New Basics. (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), p. 41. 38  Ibid., p. 44.

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Fig. 4.7  Femeia magazine cover. (Used with permission from Orlando Balaș)

observable within the rectangular frame of the Romanian Communist propaganda banners. All this reflects the militant, self-affirming characteristics of revolutionary Communism. However, Communism was not

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grassroots in Romania, but was imposed by force, with great loss of life. This aspect which puts into question the emotional response propaganda attempts to elicit, mainly with that part of the population that remembered those events. Additionally, foundational principles of document design appear as secondary, subordinated, and subservient to the ideological message on the slogan street banners. Thus, Ceaușescu stands out and remains unchallenged through chromatic and design choices on the page. In Fig. 4.6, the leader is flanked by the nationalist and ideological stances. The contrast between darker, more defined colors in the picture showing Ceaușescu and the more pastel colors in the rest of the image emphasizes the leader: His figure is better defined to attract the eye and the rest of the page is intentionally deemphasized. As shown in Bordwell and Thompson, “cool or pale colors tend to recede,” whereas “warm or saturated colors tend to come forward.”39 Next, the faces in the crowd are placed so they create a rhythm of repetition that helps render the mass of people as one. The two pictures of crowds at the top and the bottom of the page display a symmetrical design in depicting crowds standing in a monolithic support of the leader. The faces of the figures turn toward the center and the inner space, making the composition closed (as opposed to open, through the technique in which characters would look toward the outside of the frame). This enclosure of the page’s design discourages opening the image to a possible unknown outside area that would be out of the propaganda’s control. A hierarchy between the crowds and the leader is clearly defined as they are separated from the central frame of Ceaușescu’s figure; the negative space around the leader’s figure shows him detached from the people, evidencing the cult of personality characteristic of Communist Romania’s propaganda. Secondly, in Fig. 4.6, the image that references propaganda is itself within a propaganda picture. In this sense, it is a meta-picture or a medium that is “nested inside itself.”40 The juxtaposition of fabricated, fictional realities is in fact a mise-en-abyme in that images containing propaganda make up the larger picture and show how propaganda worked at the time: Layers of Communist tropes in Communist banners held by masses of people side by 39  David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction. Tenth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), p. 147. 40  See W.  J. T.  Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media.” In The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 7–14 (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 11.

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side with Ceaușescu’s picture on a wall and the Communist Party symbol situate propaganda into a larger context. The agglomeration of images within the entire composition of the magazine cover’s page leaves no place for any white or negative space. Taken in its totality, this evokes a hyperbole of conviction and self-confidence specific to the genre of propaganda. In Fig. 4.7, a 1984 cover of Femeia shows Dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, presiding over a rally. In an attempt to relate to everyday people, Ceaușescu often wore the beret popularized by Lenin and Castro. The couple’s oversized representation in the foreground plays into the cult of personality feature specific to authoritarian regimes. In contrast to their center stage, disproportionately large figures, the background features a sea of minuscule people seemingly gathered to support the leaders by carrying their leaders’ portraits and red banners in capital white letters, faithfully following the same design techniques of self-affirmation and loyalty to the Party, Ceauşescu, and Romania. At the top of the picture, with capital white letters on blue background, it reads: CEAUȘESCU— PEACE, a well-known slogan that criticized the West’s arm race. Underneath the picture, the text above the magazine’s name reads “Long Live the 13th Congress of the RCP [the Romanian Communist Party],” in yellow capitals on a red background, which together with the blue of the space below it make the tricolor of the Romanian flag. Romanianness, cult of personality, militarism in fighting the West’s arm race, and the red color of Communism are all represented. Moreover, with Ceaușescu in both the background (in handheld portraits) and the foreground (presiding), this propaganda material is again meta-referential, evoking a standing between mirrors: The semblance of dialog is in fact a monolog between the crowd and the leader, as they seem to state the exact same thing. The strategic in/visibilities propaganda used included the hypervisibility of Communist slogans, posters, street banners, and the dictator’s portraits. When displayed throughout the public sphere, the latter also functioned as visual surveillance. A real-life photograph, Fig.  4.8 shows the president’s picture on a building in Cluj, flanked by Romania’s national flag and that of the Communist Party. The words read “CEAUȘESCU— WORKERS” in capitals, reinforcing the reliance on the proletariat and the fraternity between the leader and the working class. The figure is in black and white in the original, but it is safe to infer that the colors are white or yellow text on red or navy background. The ubiquitous presence of Ceauşescu’s image intended to fortify Ceauşescu’s authority, acting as the inspecting gaze to promote self-regulation. Both Figs. 4.8 and 4.9 provide

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Fig. 4.8  Slogan and presidential portrait on a building.  Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1983-1984_c2_c5r5_008)

examples of posters in which this Communist surveillance by portrait is evident. The intent of the propaganda was also to engage what Hesford and Brueggemann call a “national gaze,” defined as “an imagined, collective lens through which the nation is seen and understood by its members and that creates and/or presumes a sense of national identity and belonging.”41  Hesford and Brueggemann (2007), p. 160.

41

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Fig. 4.9  Slogan and portrait in preparation of a rally. Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1983-1984_c2_c5r5_010)

All the photographs that include propaganda materials displayed on city buildings have two levels of context. The first level is given by the propaganda materials themselves, which are designed and organized within a framework. Second, the photographer frames the propaganda in its environment, which adds distance between the propaganda materials and the photographer as their immediate viewer. The viewer of the photograph in this book is in turn distanced again and sees it within another frame given by the book. All these layered contexts help understand the concepts of mise-en-scene and mise-en-abyme.

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The various forms of surveillance put in place and maintained for 45 years were a type of physical, material presence that contributed to the regime’s visual epistemic violence. The totalitarian deliberate hyper-­ visibility of the dictator’s image contributes to the public sentiment of being watched when the picture is present in classrooms, work offices, and factories—which were all places the government owned. This visual rhetorical strategy is as effective as knowing that telephones are tapped by the Securitate (secret police)42 or that informers may turn one in with dire consequences; as Hannah Arendt points out, in totalitarianism, “people disappear […] innocent persons are arrested” and “it is the greatest crime to talk about these ‘secrets.’”43 This awareness lies latent in people’s minds long after the propaganda changes from confrontation with enemies to self-affirming. Visual materials, however, carry the potential threat with them by virtue of the appurtenance to the same propaganda. Figure 4.9 features another well-known slogan recited in the Communist rallies and on TV. Displayed on a stage prepared for Ceaușescu’s visit in Cluj, it states in capital letters on a red or navy background: “OUR ESTEEM AND PRIDE, CEAUȘESCU—ROMANIA!” The photograph captures a contrasting and visible disconnection between the hyperbole of propaganda, stuck in its initial project, and the reality of a changing society that has learned to ignore messages from the Communist power. Gail Kligman clarifies once again why propaganda lost terrain over time and the discordant note it made compared to reality: The rhetoric of the propaganda remained coherent as long as it was understood within its own self-referential system of meanings. However, when considered in relation to empirical evidence, that coherence vanished. The failure of propaganda as a political-educational technique stemmed primarily from the lack of resonance between the official messages about everyday life that it diffused and the bleak realities of daily experience that people lived. The widening credibility gap paralleled the increasing divide between the Party/State and its population.44

The photographer seems to have framed the image with a critical eye and an awareness for context. Additionally, more layers of context and meaning 42  See Dennis Deletant, Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). 43  Hannah Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism. Seventh edition (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1962), p. 435. 44  Gail, Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 118.

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have emerged between the present-day viewer and the photograph that further enlighten our understanding: Few people are walking in the empty real-world square in Fig. 4.9. Perhaps it is simply too early in morning; but people’s disengagement with propaganda is palpable. The rally the propaganda materials are in expectation of should be understood as a forced one: Organized by the Communist Party’s leaders, all political rallies were mandatory and always supported the President or the Party. They were never spontaneous, grassroots, or initiated by the people, as that would have been illegal. They took place during working hours and were supervised by the Communist Party’s representatives and secret police who in fact had offices in every workplace to supervise every move. This was a result of the society’s politicization that was in effect for over half a century, affecting people’s behavior and controlling any acts of resistance. The photograph illustrates the contrast between propaganda materials’ positive, self-affirming messages, the beloved leader’s portrait overseeing what will be a crowd, on the one hand, and the apathetic people in the quasi-deserted street, on the other hand. This stark contrast emphasizes another angle of the Communist propaganda of that time, namely, the complete disassociation from and failure to understand the needs of the people despite claims to the opposite. This is all readable in Fig. 4.9. Propaganda’s overreliance on a truth-­by-­ default was in fact one of the main factors that contributed to the regime’s downfall. Gail Kligman explains that, in the socialist states, the law “articulate[ed] the normative relation between the state and its citizens,” a relation that was “particularly troubled” in Romania: From a strictly formalist perspective, the paternalist socialist state was a well-­ intentioned welfare state that cared for its children. Yet discourse is not sufficient to sustain the living body. The abundance promised in official rhetoric was nowhere to be found in daily life.45

In time, the population realized the disconnection. Faced with a totalitarian rhetoric, resistance rhetorics, actions, and practices can only make room for themselves through the hidden fissures extant in and around the dominant rhetorics of power. Around the self-assertive dominant rhetorics, despite the totalitarian practices of surveillance and terror, people can find ways to resist and survive, although in subtle ways, often hard to discern, and in unexpected places. When we turn our eyes from the discourses of power, as Royster explains, “if we shift perspectives to anchor our views of rhetorical  Ibid., 86.

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terrain in counter discourses […] we might notice, perhaps for the first time, features of the landscape that we just have not noticed before, or have not perceived to be meaningful, useful, or instructive.”46 In order to avoid censorship, resistant rhetorics had to resort to the tactics theorized by Certeau47 in his analysis of practices of everyday life. Communist propaganda created a kind of metanarrative that led people to skepticism over time, mostly because it became monologic and alienated from social realities. In fact, society had reached the point of oversaturation with positive message about the state apparatus and the Communist Party. To quote Nicholas Mirzoeff, who used the phrase in another context, I would say that people had become desensitized to the “banality of images.”48 Figure 4.9 illustrates, even if without any intention to do so, the lack of communication between the establishment and everyday people: the monologic standpoint of the late-stage propaganda. From the visual rhetorical perspective, in the composition of Fig. 4.9, Ceaușescu’s portrait at the top, though seemingly benign, represents the inspecting gaze that the people below should internalize. Additionally, the leader’s face is not in alignment or proximity to the people’s level, but as if situated on a pedestal—out of reach and disproportionally large. This combination of misalignment and unrealistic scale works to overemphasize Ceauşescu’s importance relative to ordinary Romanian people. Its implied hyperbole is a symptom of the pathos—an appeal to feelings of grandeur in this case. Lupton and Phillips explain that “scale refers to one’s [subjective] impression of an object’s size” and that “an image or representation ‘lacks scale’ when it has no cues that connect it to lived experience, giving it a physical identity.”49 The employment of a distorted, exaggerated scale in this case conveys an altered totalitarian reality, one that exaggerates in the name of propaganda. Point of view here highlights the same pomp and circumstance conferred to the dictator. As Lupton and Phillips show, “photographing small objects up close and from a low vantage point creates an illusion of monumentality.”50 In this case, the camera’s low-point position is in a vantage point that forces the viewer to look  Jacqueline Jones  Royster, “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 36, no. 2 (2003): 148–67, p. 160. 47  Cf. Certeau. 48  Mirzoeff observed that the “quantity of imagery generated” by the Iraq war “had relatively little effect on the general public, a phenomenon [he] labeled the ‘banality of images.’” p. xiv. 49  Lupton and Phillips, p. 41. 50  Ibid., p. 47. 46

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upward, from a lower place, rendering the viewer belittled and in awe of the establishment’s power. The composition in Fig. 4.9 reiterates society’s panoptic feature. At the same time as the stage and Ceaușescu’s portrait seemingly expect the presence of a nation happy to be watched, they also exclude those people who may not support the regime, which according to the propaganda did not even exist. Having eliminated it in earlier stages, opposition was no longer acknowledged, and at most, it could only resort to silence. That silence is visible in the empty space and in the lack of participation of the people in the street. They resist with their body language. As part of the larger propaganda strategies in Communist Romania, the images and slogans analyzed in this chapter reflect how political discourses of power surrounded people in their everyday life. Surveillance attempted to regulate behaviors. However, people did not entirely renounce dissent but resorted to nonlinguistic ways to express it. Therefore, a different set of tools is necessary to analyze how resistance rhetoric worked in the shade of the powerful propaganda machine. I posit that, in totalitarianism, connotation, culture, and even resistance can be envisioned in the absence, and that the absence is similar (and analogous) to the negative space in design. In the second part of the book, I predicate the conceptualization of resistance in totalitarianism on this acceptation of potentiality in the absence. Furthermore, within the larger scope of the propaganda, absence envisioned as emptiness, nothingness, liminality, or a hiatus can in actuality be both temporary and misleading; indeed, it ushers in problematics of being and space.51 In this sense, Giorgio Agamben illustrates the dyad’s dynamic more powerfully when he states that “What is essential is that potentiality is not simply non-Being, simple privation, but rather the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence.”52 Inherent latencies and  Cf. Derrida “On the Name” and discussions on the concept of khora, or interval, a place outside of the Greek polis, which both Derrida and Plato code as female. “Thus, by dint of being neither a cognitive formulation—an idea—nor a mimetic resemblance, it must be that enigmatic space, a chasm, an abyss between the thing and its image, between signifier and signified, the unfolding place of mise-en-abyme. Like khora, the screen is an emitting receptacle—it receives, produces and transmits (sends) images, as if it were a conduit or passageway (we might recall that among the other names that Plato denotes for khora are womb and mother, arguably both also ‘emitting receptacles’)” (see Marsh, pp. 560–1). 52  Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 179. 51

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potentialities reside in the liminality of the absence. In the next chapter, I discuss the rhetorics of resistance at the time of the 1989 Revolution, when this potentiality becomes actualized.

References Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. and edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Originally published in Giorgio Agamben, La potenza del pensiero: saggi e conferenze. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1999. Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Seventh edition. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1962. Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. New York: Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978. Beaird, Jason. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Second edition. Canada: SitePoint, 2010. Bonnell, Victoria. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. Tenth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013. Calamur, Krishnadev. “A Short History of ‘America First.’” January 21, 2017. The Atlantic. Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Gradea, Adriana Cordali. “Embroidered Visual Rhetoric in Andrea Dezso’s Lessons from My Mother.” Rhetoric Review, 33, no. 3 (2014): 219–43. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites. “Visual Tropes and Late-Modernity Emotion in U.S. Public Culture.” Poroi, 5, no. 2 (2008): 47–93. https://doi. org/10.13008/2151-­2957.1015 Hesford, Wendy S. and Brenda Jo Brueggemann. Rhetorical Visions: Reading and Writing in a Visual Culture. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Kligman, Gail. The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Lupton, Ellen and Jennifer Cole Phillips. Graphic Design: The New Basics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.

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Marin, Manuela. “‘For Our Beloved Leader’: Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Propaganda Portraits.” In The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power. New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2020. Marsh, Steven. “The Legacies of Pere Portabella: Between Heritage and Inheritance.” Hispanic Review, 78, no. 4 (2010): 551–67. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Mitchell, W. J. T. “There Are No Visual Media.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 7–14. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Morrissey, Edward. “Nothing about ‘Blood and Soil’ Is American.” August 15, 2017. The Week. Rauchway, Eric. “President Trump’s ‘America First’ Slogan Was Popularized by Nazi Sympathizers.” January 20, 2017. The Washington Post. Rancière, Jacques. “Notes on the Photographic Image.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 86–95. London and New  York: Routledge, 2013. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 36, no. 2 (2003): 148–167. Ruthchild, Rochelle. “Sisterhood and Socialism: The Socialist Feminist Movement.” A Journal of Women Studies, 7, no. 2 (1983): 4–12. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

PART III

Visual Rhetorics of Resistance: A Silver Lining

CHAPTER 5

Asserting a Presence: Rhetorics in Time of the 1989 Revolution and Early Post-­Communism

Visual Rhetorics of Resistance Things continued to change. The city of Cluj became increasingly greyer and sadder. Faces lost their smiles. Jokes couldn’t keep people from being cold and hungry anymore. There was talk in my family about Comrade President Ceauşescu. Did he make us suffer? People’s apartments were cold because the heating came from a centralized place in each city, and the tap remained more often unturned. Food, even rationed, was hard to find: bread, sugar, oil, butter, meat. Twenty-one eggs per month as a family; seven for me, or more if my parents gave me theirs. A card got punched when we bought our daily bread, but we still had to wait in line to buy it. Sometimes, meat couldn’t be found at all, even though the ration was a pound per month. Milk was sold out minutes after the store opened, because people were waiting in line since 4 a.m. to buy milk for their children. And most importantly, people’s fear to talk or ask questions was growing.1

How did resistance happen in Communism in the absence of a proper locus? If the unwanted became rhetorically invisible, how did they continue to be relevant in other ways? The theory I develop in this book underlines the latent potentiality of resistance when absent from the public eye, and in this chapter, I examine how it became manifest with the 1

 Personal account.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cordali, Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18806-0_5

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outbreak of the Revolution. For purposes of visual rhetoric, to understand potentiality (and uprising), I rely on Stijn De Cauwer’s explanation that potentiality is “a force in which ‘decreation’ is always intertwined with ‘creation’ and negation with the affirmation of something else.”2 This assertion is in line with the basic argument of this book that organizes Communist propaganda features around the absence/presence dyad. Acts of visible resistance existed in Romania, the more notable ones being the miners’ revolt in Petroșani in 1977 and the “Tractorul” factory workers revolt in Brașov in 1987. They had been put down by the regime, received no domestic media coverage, and people disappeared. Women who did not align with the regime’s aspirations of Heroine Mother for them had no voice and were not visible in society. Through the antiabortion Decree 770, the regime had already made women “the Other” in the country, similarly to other oppressive imperialist/situations, which continued typical Communist practices that had historically targeted various population groups since the 1940s—the bourgeoisie, the landowners, the intellectuals, the free press, the West sympathizers, or whomever the government deemed as “enemies of the people.” However, some women dissented. For example, Romanian women whose names were known in the West were poet Ana Blandiana, whose poems were censored, and University professor Doina Cornea, a dissident in my native city of Cluj-­ Napoca, who sent letters to the Radio Free Europe in the 1980s. Cornea was subsequently put in house arrest until the Revolution (see Deletant’s book). The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was not a day or a week but the start of a process of decommunization, decentralization, democratization, and political pluralism. I have vivid memories of the days of the Revolution.

The Revolution of 1989 That night of December 21st, 1989, the machine guns resonated through Cluj. Roaring sounds slithered between the neighborhood’s tall apartment buildings. The noise bounced off the walls, as if shattered in pieces, which amplified the cacophony outside our windows. My window was on the 5th 2  Stijn De Cauwer, “Potentiality and Uprisings: Georges Didi-Huberman in Dialogue with Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 186–99. The quote states that “Didi-Huberman posits Agamben against Deleuze, who theorises potentiality in line with Spinoza and Nietzsche, as a force in which ‘decreation’ is always intertwined with ‘creation’ and negation with the affirmation of something else” (p. 188).

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floor and oversaw the city. I could see sunsets from there and I counted seven church towers from my window. The closest church tower, Saints Peter and Paul, had a lighted clock that showed the time; it usually kept me grounded in the present every time I glanced out the window. Now, Father wanted to go out. He could tell, from the time of his mandatory conscription, the power of the bullets we could hear. He was sure a massacre was happening outside. He still wanted to go. Mom and I cried and begged with him not to go out in the street. If he went, he could be arrested. Ceaușescu could remain in power even after this. What were the odds anything would change? Nothing had ever changed in our lifetimes. After a few long hours that seemed like an eternity, it all quieted down. We were exhausted with pain and worry. We turned the lights off in the apartment so we could fall asleep. But then suddenly, in the silence, I heard the tanks advancing on Lenin Boulevard. It was a strange rattling sound. The church tower clock, undisturbed, showed just after 1 a.m. Was it an ending or a beginning? Was it something to be forgotten?3

If the Fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was celebrated with hypervisibility in the West and around the world, Romanians knew little about it. Romanian media presented no images of the event, and if we heard about it, it was from radio stations we were not officially allowed to listen to, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. In additional to the establishment’s fear that the population would revolt, this was also a deliberate effort to prevent the joyous images from entering the Romanian imaginary. Few people listened to foreign radio stations, and thus, an open national conversation could not coagulate in the country about this subject. At least not in the public space. To the West, the Wall symbolized the ultimate site of the Cold War, and its disintegration meant the end of Communism. Romania, however, remained silent, and no sign of regime change transpired to the world from inside the country. I remember the state of Cluj in November 1989, a month before the Romanian Revolution broke. Prompted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in early November, the Romanian state apparatus resorted to display an unprecedented (at least in my memory) armed military presence in the streets, which only made sense in hindsight. I remember that walking through the city in the grayness so emblematic for the late stages of that regime I noticed people in uniform who carried rifles and patrolled in groups of two. It was unclear to me if they were the Police or the Army, 3

 Personal account.

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although they were probably both plus the National Guard. I had never before seen soldiers in uniform carrying guns on their shoulders, nonchalantly patrolling the streets. I had only seen guns at military practice or parades. Now I saw them on my way to the university and back. This was shocking to my young self as I could not make the connection to external events. Propaganda on TV intensified because the 14th Congress of the Communist Party4 had started, and, overall, these intimidation efforts were not lost on the population. However, that also seemed somewhat normal to us because no one could say anything. While the West was blasting images of joyful people in the streets of other Eastern Bloc countries, Romania was impenetrable to Western cameras. As Andaluna Borcila describes it, Romania was an “unmovable site, the site devoid of a desire for change, the site of resistance to change.”5 I cannot remember if I heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall anywhere; even if I did, what could it possibly have to do with our lives? In mid-December 1989, however, changes started to happen. Of this, again, Romanians could only hear from foreign media. After the unrest spread to major cities and the capital of Bucharest by December21, the revolution arrived in full force and with bloodshed. From the silence that had clutched Romania, a Revolution broke into the realm of the rhetorical “fortress” Ceauşescu had created.6 It was received with machine guns and carnage. The sea of silence shattered. The place of absence, where the regime had placed us, grew into a presence. * * * Living through the Communist times from birth to the age of 22, I saw a society where political propaganda flooded the public sphere. At the time of the 1989 Revolution, I was a third-year university student in Cluj-­ Napoca. Until then, I had thought about the regime many times, occasionally holding the timid hope that Communism or the Dictator’s rule 4  The Communist Party Congresses took place every 5 years and received all the media’s attention. 5  Andaluna Borcila, American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), p. 47. 6  See Noemi Marin, “Totalitarian Discourse and Ceauşescu’s Loss of Words: Memorializing Rhetoric in 1989 Romania.” In The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History, ed. Vladimir Tismăneanu and B. C. Iacob, 441–64. (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2012).

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might end one day. But President Ceaușescu was always in power, from before I was born, and every time I thought about it, change seemed inconceivable to me. It was so unrealistic that at the end of that thought there was nothing in my imagination. Until it happened. In Cluj-Napoca, where I lived, on the afternoon of December 21, people saw Army and Police dispatched in the streets of most of Romania’s big cities. Seemingly out of the blue and surely unprecedented. In the largest square, called Liberty Square at the time, a group of young people challenged the troops by showing their bare chests. A handful of courageous, unarmed people lifted their shirts saying, “We only have a bare chest; shoot.” An then they shot. Dead people fell to the ground and lied on the asphalt. In my beautiful city. Eight people were killed on the spot. And so it began. Machine guns blasted through the night. While the West was still rejoicing watching television images of the Berlin Wall taken over by happy people, we had a different reality. The shooting and machine guns lasted through the night until about 1 a.m. when I heard the tanks retreating to the Someşeni Army base.7 During the hours of shooting, father wanted to go out in the streets, but mother and I kept him inside, in our fifth-floor apartment that oversaw the city from my room’s window. We worried, cried, and at long last, we turned off all the lights so father could sleep and not want to go outside. When I heard the tanks retrieving down the street, I was lying in the dark, on the floor of our living room with my sibling-­ cousin I grew up with. We could hear our heartbeats in our ears. We hurried to the window and saw the tanks, their noisy tracks pressing against the asphalt on Lenin Boulevard. * * * I am aware of the collective trauma of those days. Between about 700 and 1300 people died during the Romanian 1989 Revolution. At once perpetrated by the regime and by people who rose against it, violence marred society, a traumatic experience that was also cathartic, as revolutions always are. Violence has an epistemic aspect, occasioned by the abrupt changes in society, and unleashed as part of, or in reaction to, the violence inherent in the Communist governmental practices inflicted in the past.  See Chap. 2.

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Although the Revolution was a multifaceted event, to examine resistance, I predicate my analyses on its spontaneous component—that of the popular uprising. Georges Didi-Huberman states that “the revolution arises from a project: it is aimed at institutions, some to destroy and others to invent. […] The revolt, on the other hand, arises only from a desire.”8 The Revolution started as a revolt in Romania’s western city of Timișoara, in mid-December 1989. Then, about a week later, it had spread to the rest of the country and, most importantly, to the capital of Bucharest, where the shooting continued well into January. Had it not spread to the capital, it would not have reached the important institutions in need of change. Antonio Negri writes about the uprising as follows: In fact, it only becomes powerful when produced collectively. Uprising is plural; the event is collective. Sure, each collective is constituted by individuals and the uprising is made up of a multitude of singularities, but the “true” collective is the shift that turns the heaviness and unbearableness of life into the choice of rising up, into the effort and joy of doing it.9

Given the book’s centrality on the population’s response to the regime, I resolve to call it a Revolution, although I am fully aware of the large spectrum of participating forces, and that some call it a coup d’état. Here again I cast no moral judgment nor do I claim to solve the “mystery” of this historical event. I direct the reader to excellent works that examine all these facets—a valid research line without which the totality of what happened may elude us.10 Consequently, when I analyze the Revolution’s flag with the hole, I look at the population’s agentic forces while obscuring from view the aspects that expound the revolution as a coup made by a faction of the Communist Party against itself (as Zizek mentioned in 1993).

 Quoted in Stijn De Cauwer, 194.  Antonio Negri, “Uprising as Event.” In Uprisings, ed. Georges Didi-Huberman, 37–45 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 2016), p. 39. 10  Cf. Dennis Deletant, Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). 8 9

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The Revolution’s Imagistic Aspect: Turning the Absence into a Presence Given that “Every political gesture arises from a history,”11 as Georges Didi-Huberman states, I contextualize the visual rhetorical interventions during the Romanian Revolution to reveal the potentiality of the absence as resistance in the country. The reversal of the absence/presence dyad during the times of regime change is evident when we consider Sara Ahmed’s statement that “The idealization of movement, or transformation of movement into a fetish, depends on the exclusion of others who are already positioned as not free in the same way.”12 This dynamic is even truer during revolutions because their goal is to challenge the balance of power. The national television station in Romania’s capital of Bucharest played a major role in the Revolution’s visibility when it disseminated images of revolutionaries taking over the building. Broadcasting the events unfolding in the capital for the rest of the country contributed to the Revolution’s visibility and to the creation of a visuality for the people. Resistance became visible, palpable, and audible.13 Yes, the Revolution was televised: Televisuality was the liaison that united the nation in participative action albeit virtually. As we entered a new era, televisuality became at once the gain and the engine of the revolution, providing insight into these changes as they happened. The Revolution was sprouting with new imagery. Through the aesthetic of visuality, we entered a novel sense of belonging: The lens of the camera and the TV screen united us into the collective group that took part in effecting the change. Although most people were mere witnesses to the spectacle, for a limited time, we all belonged. Through the new emerging imagery, visibility and visuality were thus producers of knowledge in ways Communist propaganda could never be— not for the lack of trying. At once, the events became known in the world, and the world watched through different agendas. Borcila explains the American media’s role in making the Romanian Revolution a presence on the world stage as follows: “The disintegration of communism happened  Georges Didi-Huberman, quoted in Stijn De Cauwer, p. 194.  Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 152. 13  See Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991) and Andaluna Borcila, American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives (New  York and London: Routledge, 2014),  for discussions on the role of the television in the events. 11 12

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on television, and television produced the spectacle of collapsing communism as a series of media events. This televisual collapse gave Western viewers access to an assumedly once ‘impenetrable other.’”14 Televisuality brought new iconic images into the imaginary of Romanians and people in the world. The Holed Flag: Reclaiming the Void In this section, I analyze the visual rhetorical significance of the hole in the Romanian flag that emerged as a symbol of the 1989 Revolution. People participating in the Revolution modified the Romanian flag into what became the iconic revolutionary “holed flag.” They did this by extracting the coat of arms of Socialist Republic of Romania from its middle section. Romania’s red, yellow, and blue flag now featured a symbolic hole in the middle. A similar act had been done before when in the 1956 Anti-Communist Revolution in Hungary people in that country had also extracted the coat of arms from their red, white, and green flag while chanting “Not Our Flag.”15 It is unclear if people who first cut the hole in the Romanian flag were familiar with the Hungarian revolutionary flag, but among the people who took part in the early events in Timișoara were indeed Magyar ethnics. Romania and Hungary are neighboring countries, and Transylvania (where Timișoara is located) has a large Magyar minority. The holed flag represented one of the most remarkable visual rhetorical interventions during those events. It contained all the meanings of resistance and became iconic even outside of the Romanian borders. Slavoj Zizek called it “undoubtedly the unique picture of the time.”16 Figure 5.1 represents the imagistic reality of the Revolution: People climbing a tank, holding a holed flag, in front of the building of the local government (prefecture) in Cluj-Napoca. I used to live next door to that building in middle school. Such images became tropes of the Revolution during late December 1989 and in the following months, now being recognized as  Borcila, p. 2.  See John Woods, “Why Is There a Hole in the Centre of the Hungarian Flag Today?— Photos, Video.” Daily News Hungary. 2018. Retrieved from https://dailynewshungary. com/why-is-there-a-hole-in-the-centre-of-the-hungarian-flag-today-photos-video/ (accessed March 2021). 16  Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 1. 14 15

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Fig. 5.1  The Holed Flag during the Romanian Revolution in Cluj. (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the President of the Minerva Cultural Association, Dr. Zoltán Tibori Szabó)

iconic for that time. As John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman explain, “Iconic photographs” are images that “are (1) recognized by everyone within a public culture, (2) understood to be representations of historically significant events, (3) objects of strong emotional identification or response, and (4) regularly reproduced or copied across a range of media, genres, and topics.”17 Cutting out the flag’s symbol is a violent act (beside being illegal) in line with the epistemic violence of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, whether it was grassroots or imposed in Eastern Europe by Soviet Russia at the end of WWII. Epistemic violence had remained a sociopolitical practice in effectuating social change in Romania from the beginning of the Communist period. Therefore, the newly formed engine of change similarly employed epistemic violence when its turn came: The  John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture.” Rhetoric Review, 20, no. 2/1 (2001): 37–42, p. 37. 17

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Anti-­Communist Revolution used the same exclusionary and violent practices as the Communist Revolution had done before it. Thus, the hole in the flag symbolizes the agentic act of exclusion. Slavoj Zizek explains that “crucial for Hegel’s notion of act is that an act always, by definition, involves a moment of externalization, self-objectivization, of the jump into the unknown” and it means assuming “the risk that what I am about to do will be inscribed into a framework whose contours elude my grasp, that it may set in motion an unforeseeable train of events […].”18 First, and in no particular order, the cutting of the hole signaled people’s revolt against the Communist regime: The hole resulted from excising the emblem of the Socialist Republic as it was associated with the time the country became Communist. Second, it established a banner under whose recognizable uniting symbol revolutionaries could fight, even if for a short time only. Third, they meant to use the same symbolic “language” the regime would understand because it resembled the violent exclusionary methods employed throughout Communism. Finally, the extraction of the emblem from the Romanian flag showed agency against a totalitarian state that had until then denied any opposition for decades. Thus, when the holed flag established itself as the new emblem of the Revolution, it placed the absence at the crux of the new symbology as it to assert that one can act from such a place. In the process, the void in the hole became a presence by which the previously absent opposition became embodied. In other words, in visual rhetorical terms, through all these actions, people used the void of the hole to paradoxically assert their presence in the public space. A few years after the Romanian Revolution, Zizek begins his 1993 book, Tarring with the Negative, with a discussion of the holed flag, an image he calls the most “sublime” in the Kantian sense. He states that the symbol of Socialist Romania that used to stand for “the organizing principle of national life” had been voided out: It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the “open” character of a historical situation in “its becoming” […] of that intermediate phase when the Master-Signifier, although it had already lost the hegemonical power, has not been replaced by a new one. […] what really matters is that the masses that poured into the streets of Bucharest “experienced” the situation as “open,” that they participated in the unique intermediate state of passage  Zizek, p. 31.

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form one discourse (social link) to another, when, for a brief, passing moment, the hole in the big Other, the symbolic order, became visible. The enthusiasm which carried them was literally the enthusiasm over this hole, not yet hegemonized by any positive ideological project; all ideological appropriations (from the nationalistic to the liberal-democratic) entered the stage afterwards and endeavored to “kidnap” the process which originally was not their own. At this point, perhaps, the enthusiasm of the masses and the attitude of a critical intellectual—if, in today’s “postmodern” universe, this syntagm has any meaning left—is precisely to occupy all the time, even when the new order (the “new harmony”) stabilizes itself and again renders invisible the hole as such, the place of this hole, that is, to maintain a distance toward every reigning Master-Signifier. In this precise sense, Lacan points out that, in the passage from one discourse (social link) to another, the “discourse of the analyst” always emerges from a brief moment: the aim of this discourse is precisely to “produce” the Master-Signifier, that is to say, to render visible its “produced,” artificial, contingent character.19

This excision of the Communist symbol represents a castration at the same time as it coagulates a presence, a voice that had been muted for decades. The hole in the flag is reminiscent of Roberto Esposito’s explanation of the connection between law and violence that supports my arguments throughout this book: Law is first founded by an act of violence, then as excluding acts of violence outside of it, and is also carried out by “acts of violence […] to preserve the established power. In the final analysis, this is what law is: violence against violence in order to control violence.”20 Monuments as Visual Rhetorical Presence In line with agentic acts that accompany revolutions is the practice of erasing history embodied in monuments. Established as symbols for each era and construed as phallic21 representations of various forms of power,  Ibid., 1–2.  Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Malden, MA: Polity Press. 2013), p. 29. 21  The psychoanalytical phallus is defined somewhat differently by each theorist; however, it is closely related to the figure of the father, especially in totalitarianism, where the authority is excessive. The phallus is the warrant of power, knowledge, and fertility, and through Decree 770, it conflates the functions of sexuality and procreation mudding the relationship between men and women. This concept can be discerned in monuments erected to the regime. In my analysis, I look at the propaganda materials, which are at once representative of the regime’s virility and articulated in language. 19 20

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monuments constitute a tridimensional presence throughout the public space. Together with pictures of leaders and slogans on banners displayed throughout the common space in cities, they play an important role in the propaganda project and contribute to the visual rhetoric of power in society (see discussions of the visual rhetoric of power in Chap. 3). Figure 5.2 is a photograph most probably taken in the early days of 1990 in Cluj-Napoca. It shows the defacing of a monument representing

Fig. 5.2  The monument to the Soviet tank in Cluj, defaced in early 1990. (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania, used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_1987-1991_c2_c3r1_003))

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a tank. It had been erected after WWII in honor of the Soviet Army of which the Communist regime alleged that it had “liberated” Romania from the fascists. In reality, the narrative of the so-called liberation was part of the revisionist history that taught us a lie throughout the Communist times. History classes intently omitted to note Romania’s role in shortening the war by turning against the Axis countries in the summer of 1944, and wrongly attributed this act to the country’s Communist forces, which were in fact negligible in the political spectrum at the time. In fact, Romania’s turn against the Axis and the collaboration with the Allies was a patriotic act. As historian Dennis Deletant explains, the actual events of King Michael’s “crucial act in ordering the arrest of Marshal Ion Antonescu on 23 August 1944, were largely unknown in Romania before the overthrow of the Communist regime.”22 Therefore, the monument of the Soviet Tank in Fig. 5.2 stood for this lie designed to glorify the ideological connection to the Soviet Union, as well as Romania’s subservient role to the largest power of the Communist Block. Days after the 1989 Revolution, therefore, on the monument to the Soviet Tank (Fig. 5.2), someone wrote in capital letters: “Tank, go home! Take Iliescu with you too.” Ion Iliescu was the leader of the newly formed National Salvation Front, the political organization emerged during the days of the Revolution. Part of the population already suspected Iliescu of being a “reformed” Communist of the second echelon after his statements on national TV that Romania should have a type of “Communism with a humane face.” The statement had not gone unnoticed. The fact that he intended to call Moscow to let the Soviets know that he had taken control of the country also transpired. People who saw in the Revolution more than a replacement of presidents sanctioned such messages as they indicated a continuation of the old regime. More than a thousand people lost their lives during the Revolution that most people perceived as being anti-Communist. Authoritarian regimes love monuments because they assert a robust presence. Slavoj Zizek writes that “Monuments are usually ‘phallic’: towers, spires, something that protrudes and ‘stands out’ […] the reverse of the hole in the flag which sets in motion our sublime enthusiasm.”23 The act of removing monuments can be perceived as violent, even when not performed with violence, because it comes to  Deletant, p. 42.  Zizek, Introduction Note 1, p. 239.

22 23

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demolish old knowledge or belief systems.24 The act can have an epistemic nature. The violence intrinsic to the replacement of an episteme echoes the violence perpetrated at the initiation of the Communist regime (see the section on history in Chap. 2). This type of violence, however, is not entirely comparable to the government’s violence of shooting protesters/ revolutionaries. It is instead the new power’s intention to affirm itself: “[Giorgio] Agamben defines the politics of constituent power as ‘revolutions, revolts, and new constitutions, namely a violence that puts in place and constitutes a new law.’”25 During regime change, a reevaluation of monuments that embody obsolete ideas is understandable and often necessary. In the final chapter, I discuss the manners in which various post-­ Communist countries handled the relics of the old regime.

Visual Rhetoric in the Revolution’s Aftermath Changes do not happen overnight. Because revolutions are in a certain flux and never confined to a clearly defined period of time, in the months following Ceaușescu’s demise, forces of the old regime continued to fight for supremacy; consequently, the rhetorics of the public space reflected this struggle. In this section, I discuss the manipulation of the hypostasis of absence in Communist rhetoric illustrated in visual rhetorical fashion by the graphic design element of the negative space. For the first time in decades, rhetorical hybridities of old and new discourses filled the media in what Noemi Marin calls “discursive crossings.”26 Given propaganda’s ubiquity in Communist times and the inertia of change, rhetorical detritus from the time before the Revolution continued to linger, as did the old practices of denying opposing voices. Throughout this book, I argue that secondary discourses find ways around the Communist masternarratives, although that happens with more difficulty during totalitarianism because of a lack of a proper locus.27 The absence can assert its rhetorical 24  Removal or replacement of monuments was at the center of the protests of the summer of 2020. The role of the media in shaping perceptions is evident in the case of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, which were perceived by 42% of the people as being violent and destructive of property, while less than 10% of them were so (ACLEDdata.com). Retrieved from https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-americanew-data-for-summer-2020/ (November 2021). 25   William Watkin,  “Agamben’s Impotentiality: Separation, Nonrelationality, and Destituent Potential in The Use of Bodies.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 200–14, p. 209. 26  Marin, p. S171. 27  Cf. Michel  de Certeau,  The Practice of Everyday Life  (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010).

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presence to various degrees in times of totalitarianism and during regime change. I call the alternation to power of various practices and discourses the dialectic of discourses because ideas can temporarily circulate and have a hold of public discourses at different times. In fact, visual tropes themselves can change hands and be weaponized by various groups as they accede to power, as I show when discussing Fig. 5.3 in what follows. The old regime curbed the progress intended by factions of the revolutionaries. It took me some time to understand that revolutions are slowed down by social inertia. Revolutions are like large, heavy rivers, in which various currents pull in many different directions. While the surface waters run faster, deeper waters are slower, hindered as they are by sand, gravel, and grit. In the end, the river only moves by the speed resulted from a relative median of all these forces. Society has the same inertia as the heavy river: As much as some of us wanted change to happen faster, several other forces always exist in the sociopolitical evolution, some of which remained forever obscured from sight. Sociopolitical forces on the new public stage continued to employ the rhetorical features of presence and absence for political expediency. For example, the newly created National Salvation Front and its leader, Ion Iliescu, significantly built the rhetoric of his election campaign on the need for a so-called “quiet” environment in the country. He often called the population to “calm” and “quiet” in an attempt to mute dissenting which continued to call for the exclusion of former Communist leaders from the new administration. Iliescu was from the second echelon of the Communist nomenclature; he had first claimed no stake in the new political configuration, promising to remain a mere organizer of the first free elections after the Revolution, only to then change his mind. Shortly before the elections, he announced his candidacy for president, running to the idea of “silence in the country,” the equivalent of “peace and quiet,” which meant that he wanted no opposition. This soon appeared as a trope in the visual rhetoric of the time. To keep in line with Iliescu’s message of the absence of speech, on Election Day, May 20, 1990, the cover of the former Communist newspaper in Bucharest, Adevărul, displayed an overwhelming negative space as a piece of visual rhetorical silence (see Fig. 5.3). Adevărul was the counterpart of the Soviet Russia’s main newspaper Pravda and they both mean “The Truth” in a self-affirming, indisputable, and dogmatic conviction. The front page displayed a white void that emphasized the rhetorical absence of opposing voices as a political goal: While it banished from sight unwanted opposing

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Fig. 5.3  The front page of Adevărul newspaper, Bucharest, Romania, May 20, 1990. (Used with permission from Cristian Delcea)

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voices (or words), on the bottom half of the page sat the sentence: “Avem nevoie de liniște, oameni buni!” (literally: “We need quiet, good people!”). Iliescu’s slogan reinforced the rhetoric of the new neo-Communist power and invoked the so-called “consensus” and “agreement” Communism had always sought at the same time as it disparaged critics and opposition leaders. The front page of one of the most prominent newspapers in the country showed, through visual rhetorical means, the evident intent to perpetuate the Communist rhetorical feature of the absence; it declared the new political power’s old strategies of excluding voices. Furthermore, in another attempt to continue the Communist propaganda, Iliescu repeated the phrase “good people” (oameni de bine, in Romanian) in his speeches, an invocation reminiscent of the “Us Versus Them” feature. Besides being a well-known divisive strategy of authoritarians, the expression was also a verbal attack on those who opposed him who were thus inherently the opposite of “good people.” The Proclamation in Timișoara, a document put forth by those who started the Revolution, had a renowned Point 8 that required former Communist leaders to refrain from public roles. Iliescu could not approve of such  demands because he had been a prominent member of Communist Party structures, even though Ceaușescu sidelined him in the last few years of the regime. By calling for people who identified as “good” and referring to the new leader’s supporters as “well-intended,” he vilified “ill-intended” noisemakers who kept asking for real change. The silence Iliescu invoked was represented as the negative space used in design, which can be an instrument of political visual rhetoric in propaganda. If in Fig. 5.3, the front page of the newspaper is a powerful visual rhetorical move, in contrast  Fig. 5.4 illustrates the visual rhetoric of Communist propaganda at the height of its self-affirmation. The front page of the local Communist Party newspaper Făclia (The Flame) in Cluj-­ Napoca, dated November 26, 1974, stands in stark contrast in the organization of the space. As it propagandizes the Communist Party’s 11th Congress, the abundance of text, the lack of negative space, and the Communist Party symbol over the newspaper’s name and Ceaușescu’s picture are in line with the features of propaganda discussed in Chap. 3, such as self-affirmation, monologism, hyperbole, and cult of personality. The side-by-side display of newspaper front pages in Figs. 5.3 and 5.4 emphasizes how the ideas of absence and presence (of text and images) can be visually represented to support the Communist Party’s political expediency, whether in the Communist or the post-Communist times.

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Fig. 5.4  The Communist Party newspaper in Cluj until 1990, Fac̆ lia (The Flame). (Photo © Minerva Cultural Association, Cluj, Romania used with permission from the Minerva Archive (minerva_reproduceri_c1_poze_006).)

Conclusion The 1989 Revolution and its aftermath, when things previously invisible violently came out into the light, shook my understanding of the world. After learning about the violence inherent in the legislation associated with my coming into being, learning that the regime was quick to shoot at us was a hard pill to swallow. The byproduct of Decree 770, the very generation tasked with building the “bright future,” was in fact disposable if it came to the survival of the regime. Andrei Codrescu points out that, “Ironically, the young students and workers who fought the streets to overthrow Ceaușescu were the very children he had ordered into being over the wishes of his people.”28 A teacher and a student from the school where my father taught were among those fatally shot in the Revolution in Cluj. A former colleague of mine from the art school, Călin Nemeș,  See Codrescu, p. 97.

28

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survived with wounds to his kidneys but killed himself in July 1993. However, while people of all ages rose in the Revolution, I was again proud of my generation, as conflicted as I was (and still am) knowing that the paternalistic state could get rid of us when we did not comply. Narrating his return from exile shortly after those events in December 1989, author of Romanian origin Codrescu clarifies what the Revolution meant to all of us: “It was a revolution in people’s souls when they suddenly felt no more fear. This revolution is still going on. Whoever let the tiger out of its cage is in no position to put it back.”29 Codrescu’s words rang cuttingly true in the moment. The Revolution, which divided my life, was part and parcel of the movements surrounding the event historically known as the Fall of the Berlin Wall—the beginning of the Cold War disintegration. As reductionist as this “before and after” approach may sound, certain moments act as landmarks when violence mars the sudden social and political changes. Experientially, at the time I witnessed the 1989 Revolution, I saw in it the idealistic pursuit of righting a wrong. Like most of Romania’s population, I allowed myself to be carried away with that hope, resisting the thought that secret forces started it, or planned to confiscate it for the political will to power. Now, however, we have a more comprehensive tableau of those days. To many of us, things began to look differently in the months immediately after December, when forces that resisted the change resurfaced. Furthermore, for the Romanian population, the Revolution meant more than it meant to the world. Indeed, Borcila calls the representation of the Romanian Revolution a “pseudo-clinical discourse” that positioned the world versus Communism in an “us” and “them” dichotomy in the U.S. media of the 1990s.30 What is continued from the old, Communist regime into the newly established order of early post-Communism? The year that followed the Anti-Totalitarian, Anti-Communist Revolution of 1989 was one of the most turbulent; the changes and upheaval of that December and the following months expanded time and affected all our public and private lives. However, political power, especially a totalitarian one, does not give up easily, and change does not happen overnight or even within decades. In Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, Hannah Arendt points out that “revolution involves both liberation from

 Ibid., p. 238.  Ibid., 4.

29 30

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necessity so that men may walk in dignity and the constitution of a body politic that may permit them to act in freedom.”31 Giorgio Agamben posits that, “A power that has only been knocked down with a constituent violence will resurge in another form, in the unceasing, unwinnable, desolate dialectic between constituent power and constituted power.”32 If by constituted power we understand Romania’s Communist privileged class, we know that it did not disappear with the events of the 1989 Revolution, which by virtue of being a revolution should be seen as a constitutive power. Moreover, it soon became clear that the Revolution had a counterrevolutionary faction. Zizek was probably right when he stated that, “ultimately, it had to do with a coup of the Securitate, the Communist secret police, against itself, against its own signifier; that is, the old apparatus survived by casting off its symbolic clothing.”33 Over time, we all understood this fact. Despite the disappointment Zizek’s words may bring, I argue that the 1989 Romanian Revolution (together with the rest of the movements it was part of) proves that the subaltern to the Communist regime can speak. Unlike the colonial subaltern conceptualized in Gayatri C. Spivak’s well-­ known article “Can the Subaltern Speak?,”34 populations in Eastern Europe have learned to believe in agency and class consciousness as the governmental propaganda claimed. Specifically, Spivak argues that the subaltern in the global South does not have the class consciousness that would embolden them to rise, contrary to what Western philosophers such as Foucault and Deleuze wrongly assumed.35 Because of the 31  Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975 (New York: Schocken Books, 2021), p. 254. Arendt also maintained at the time she wrote that chapter (1962) that the only revolutions “for the sake of freedom” as opposed to bread were the American Revolution and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (pp. 251–2). 32  Quoted in Watkin, pp. 209–10. 33  Zizek, p. 1. 34  Gayatri C.  Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (London, UK: Macmillan, 1988), p. 280. 35  Ibid., p. 283. Spivak states: “According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardization and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed, if given a chance (the problem of representation cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here) can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the following question: On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?”

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“international division of labor” and because “the phased development of the subaltern is complicated by the imperialist project,” Spivak concludes that the subaltern of the global South cannot speak even if “given a chance.” However, the Central and Eastern European Revolutions of 1989 showed that the Communist subaltern learned a lesson in class consciousness after two generations experienced Communist propaganda that promoted class consciousness, “revolutionary” thinking, the power of the proletariat, and agency; such propagandistic ideas were taught in schools, disseminated through the country’s media and the public sphere, and possibly learned by people in their workplaces. After four decades of Communism, through the Revolution, the young generation enacted a few socialist precepts about sociopolitical agency and involvement, thus proving that some of the propaganda worked with the young in this respect. Moreover, the revolt used the regime’s tools to change the regime, including in visual rhetorical ways, such as exclusion and epistemic violence (e.g., the holed flag), which the state also used at the installation of Communism after WWII, as I have already discussed. When revolutionaries used violence, however, it was not a purpose in itself; in fact, the state met them with considerably more violence. In her article, Spivak refers especially to the woman subaltern and concludes that “the possibility of collectivity itself is persistently foreclosed through the manipulation of female agency.”36 In light of these arguments, the next chapter is a case study in female resistance in Communist Romania.

References ACLED. Demonstrations & Political Violence in America: New Data for Summer 2020. 2021. Retrieved from https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/ demonstrations-­political-­violence-­in-­america-­new-­data-­for-­summer-­2020/ (November 2021). Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge, 2005. Arendt, Hannah. Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975. New York: Schocken Books, 2021. Borcilă, Andaluna. American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives. New  York and London: Routledge, 2014.

 Ibid.

36

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Bottez, Monica, Alina Bottez, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Ruxandra Rădulescu, Bogdan Ștefănescu, and Ruxandra Vișan. Postcolonialism/ Postcommunism: Dictionary of Key Cultural Terms. Bucharest, Romania: Editura Universităt ̦ii, 2011. De Cauwer, Stijn. “Potentiality and Uprisings: Georges Didi-Huberman in Dialogue with Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 186–99. Codrescu, Andrei. The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991. Deletant, Dennis. Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Lucaites, John Louis and Robert Hariman. “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture.” Rhetoric Review, 20, no. 2/1 (2001): 37–42. Marin, Noemi. “Totalitarian Discourse and Ceauşescu’s Loss of Words: Memorializing Rhetoric in 1989 Romania.” In The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History, edited by Vladimir Tismăneanu and B.  C. Iacob, 441–464. Budapest and New  York: Central European University Press, 2012. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Negri, Antonio. “Uprising as Event.” In Uprisings, Georges Didi-Huberman, 37–45. Paris: Éditions Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 2016. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L.  London, UK: Macmillan, 1988. Watkin, William. “Agamben’s Impotentiality: Separation, Nonrelationality, and Destituent Potential in The Use of Bodies.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 200–14. Woods, John. “Why Is There a Hole in the Centre of the Hungarian Flag Today?— Photos, Video.” Daily News Hungary, 2018. Retrieved from https://dailynewshungary.com/why-­i s-­t here-­a -­h ole-­i n-­t he-­c entre-­o f-­t he-­h ungarian-­ flag-­today-­photos-­video/ (accessed March 2021). Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

PART IV

Bridging the Past and Present in Post/Communism

CHAPTER 6

Returning the Gaze: The Visual Rhetorics of Resistance

This chapter presents a case study of visual rhetorics of resistance in response to totalitarian power in Communist Romania. My site of analysis is Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 award-winning1 film 4  Months, 3  Weeks and 2 Days (in Romanian: 4 luni, 3 sa ̆ptămâni şi 2 zile; for short, 4,3,2),2 which is part of the Romanian New Wave in cinema that has gained international recognition after 2000. Although this film illustrates one aspect of Romania’s Communist regime, it is at the same time a historiography as it recuperates the Communist memory. It is both remembrance and lesson. The film’s visual rhetoric brings to the visible women’s responses to totalitarian biopolitics and the epistemic violence that permeated the regime. The visual rhetorical analyses in this chapter focus on the power of the visual (e.g., visual violence, absence/presence through silence) and the embodied rhetoric (e.g., biopolitics, responses with the female body to a  Despite its plot revolving around an abortion—a topic that is highly controversial and politicized along partisan lines, especially in the United States, where the sociohistorical context of Communist Romania (1947–1989) is still largely unknown—4,3,2 won three awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, including the Palme D’Or and the Hollywood World Award for the Best Film in the Hollywood Film Festival. 2  In this case study, I focus on the legality/illegality of abortion and the effects of the legislation on the population. Although important, the morality of the abortion act as presented in the film is not the subject of this analysis. The film insists on the consequences suffered by the women and the tribulations of achieving a goal rather than moral implications to the characters or society. 1

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law addressing the body) as they are at the crux of this conceptualization of nonlinguistic forms of resistance. I ask the following working question: How can embodied rhetoric be visible and visualized as a form of resistance through the body? First, when totalitarian practices ban overt verbal opposition, the rhetoric of resistance is rendered mute yet otherwise perceivable. Secondly, the body is the object of the regime’s surveilling gaze, which lingers on it to define it. Third, through the presence/absence hypostases of Communist rhetoric, women act from a place of absence and resist through the body’s negative space. Propaganda has attempted to colonize the public, private, and intimate spaces. The analysis is structured in three main parts. The first part contextualizes the film to Romania’s sociocultural environment; the second part is a reading through biopolitical concepts; and the third discusses the film’s cinematic visual rhetoric. Indeed, Mungiu employs visual violence to make visible the totalitarian biopolitical practices both to the viewer who remembers those times and to those who learn about them for the first time. In this sense, the film also constitutes public pedagogy.

Cristian Mungiu’s Film 4,3,2 and Its Contexts Set in 1987 Communist Romania, when Decree 770 of 19663 had been in effect for more than two decades. Mungiu’s film 4,3,2, made in post-­ Communism, looks back at the devastating effects of the antiabortion decree on women’s reproductive rights (or lack thereof). By employing biopolitics, or politics that address people’s bodies, the state apparatus placed the female body at the intersection between ontology (lived experience) and epistemology (ideology) (or what Barad calls “ontoepistemology”4). The rhetoric from power overemphasized ideology (or epistemology) while it disregarded the ontological dimension represented by the human body. Mungiu’s film reveals that resistance could be performed through the body—in this case, the female body—in what I call embodied rhetoric. Paraphrasing Foucault, Karen Barad perfectly characterizes the body as “the locus of productive forces, the site 3  A biopolitical measure, Decree 770 intersects with my personal becoming both as a decreeling and as a grown-up woman, as I have shown in the previous chapters. 4  Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning  (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). See also Chap. 1 in this book.

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where the large-scale organization of power links up with local practices.”5 The body is, therefore, at the center of the dynamic between larger practices (or strategies) and individual practices (tactics),6 namely, between the totalitarian power and people’s everyday lives. The film zooms in on practices of resistance as tactics, which are represented by the actions of two college-age women seeking an abortion for one of them. Based on a true story retold to the director by a friend, the plot follows two young women who are college students and dorm-mates, Otilia Mihăr tescu (played by actress Anamaria Marinca) and Găbit ̦a Drăgut ̦ (played by Laura Vasiliu), in their struggle to obtain an illegal abortion for Drăgut ̦ in 1987’s Romania, where Decree 770 had been in place since 1966. The women employ a black-market doctor, Mr. Bebe7 (played by Vlad Ivanov), who risks going to prison if the pregnancy is over four months; the film’s title refers to the advanced age of the pregnancy, and the countdown implies a certain urgency. Consequently, the doctor blackmails the women into sexual favors through intimidation and violent verbal abuse at a point when it is too late to turn around. The state violence externalizes to the doctor, who practically physically rapes both women. Once the sexual assault and the abortion take place, the women vow to never speak about any of it again, further underscoring the importance of the silence in the film which lacks any music. In the end, despite this compounded aggression, the women survive and resist. The two women form a dynamic that is significant on more than one level in the film despite their different behaviors in the film; in fact, the characters and the plot remind of an earlier Romanian film directed by Andrei Blaier in 1975, Ilustrate cu Flori de Câmp (Postcards with Wild Flowers). Both films follow friendships between two women and a situation around an illegal abortion. In the earlier film, young Laura (played by Carmen Galin) travels to Giurgiu, a small town where a couple of older women help her get rid of an unwanted pregnancy resulted from a 5  Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In Material Feminisms, ed. by S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 127. 6  I propose Michel de Certeau’s (The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010) distinction between strategies as manipulations of power relationships employed by a “subject with will and power (a business, and army, a city, a scientific institution),” on the one hand, and tactics as “calculated action[s] determined by the absence of a proper locus […] [or] the art of the weak” (pp. 35–7). 7  Bebe is a popular masculine first name diminutive, which in fact translates to “baby.”

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relationship with a married architect. Laura befriends Irina (played by Elena Albu), the daughter of the local woman (Eliza Petrachescu) who assists Titina (Draga Olteanu Matei) in medicating Laura to miscarry. Laura and Irina have naïve conversations that provide the idyllic backdrop for their tragic deaths in the second part of the film. Laura is sweet, talkative, and optimistic in her plans for a happy future and dreams of world travel. She explains she sends herself postcards from places she visits and loves wildflowers, which are also referenced in the film’s title as a clear metaphor for the nonconventional woman. Later, Laura dies as a result of the botched abortion, and Irina commits suicide soon afterward by falling asleep with the gas on. The contrast between the prospects of a happy life and the tragic deaths reveals the film’s propagandistic, almost didactic, message: Women should not disobey the paternalistic and patriarchal state by going against the antiabortion law. At the time, Blaier’s film received national awards for director, best actress, screenplay, and costumes, in a clear nod from the Communist establishment. Thirty years separate Blaier’s and Mungiu’s films, a period that encloses the 1980s, which was the worst decade of Ceausescu’s regime. Unlike Blaier, Mungiu has the freedom of post-Communism to show more resistance in a similar situation in manners the other film could not because of censorship. Despite similarities, the two films diverge not only in technique, but also, and more importantly, in their representation of women and their condition in Communism, and stand as profoundly opposite political approaches to the issue of abortion. In real life, Communist propaganda had rendered these individual crises invisible to the population. A comparison of these two films evinces the propaganda’s role in Romania: Blaier’s film is from a period of increasing censorship of the arts (the 1970s), while Mungiu’s film is from the post-Communist times and benefited from the lack of censorship. Mungiu brings to the visible spectrum situations that could not be freely discussed before 1990. In that sense, the two films are not mutually exclusive: Both these situations can be imagined as having coexisted over the 25 years the decree was in effect. While the films are similar in topic and focus on female solidarity, they differ in style and aesthetics, which matters inasmuch as Mungiu’s film uses visual rhetoric with a purpose. Compared to the earlier film, 4,3,2 in fact changes the outcome and reverses the dynamic between cinematography and the larger message: While Blaier’s film counterbalances the tragedy with the idyllic imagery in the film’s title, Mungiu creates a gloomy atmosphere and uses  cinematic techniques, such as still and handheld

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cameras, toward a documentary style. The contrast is also evidenced in the title: In Mungiu’s film, 4,3,2 is in fact a countdown and stands in stark contrast to the postcards and wildflowers in Blaier’s film’s title. Therefore, the tone in the earlier film is optimistic up to the point of Laura’s death, while the cinematography resorts to less metaphor than Mungiu’s film. Blaier’s film was a propaganda project made during Ceausescu’s presidency; Mungiu made the film almost two decades after the fall of that regime. If the women survive in Mungiu’s film, it is so they solidify a feminist message—they disobey the regime’s orders and respond to the governmental biopolitical strategies by taking ownership of their bodies. In fact, they use their bodies against the law itself.8 Mungiu’s film thus poses a feminist problematization that links to the original Decree 770  in several ways. The women are addressed by the reproductive law, abused by it, and probably born as a consequence of it because they belong to the decreeling generation; yet they resist it, and metonymically stand for the country’s resistance. They resist with their negative space where the propaganda wants to penetrate in the same manner as it colonizes the public space. As half of the country’s population, the women add to the nation’s resistance, and when the Revolution happens, they are part of the generation that both resulted from the abusive law and asserted a presence in regime change efforts. However, absolutizing this fact by neglecting all those previously excluded, repressed, or killed would be reductionist. Blaier’s and Mungiu’s films participate in a limited yet necessary conversation about Decree 770. To further contextualize the film, Decree 770 forced women into the role of the mother during Communist times. Motherhood was a preponderant propaganda trope and was presented as one of the country’s ideal states for women. Mungiu’s film takes place in

8  See Maria Bucur, “AHR Forum: An Archipelago of Stories: Gender History in Eastern Europe.” American Historical Review, 113, no. 5, (2008): 1375–89 and Alina Haliliuc, “Who Is a Victim of Communism? Gender and Public Memory in the Sighet Museum, Romania.” Aspasia. The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, 7, (2013): 108–31, for work on women’s resistance in communist Romania.

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1987, when the decreeling9 generation was between 15 and 21 years of age, which places the female characters in that generation. The topic of abortion found little attention in the public space, perhaps because it is about society’s private and the intimate spaces, and the public sphere received the most attention in those times. Films still avoid this highly politicized issue, and genuine debate is not encouraged  or easily approachable in Romania. Additionally, it is significant that predominantly male film directors have told stories, possibly from the male viewpoint and under the careful eye of the Communist censorship that ensured nothing controversial happened on screen. Romanian female stars only occasionally portrayed somewhat rebellious characters, if and when censorship allowed it  and if political undertones were not suspected. Abortion remains highly controversial to this day, which explains the scarcity of artistic creations dealing with the repressive antiabortion decree that was in effect until 1990. However, a few important documentaries about it have been made (cf. the previously mentioned 2005 documentary Children of the Decree by Florin Iepan). In the next section, I read the film through a biopolitical interpretation.

Embodied Rhetorics of Resistance: A Biopolitical Reading of 4,3,2 Performed through the body, embodied rhetoric refers to material, corporeal, or nonverbal states of being that may constitute forms of resistance. Michel Foucault defines biopolitics as a “politics in the name of life” and biopower as a “life subjected to the command of politics.”10 He explains that biopolitics is part of life as it has been connected to power structures throughout history: At first, sovereignty had practiced a kind of discipline that was addressed to bodies, which was then followed by a so-called “new technology of power” that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. The latter instead addressed the “multiplicity of men” (and, of course, women) as a “global mass” subjected to governmental i­nterventions, including policies 9   Both director Mungiu and myself belong to the so-called “short, baby boom” (Donella  Meadows, “Ceaușescu’s Longest-Lasting Legacy: The Cohort of ‘67.” In The Donella Meadows Archive: Voice of a Global Citizen. Sustainability Institute, 1990, n.p. Retrieved from http://www.donellameadows.org/archives/ceausescus-longest-lastinglegacy-the-cohort-of-67/ (accessed November 20, 2022) or decreeling generation. 10  Roberto Esposito,  Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 15.

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regarding “birth, death, production, illness, etc.”11 Foucault explains that in order to form new subjects, institutions of power mark the body with their disciplining systems of norms: “the body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration.”12 A biopolitical reading of Mungiu’s film 4,3,2 evinces the negative effects of Communist Romania’s natalist policy.13 Despite an apparent positivity in intention, Decree 770 resulted in numerous deaths when “the maternal mortality rate tripled.”14 As previously shown, within the interplay of rhetorics in Communist Romania, embodied rhetorics came to exist in the absence of a “proper locus” for other kinds of rhetorics of resistance. Thus, explaining biopolitics in today’s world, Roberto Esposito asks the following questions: [I]f life is stronger than the power that besieges it, then how do we account for the outcome obtained in modernity of the mass production of death? How do we explain that the culmination of a politics of life generated a lethal power that contradicts the productive impulse? […] How is it possible that a power of life is exercised against life itself?15

Biopolitical measures can start as positive yet end as negative. In the remaining of this section, I employ Esposito’s concept of “the law” to discuss Decree 770’s epistemic violence, Agamben’s concepts of “state of exception,” polis, and zoé/bios to examine the women’s embodied and visual rhetorics of resistance, and Esposito’s immunization.

11  Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976. Trans. David Macey (New York, NY: Picador, 1997), pp. 242–3. 12  Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. by Donald F.  Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 139. 13  Controlling the population was not specific only to Ceauşescu’s regime. For example, discussing life during witch hunts, Silvia Federici shows how women were controlled in similar ways before: “Your body is truly enclosed the moment that you are so terrorised that you cannot control your own reproduction, your sexual life. We can think of an enclosure of knowledge because, for example, there was an attack against the means that women had used to control procreation” (Federici qtd. in Luca  Palterinieri, “Italian Theory and Feminist Materialism: A Reappraisal.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 135–47, p. 144). 14  Meadows, n.p. 15  Esposito (2008), p. 39.

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The Violence of the Law16 Decree 770 plays a crucial role in the economy of 4,3,2 as it illustrates the distribution of violence through legislation.17 Roberto Esposito describes “the Law” as being “located at the point of indistinction between the preservation and exclusion of life.”18 I suggest reading Esposito’s explication of the law bearing in mind the Communist history in Romania: The epistemic violence of Communism’s installation in Romania after WWII, the inclusion/exclusion feature of Communist practices and propaganda, and Decree 770, which intended to promote life (by banning abortion), but instead led to tragic loss of life. Esposito claims: (1) law is always founded at the beginning by a violent act (one that is legally unfounded); (2) once established, it excludes any other violence external to it; (3) but this exclusion can only be carried out by means of further violence, no longer to institute but rather to preserve the established power. In the final analysis, this is what law is: violence against violence in order to control violence.19

The Decree’s epistemic violence perpetuates the cycle of violence started with the forceful implementation of Communism in Eastern Europe after World War II and with the systematic elimination of opposing voices, which follows in the steps of the epistemic violence of the imperialist project (see Spivak 20). Romania’s Decree 770, as part of the practices of totalitarian power, was a law-making type of violence that addressed all women as categories of the social, political, and sexual “Other.” If, as Walter Benjamin states, “all violence as a means is either law-making or lawpreserving,”21 in the film, the doctor’s sexual assault on the women is 16  Parts of  this chapter have been taken or adapted from  my article “A Psychoanalytical Approach to  Cristian Mungiu’s 4  Months, 3  Weeks and  2  Days” published in  Journal of European Studies, 48, no. 3–4 (2018): 295–307. (I have the copyright.) 17  Jacques Derrida qtd. in Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 7: “Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law can’t by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without a ground.” 18  Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), p. 10. 19  Ibid., p. 29. 20  Cf. Gayatri. C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (London, UK: Macmillan, 1988). 21  Walter Benjamin, quoted in Esposito (2013), p. 29.

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an attempt at law-preserving—he will not let the law be violated without punishment. The violence inherent in the law targets all the country’s women, metonymically represented in the film by Găbit ̦a and Otilia as the two types of hypostases: pregnant and not pregnant, respectively. Later, the final act of violence constituted by the abortion closes the circle when the women respond to the law’s initial violence against them with violence transferred toward the fetus. This third violent act reacts to the law-­ making violence intrinsic to the law itself, although it is also law-making. This way, the women assert themselves as a force when the state does not officially include them in legislative decisions about their reproductive rights.22 In the film, the Communist state apparatus embodies what Giorgio Agamben calls the “state of exception as a paradigm of government,”23 which affords governments accumulated power to act in times of crisis. The Communist regime passed Decree 770 because of an alarming abortion rate previous to this law. In so doing, the extremism of the Decree was justified when the state apparatus acted as an authoritarian political power that Agamben calls “sovereignty.” In fact, Agamben defines totalitarian regimes such as that of Nazi Germany as follows: “modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.”24 Communist Romania fits the same description of an all-powerful government, and the Law is part and parcel of the politics of crisis. This definition is crucial in understanding the female characters’ resistance in Mungiu’s film. Decree 770 is the instrument through which the abortionist doctor assumes the governmental rhetoric of power and duplicates its violence. Anna Batori points out that the doctor’s name, Mr. Bebe (which translates to “baby” in English), is reminiscent of “reproduction itself” and that he therefore “stands both for and against the authorities’ will at the same time; he rebels against and deploys sexuality simultaneously by performing abortions while raping women, thus running the risk of unwanted 22  In Lacanian terms, they act against the law of the father that inhabits the symbolic order, as I show in Adriana Cordali Gradea, “A Psychoanalytical Approach to Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” (2018). 23  Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, (Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 1. 24  Ibid., p. 2.

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pregnancies.”25 I agree with Batori that Mr. Bebe invades Otilia’s “last individual space she could control”26 (see also the psychoanalytical interpretation I have published elsewhere27). The women are twice violated, first by the intrusive law and secondly by the rapist doctor, both symbols of violent masculinity and patriarchy that perpetuate a cycle of violence against women. Therefore, Decree 770 is a character in the film. The disciplinarian, totalitarian law (circumscribed to the overall authority of the encompassing Communist state apparatus) is in this context the rhetorical figure, the paternal metaphor (and the voice of the Freudian father), while it is similarly the one that regulates, represses, and imposes behavior. By definition, the law is always normative and regulating. As the Freudian voice of the father, it operates under the reality principle, regulating desire and sexuality, as well as the ego that keeps the id under control. It is significant that the father figure is fragmented in the economy of the film: The unborn baby’s father is unknown and never mentioned, and the women’s fathers are never present or referred to. The state apparatus is paternalistic though only present through its symbols—The law and Mr. Bebe, the abortionist doctor, both representing oppressive masculine figures.28 On the other hand, it is significant and well known that Ceauşescu acted as the Father of the Nation through the cult of personality’s instruments: During his 25 years in power, the schools presented him as the father of all children, who were often required to sing patriotic songs to the country and its leader. As already shown in the first part of the book, all school children belonged to the Pioneer Youth Organization—an all-encompassing politicization that totalitarian regimes in general resorted to (cf. Hitler’s Youth in the Third Reich). Consequently, the fact that in 4,3,2 the baby’s biological father is never mentioned, or present, makes Ceauşescu’s dictatorial government the symbolic “father.” Moreover, the absence of the baby’s biological father from the film’s plot reinforces the government as the metaphorical “father” who wanted all women to be pregnant, a desire inherent in the legislation’s rhetoric. It 25  Anna Batori, “Power and acts of resistance in Cristian Mungiu’s 4  months, 3  weeks, 2 days.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 7, no. 2, (2016): 127–38, p. 132. 26  Ibid. 27  Adriana Cordali Gradea, (2018). 28  In a Lacanian psychoanalytical sense, the law—which belongs to the symbolic order— regulates desire and acts as the father. The symbolic function has traditionally identified the father with the figure of the law.

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is as if, when the female characters attempt violence against the law in seeking the abortion, the law responds with more violence by way of the doctor’s sexual assault: This is in fact the violent way to control the violence, as Esposito shows.29 Therefore, when the doctor sexually assaults both women, it seems that violence is performed on women in general, both the  pregnant and the nonpregnant, and it is of the law-preserving kind. Within this context, Otilia actively helping her friend to obtain the illegal abortion represents a rebellion against the father figure embodied by the authoritarian state and its laws. Resisting from the Negative Place When I conceptualized the negative space within the visual rhetoric of power (see Chap. 4 on visual rhetorical tropes), I identified it as the gap/ void/empty space around the propaganda materials where the opposition is forcefully banished but where resistance resides. As previously shown, David Spurr explains that colonialism (and I argue that Communism also) “must always reaffirm its value in the face of an engulfing nothingness,” which is a way of “validat[ing] the presence, that is, the symbolizing power” of a subject.30 In this sense, the totalitarian power attempts at occupying all the available space, be it public, private, or intimate. Mungiu’s film shows that resistance can happen through the female body, which is in fact raped in the film. Therefore, I argue that the women’s intimate space corresponds to the “negative space” in visual rhetorical analysis where resistance can take place and the political power reaches to invade. Similarly to propaganda’s colonization of society at all levels, the patriarchal totalitarian power penetrates the women’s intimate space twice: By means of the restrictive reproductive law and by the abortionist doctor’s rape. This double rape is significant in Esposito’s31 biopolitical approach in Immunitas, where he theorizes the concept of immunization (in connection with contamination and community). He applies it to Nazism, and I argue that it equally applies to the Communist regime by virtue of the totalitarian regimes’ quality that Agamben calls the “state of exception” or the state of crisis. To clarify, Esposito extends biopolitics to explain the  Esposito (2013), p. 29.  Ibid., p. 109. 31  Esposito (2013). 29 30

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function of the law as a form of immunization. Esposito claims that, instead of “being limited to the role performed by the law of immunizing the community from the violence that threatens it […] violence is incorporated into the apparatus it is intended to repress.”32 Similar to Esposito’s “law” described as not distinguishing between “the preservation and exclusion of life,”33 Decree 770 attempted to manage women’s reproduction with no regard to the law’s by-products: death by illegal abortion, abandoned children, overcrowded orphanages, and so on. In addition to its intention to control life, Decree 770, as an extension of the Communist propaganda, inoculated34 the population with the sovereign power’s ideological germ, equivalently to what Esposito calls a “contamination.”35 The law was part and parcel of the rhetoric of the Communist governmental paradigm, and the regime thus immunized the population against outside ideology, in affirming and self-affirming ways, just as hegemonic powers demarcate their territories. The state apparatus secured the circle drawn around itself, enforcing discipline by legislative means and by exerting biopolitics in a Foucauldian “massifying mode.” All this happened at the level of the body which, as Esposito posits, is “both the instrument and the terrain of [the] battle” where politics intervenes.36 In Mungiu’s film 4,3,2, pregnant Găbit ̦a becomes a body contaminated with the effects of the sovereign power’s biopolitics. Otilia is aware that Găbit ̦a’s contagion can affect any woman, including herself. Additionally, when Otilia submits to the doctor’s violation—and I say this without any attempt to minimize the horror and trauma of the rape37—she subjects her body to the propaganda’s intention to “immunize.” She consequently becomes the instrument/object the government requires her to be as she has been “inoculated.” Therefore, by submitting to the physical rape—since the regime had already violated the women through the law—the women receive a second  Ibid., pp. 9–10.  Ibid., p. 10. 34  Cf. inoculation theory proposed by social psychologist James McGuire for further interpretations. 35  While Esposito applies the concept of contamination to Nazism, I posit that it equally fits the Communist regime, by virtue of their shared totalitarian practice. 36  Esposito (2013), p. 113. 37  I am aware that the conflation of metaphorical and bodily immunization discussed here can be problematic in actual terms. However, I emphasize the metaphorical while using the bodily sense to help the argument of propaganda’s forcefulness. 32 33

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dose of immunization (which, interestingly sometimes does require two injections). In a way, if the ideological rape was the first dose, the second, physical rape mirrors the immunization previously received. The doctor uses it as a debasement or a negation in the same way that colonizers rhetorically construct “the horror of the Other.”38 As previously shown, David Spurr explains that colonialism (and I argue that Communism also) “must always reaffirm its value in the face of an engulfing nothingness,” which is a way of “validat[ing] the presence, that is, the symbolizing power” of a subject.39 In fact, Esposito clarifies that immunization “contains an element of the same substance it is intended to defend against.”40 However, the women turn this debasement into a negation of a negation which results in an affirmation. Esposito further explains that “life can be protected from what negates it only by means of a further negation.”41 This type of affirmation, resulted from submitting to violence, is a fitting response, inasmuch as affirmation cannot exist without negation, the same way as contrasts exist to emphasize each other. The female characters in Mungiu’s film 4,3,2 form a duo that can be analyzed in a few ways that all evidence the presence/absence dyad. As an entity, they best express the nature of solidarity: Resistance to totalitarian biopolitics requires solidarity among women even (or especially) when resistance cannot be overt or organized; and resistance can take place even when political circumstances affect them differently. Decree 770 addressed women as a group, indeed half of the country’s population while treating them through a single dimension: Their reproductive function. The dynamic between Găbit ̦a and Otilia (one pregnant and the other not pregnant) metonymically illustrates the larger situation of the two types of women acknowledged through the Decree: The law targets them both, even though Otilia is not pregnant and is arguably situated outside the law’s consequences, at least momentarily. They, however, act from within the assumption of sameness. Nonpregnant Otilia more actively fights for the abortion than the pregnant Găbit ̦a, as suggested by the director who films her mostly on the move (see the subsection on the film’s cinematic visuality). She is aware that as a woman she could be in Găbit ̦a’s situation, 38  David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 79. 39  Ibid., p. 109. 40  Esposito (2013), p. 21. 41  Ibid.

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and she tells her boyfriend that an unplanned pregnancy could happen to her too. Biopolitically, as subjects to the disciplinarian state apparatus, Găbit ̦a and Otilia are what Giorgio Agamben calls zoé and bios, respectively. To clarify, in classical Greek, zoé is “the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods),” while bios is “the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group.”42 In rapport to Decree 770, the definitions of bios and zoé similarly apply to Găbit ̦a and Otilia as metonymical representations of the country’s pregnant and not pregnant women, respectively. Zoé (also called bare life) equates to the biological being in its animal state, without civil or political rights. Instead, bios, which is also called qualified life, is the political being that can participate in the affairs of the polis (or society). In Mungiu’s film, Găbit ̦a is the equivalent of zoé by virtue of her pregnancy, which underscores her biological characteristic in the film. Otilia is bios because she is more politically active in her resistance to the oppressive law. In this film, Mungiu metonymically illustrates this larger dynamic as characters Găbit ̦a and Otilia represent the two types of women the rhetoric of power acknowledges through this decree. They live in a specific totalitarian state apparatus that resembles what Agamben calls the “state of exception”—a kind of liminal space of modern43 biopolitics. Moreover, the duality of the women in 4,3,2 illustrates that resistance to totalitarian biopolitics requires solidarity among women even (or especially) when resistance cannot be overt or organized. They prove that resistance can take place even when political circumstances affect them differently. Otilia, although not pregnant, more actively fights for the abortion, as elaborated in the subsection on the film’s cinematic visuality. Furthermore, according to Agamben, “bios and zoé, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction,”44 specifically, the state apparatus with oppressive totalitarian rules. Agamben states that, in modern politics,

 Agamben (1998), p. 1.  I say modern because the totalitarian states were largely based on modernist thought, which is considerably different than the postmodernity of the globalist model emerging since then. Among the extreme biopolitical practices of modernism are concentrated camps and gulags, which were the more deadly forms of intervention on the ontological that humanity ever experienced. 44  Ibid., 9. 42 43

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the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoé, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.45

The indistinction referenced here is that of the women vis-a-vis the law. A totalitarian regime is the state of exception in which political action—or what philosophers of biopolitics call sovereign power—oppresses at the expense of human life. In its vulnerable form, life suffers when the political impinges on it. In Communist Romania’s dictatorship, “right and fact” were subject to practices of exclusion and inclusion along lines of the new Communist ideology, as shown in the previous chapters. The two female characters in Mungiu’s film exist in the zone of indistinction (or the realm of bare life) of the totalitarian state apparatus where, despite their differences, they become indistinguishable in the face of the law. In fact, they act in solidarity. An extreme society is “the space that is opened when the state of exception becomes the rule.”46 Those excluded become invisible, silent, and indeed, nonexistent in the eyes of the public sphere. Otilia thus represents all the women the law excludes or renders invisible and silent, which adds to the many nuances of the film’s powerful rhetorical silence. As a woman who is not pregnant and who will not submit to the law’s requirement to accept the status of pregnancy as a must, Otilia is not the woman the law discusses, but she is aware that she is targeted her as the law’s potential object. In psychoanalytical terms, nonpregnant  Otilia is arguably situated outside the Lacanian symbolic order and instead takes the part of the Lacanian real, which the symbolic order can never fully contain. It is in the name of the Lacanian real that she subversively intervenes in the symbolic order, represented here by the specific ideology-­ ridden sociopolitical organization of the Communist regime. As with other dichotomies that apply to the pair Otilia/Găbit ̦a, the two characters stand for a particular divide that humans can embody simultaneously: “being a body” (“first-person perspective, dynamic embodiment”) versus “having a body” (“third-person perspective,” “static embodiment”).47 Whereas Otilia is the dynamic embodiment, Găbit ̦a is  Agamben (1998), p. 9.  Ibid., pp. xxii, 166, 168, 169. 47  Philosopher Hans Jonas, 1982, cited in Bernadette  Wegenstein, “Body.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed.  W.  J. T.  Mitchell and B.  N. Hansen, 19–34  (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 21. 45 46

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generally depicted as static, and her systematic failures at planning and organizing put additional pressure on Otilia. For instance, she fails to reserve the hotel room, at the last minute sends Otilia to meet the doctor, and cannot secure the money for the procedure. However, Găbit ̦a’s static aspect makes her more of a “third-person,” that is, the static person that is the object subjected to the gaze of others. In a subplot, Otilia fights with her boyfriend who cannot understand her need to help her pregnant friend,48 which further metonymically represents the breakdown of connection between men and women as social categories in the country. One of the most relevant aspects of Communist reality was that the population understood that propaganda lied and that one had to live life with a split personality. The two women in Mungiu’s film embody the split personality typical for individuals living under traumatic circumstances—a double consciousness characterizing oppressed populations. Therefore, the postcolonial concepts of doublespeak and doublethink49 (entertaining and performing two different ways of speaking and being) fittingly describe life in Communism as I experienced it: We lived in two different realities even when they contradicted each other. According to Katherine Verdery, a scholar who supports the comparisons between colonialism and Communism (confirmed to me by Bogdan Ştefanescu in personal communication), “social duplicity” existed in “the Romanian way of life: One developed a public self that praised and followed the party’s ways, and then at home one revealed one’s ‘real’ self, this self being very critical of what ‘they’ (in this they including the public self) were doing.”50 Furthermore, in The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel states that the compromised minds realize the way systems of power work and that people in a totalitarian regime “must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”51 Consequently, apart from the zoé/bios 48  For another discussion of the dinner scene, see Ioana Uricaru, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: The Corruption of Intimacy.” Film Quarterly, 61, no. 4 (2008): 12–17. 49  See Geraldine Moane, “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision. In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, edited by Kirby, P., Gibbons, L., and Cronin, M. (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 50  Cited in Florentina Andreescu, “The Changing Face of the Other in Romanian Films.” Nationalities Papers, 39, no. 1 (2011): 77–94, p. 83. 51  Vaclav  Havel, The Power of the Powerless (London and New  York: Routledge, 1985), p. 136.

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dichotomy, Găbit ̦a and Otilia’s dynamic can be understood through the split of the self or, conversely, the coming together of the Self and Other: One acts as the savior of the other which is a victim. Găbit ̦a Drăgut ̦’s passivity makes her a “victim” (of Decree 770, of the political power’s attempt to silence her, and so on), further hinted in her first name, a diminutive of Gabriela (which add to her an infantilized or childish quality) and in her last name, which means “pretty” (and thus reduces her to physical qualities). Furthermore, Găbit ̦a needs an ally to resist. Furthermore, as explained earlier, here the characters illustrate yet another split between “being a body” and “having a body,” where the former stands for “first-person perspective [and] coincides with dynamic embodiment [while] the latter, referencing the body from an external, third-person perspective, can be aligned with the static body,” as philosopher Hans Jonas states.52 This split is in fact intently and emphatically embodied by the two characters because in actuality “any bifurcation of humans and things, culture and nature, object and subject fails to acknowledge the ontological hybridity that constitutes reality,” as Laurie E. Gries aptly explains.53 Subsequently, the abortion is the final act of violence, closing the circle: The women establish themselves as a category that can make decisions, even though only at the tactical level in Michel de Certeau’s terms, unacknowledged by the patriarchal totalitarian state. Therefore, when women use the power within their bodies (biopower) to reverse the law’s effects, they use their strategic invisibility in agentic ways. In what follows, I will demonstrate that the women’s response to the “law” is an embodied rhetoric of resistance; it is embodied because of the restrictions on the verbal imposed by the rhetorics of power, and it is an agency because they use it to reach their goal.

Cinematic Visuality as Rhetoric in 4,3,2 In conceptualizing resistance in opposition to authority in totalitarianism, film can be instrumental in visualizing what otherwise may remain obscured. Mirzoeff’s words resound with more truth, especially in relation to totalitarian regimes: “The autonomy claimed by the right to look  Paraphrased in Wegenstein (2010), p. 21.  Laurie E. Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2015), p. 5. 52 53

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is thus opposed to by the authority of visuality. Visualizing is the production of visuality, meaning the making of the processes of ‘history’ perceptible to authority.”54 Some of the processes are visible, while others remain invisible, precisely by virtue of having previously been excluded. Mungiu’s film 4,3,2 lends itself to visual rhetorical interpretations, first in that it makes visible the embodied rhetoric of women faced with a totalitarian biopolitical legislation, and, second, in that the director’s cinematographic choices carry heavy rhetorical valences. Remembering that the rhetorics of power centered people’s bodies and used surveilling practices as a metaphorical gaze to modify people’s behaviors, the film illustrates Bernadette Wegenstein’s assertion that the “body mediates its meaning via the gaze of others at the same time as it mediates between the world and the construction of self.”55 In fact, rhetorics of resistance were born in the gaze and developed around it, even when no one could document how this happened. I argue that Mungiu’s film makes visible the Communist regime’s intrusive gaze, makes it intrinsic to the film, almost palpable through the dreadful atmosphere, at the same time as the film returns the patriarchal gaze from a safer time in post-Communism. Mungiu’s film ultimately adduces a cinematic visualization of the state’s violence through appropriately violent cinematic visuality (ciné-visuality for short), which he employs as a rhetorical device. First, the visual violence counterbalances the powerful strategic silence of the film, in the same fashion in which presence and absence emphasize each other in the regime’s abusive practices: In visual rhetorical terms, violence represents the political power and its propaganda, which are loud and overly present; silence is the absence and where resistance exists. In Communist Romania, women were rendered invisible and quiet unless they played the state’s prescribed roles (I remind of the visual tropes of the Communist Woman discussed in Chap. 4, such as those of the mother, worker, farmer, or scientist). The film’s acute and symbolic silence links to the regime’s exclusion of voices because it reminds of the place of absence where opposing voices had been banished. Thus, the two female characters in the film assert a presence from a place of rhetorical absence where the regime had banished them. Nonlinguistic, embodied resistance rhetorics are visualized cinematographically, in powerful ways. Mungiu is aware of the importance of the  Mirzoeff (2011), p. 3.  Wegenstein.

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viewer’s inspecting gaze into a reality of the past that the film portrays with neorealist hypervisuality. In what follows, I analyze the cinematography in light of the concepts I develop in my methodology that are specific to rhetorics of power and resistance in Communist Romania: The role of the rhetorical silence as a response to exclusion practices and as a counterpoint to violence; the visualization of the totalitarian biopolitics and its epistemic violence; the metaphorical repudiation and expulsion of the rhetoric of power through the abortion. These visual rhetorical analyses focus on a few scenes that I read through the dyad presence/absence vis-à-vis resistance. First, the boyfriend’s mother’s birthday scene offers conversations between people of various generations and social statuses. Seen as a metonymical replication of larger public totalitarian rhetorics, it shows Otilia as excluded from the conversation: She finds no “proper locus”56 for her story.57 Then, the abortion scene constitutes a powerful visual intervention in the illustration of the concept of visual epistemic violence. The very last scene of the film contains further visual tropes that conclude with references to the gaze and the all-forgiving silence. Visualizing the Absence and the Epistemic Violence Cinematography bears rhetorical importance in any film. Mungiu’s cinematographic style is close to a documentary in this film because of the handheld camera technique he largely relies on. In How to Read a Film, James Monaco points out that filming choices affect “the relationship between the subject and the camera (and therefore the viewer),” which is why “camera movement has great significance as a determinant of the meaning of film.”58 At the same time, documentaries are more than objective incursions into realty by means of film. Mungiu’s film is an art film, and thus it blends the fictional character of a feature film with the impression of a documentary style to make one believe that his film offers a veridical glimpse into the historical period in question. Additionally, because the film is concerned with issues of the individuals’ intimate space, 56  See Certeau’s (2010) discussion about tactics that do not have a “proper locus” within, and in the face of larger strategies that are often institutionalized. 57  For a discursive analysis of this scene, see Gradea (2016). 58  James Monaco, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond. Fourth edition (New Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 108.

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the impromptu modality further makes the viewer the accomplice looker into a forbidden reality. As shown in Hesford and Brueggemann, while notions of neutrality and objectivity are commonly associated with the genre, documentary images do not simply portray facts. Instead, documentary film and photography create particular stories and capture particular viewpoints to the exclusion of others. Documentary forms of representation are therefore rhetorical, in the sense that they are laden with particular gazes, purposes, and perspectives, including gazes of the filmmaker or photographer and the subjects within the image.59

Director Mungiu’s filming and editing methods connect to underlying rhetorical choices. For instance, both the static scenes, set as mise-en-scène frames, and those filmed on the move remind of the French New Wave style of the early 1960s which was “noted for the creation of a new vocabulary of hand-held camera movements.”60 In the style of the “cinéma-­ vérité documentary,”61 a seemingly handheld camera follows Otilia through her wanderings, which renders the viewer as the apparent witness to an improvised, illicit, or impromptu activity. In such scenes, she walks fast, when she hurries through the dorm corridors at the beginning of the film, or at night, on her way to dispose of the fetus. When on the move, apart from replicating the title’s urgency (in the 4,3,2 countdown), I posit that Otilia actively attempts to avoid the totalitarian gaze, which people felt as omnipresent and controlling, indeed “omniscient.” As Anna Batori calls it a “metaphor of total power [that] prevails over [Otilia], exposing her as endangered and vulnerable in the city-scapes.”62 Otilia proves she is aware of and relentlessly resists the totalitarian gaze and the regime’s surveillance. Absence is most strikingly represented by the film’s silence. Rhetorically, the most relevant scene to issues surrounding the interplay of rhetorics in 4,3,2 is that of the “family” dinner that Otilia unwillingly attends. Her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday party takes place in the parents’ apartment in one of the ubiquitous architectural edifices of the Communist

 Hesford and Brueggemann (2007), p. 476.  Monaco, p. 109. 61  Ibid. 62  Batori, p. 131. 59 60

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infrastructure of brutalist apartment blocks.63 The director uses the technique of the static camera in a mise-en-scène frame that further confers the film a note of realism by its similitude to a proper theatrical stage; thus, it is as if behind the lens sits the viewer’s eye watching the action unfold. Center stage, Otilia and her boyfriend are significantly silent. Representing the younger generation, they appear largely ignored by the speakers, who are situated outside the frame and should be understood as the new “socialist elite.”64 Otilia feels as if she is “Othered” because the dialog “models the country’s authoritarian rhetoric patterns, that is, it focuses on itself and excludes topics of no interest to its own agenda. This is not unlike the situation of the woman discussed by Spivak in her article, Can the Subaltern Speak?65 Similarly to what Spivak explains, Otilia is not listened to, as evidenced by the film’s overwhelming rhetorical silence66 that emphasizes the metaphorical sociopolitical and, most importantly, rhetorical exile. Silence is symbolic in multiple ways and remains the only possibility of expression faced with the loud, self-affirming rhetorics of power. The film’s lack of a soundtrack is equally rhetorical, in that it invites the audience to fill the aural void with thoughts about the action, at the same time as it shifts the focus to the visual. The “silence versus spoken word” dichotomy is then reinforced again at the end of the film, after the abortion takes place and the fetus is disposed of, when Otilia says: “We’re never going to talk about this, OK?” Silence is where the deep, unutterable meanings are banished and where, through the film’s visual rhetoric, this absence could be seen rather than heard. The silence, however, is the place where all the senses collapse. The lack of sound equates to the physical absence. Furthermore, the silence provides a counterpoint to the film’s violence especially present in the sexual assault, the abortion, and the visualization of the aborted fetus. I argue in what follows that the fetus both materializes and makes visible the regime’s totalitarian biopolitical dimension itself. In the next section, I will

63  The scene is at the heart of my analysis in the book chapter “Communist Authoritarian Discourses and Practices in Romanian New Wave Cinema” (Gradea 2016). 64  Batori. 65   Adriana Cordali Gradea,  “Communist Authoritarian Discourses and Practices in Romanian New Wave Cinema.” In Commanding Words: Essays on the Discursive Constructions, Manifestations, and Subversions of Authority, edited by Lynda Chouiten (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,  2016), p. 114. 66  This has been discussed at length by authors; see, e.g., Palmer-Mehta and Haliliuc.

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elaborate on the metaphoric and visual significances of the abortion scene, one of the most shocking imagery that is meant to shake the viewers. Counterpoint to the film’s silence is the employment of violence. First, there is the violence in the rape, the verbal abuse, and the cold, matter-of-­ fact disposal of the fetus. From a visual rhetorical perspective, the scene of the aborted fetus is the full-frontal, visual confrontation with embodied rhetoric. It constitutes a kind of epistemic violence that emulates the regime’s violence on the population. The abortion can be interpreted in a few ways. As already stated above, in light of Esposito’s contamination/ immunization theory of biopolitics,67 the fetus is an infecting germ—the carrier of the state’s ideological “disease.” In helping with the abortion, Otilia acts as the antibody in the process of contamination with the regime’s ideology, and as such, she goes against the infecting germ. This dichotomy also connects to immunization’s constitutive binarism (life/ death, growth/decay) that makes “the body the liminal zone where the immunitary intention of politics is carried out” because, as Esposito explains, “the body is both the instrument and terrain of this battle.”68 In the end, the two women emerge cleansed when Găbit ̦a expels the germ of the infestation representing the result of the totalitarian biopolitical action over her (the disease/evil/germ of the first immunization). Therefore, Otilia has seemingly immunized herself against the same. These women live in a specific totalitarian state apparatus that resembles what Agamben calls the “state of exception”. A totalitarian regime is the state of exception in which political action oppresses at the expense of human life. I remind that Juan Linz called Ceaușescu’s regime “sultanistic,”69 which makes it closer to a “sovereign regime” than other countries in the region had. In its vulnerable form, life suffers when the political impinges on it. Communist Romania’s political power had long engaged in practices of exclusion and inclusion along lines of the new Communist ideology (episteme), as shown in the previous chapters. As already shown, Agamben defines an extreme society as “the space that is opened when the state of exception becomes the rule.”70 Those excluded become invisible, silent, and indeed, nonexistent. They exist in the zone of  Esposito (2013).  Ibid., p. 113. 69  Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, CO and London, UK: Rienner, 2000), pp. 151–52. 70  Ibid., pp. xxii, 166, 168–169. 67 68

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indistinction (or the realm of bare life, which is important for the analysis of the abortion) of the totalitarian state apparatus, where despite their differences, they become indistinguishable in the face of the law. Indeed, Otilia shifts the burden of the killable homo sacer from Găbit ̦a, and in fact from all the women, to the fetus within a paradigm that resembles the “us versus them” mindset at the core of totalitarian regimes. Resorting to violence, Otilia engages in a practice that is in line with that of the regime’s. In biopolitical terms, the women in 4,3,2 deem the fetus as homo sacer or killable. Agamben explains that it is historically and juridical permissible to kill homo sacer in the state of exception, without legal consequences or punishment. Christopher Breu explains, in relation to biopolitical practices, that “in the name of avoiding risk and securing immunity for one managed or governed population, another population is rendered either disposable or killable.”71 Visually, the violent image of the fetus hints at a form of the abject. As the object of the totalitarian biopolitical law, Găbit ̦a becomes contaminated by way of the fetus and has subsequently been inhabited by the rhetoric of power’s ideology as if it were the abject. If the pregnancy is the result of the authoritarian state’s intrusive law that places Găbit ̦a’s body at the center of its rhetoric, Găbit ̦a embodies it. Julia Kristeva defines abjection as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”72 While Găbit ̦a may be ambivalent in her feelings about the abortion because of her body’s colonization, Otilia sees the fetus as the abject thusly defined since it marks the difference—indeed, the boundary—between the two women, after one of them has fallen victim to the violence and rhetoric of the sovereign law. Because “the abject has only one quality of the object— that of being opposed to I,”73 it emphasizes these women’s subject/ object divide, which the law also comported on them. According to Kristeva, “abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.”74 The aborted fetus is also that which had set the two women as separate (object/subject, inside/outside, 71  Christopher Breu, Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 53. 72  Kristeva, Julia, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S.  Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. 73  Ibid., 1. 74  Ibid., 10.

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self/other, zoé/bios), and again, through its expulsion, that which had separated is eliminated. Abjection had been inferred throughout the film, but the dead fetus ciné-visualizes it. This visual violence is an aggression intended for the viewer, who should understand the biopolitical dimension of totalitarianism and should make the connection between the regime and the abject. The film thus indeed has an “insistence of the material” quality, to use Christopher Breu’s expression in his book on biopolitics.75 First, it brings up the Lacanian real, which resides in the materiality of the women’s bodies and that of the fetus. Secondly, at a larger scale, this insistence hints to the historic-materialism specific to the Communist regime and the Marxist ideology itself, whose rhetorics either excluded or intentionally and declaratively renounced idealisms, religions, or nonmaterialist world views. This insistence on the material dimension is evidenced when Otilia breaks the promise Găbit ̦a exhorts of her in the aftermath of the abortion, that is, to “bury it,” and when she instead dumps the fetus in the trash chute of a Communist apartment building. The reference to a Christian burial at this point of the film reminds of the regime’s official atheistic stance, which renders irrelevant any moral debate in this context, in a film that keeps such discussions at bay. At the same time, such a reference functions to intentionally underscore the fetus’s materiality, that is, its lack of any spiritual significance, because “the corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.”76 In a final analysis, in their embodied rhetoric in response to totalitarian biopolitics, Găbit ̦a and Otilia use their own bodies (i.e., biopower) as a tactic of resistance against the system’s biopolitical strategy. Our understanding of the polis, however, informs how we read the zoé/bios dichotomy in the film. If we conceive of the polis to be the Communist state, pregnant Găbit ̦a will be bios, as she is the one who participates in the overall totalitarian project and obeys its laws. By intervening against the pregnancy, thus indirectly against the state, Otilia is construed as zoé, or the one who refuses to participate in the totalitarian polis. Such an interpretation, however, disregards that the marks of zoé (or bare life)—the biological, the libidinal, and the animal—more fittingly apply to Găbit ̦a, who is marked as such by her pregnant body. The state of exception (here, the Communist regime) paradoxically confers the qualities of bios (or  See Breu.  Kristeva, p. 4.

75 76

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qualified life, or political animal) to Găbit ̦a, who has been “colonized” after all, while at the same time addressing her physical body in terms of zoé (or bare life) by means of the antiabortion law. This is a reversal of qualifications for participating in the affairs of the polis, but it may be exactly what the totalitarian state is about: In order to qualify as a participant in the Communist polis, one should be reduced to the animal (bare life) state. This, according to Agamben, also happens in thanatopolitics, where zoé takes preponderance over bios.77 The politicization of women is thus underscored in ways best described by Agamben, who posits that in modern politics there is an inclusive exclusion of zoé from political life, “almost as if politics were the place in which life had to transform itself into good and in which what had to be politicized were always already bare life.”78 It “is not so much the inclusion of zoé in the polis […] nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power,” but that, instead, “the state of exception actually constitutes, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested.”79 On the other hand, in a different conception of the polis, the film depicts a negative dimension of the Communist times in which the polis is not equated with totalitarianism, but with democracy—to which Romania aspired and indeed adhered after the fall of Communism. As such, the “state of exception” of the Communist state is situated from the start outside the polis represented by the democratic system. By becoming pregnant, Găbit ̦a has submitted to Decree 770 as the extension of the totalitarian state and is thus better construed as zoé (bare life), marked as she is and  almost exclusively defined by biology in this respect. I argue that, in the words of Christopher Breu  in his discussion of biopolitics, Găbit ̦a has “been put under the sign of the subject who is object.”80 Consequently, Otilia is bios (qualified life) when she takes it upon herself to rise from the position of zoé, where the governmental rhetoric wants her, and goes against the governmental natalist legislation. Otilia actively and determinately draws Găbit ̦a out of her condition of zoé—where the regime wants all women to reside—and returns her to the status of “qualified life.” They do this by cleansing Găbit ̦a’s body from the marks of zoé  Agamben (1998), p. xxii.  Ibid. 79  Ibid., p. 9. 80  Breu, p. 63. 77 78

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and of what Agamben theorizes as homo sacer, who can historically and juridically be killed without legal consequences. Moreover, since she acts against the regime, Otilia asserts herself (and thus all the Romanian women with whom she is in solidarity) as a sociopolitical and sexual force previously disregarded by Decree 770’s rhetoric that wanted all women to be reduced to their biological (reproductive) quality, to zoé. Instead, Otilia courageously rises to the level of a qualified, equal participant in matters of the polis. Moreover, they have overcome their object status and have now asserted themselves as subjects in the polis. The women overcome the reduction to zoé in order to become bios, or qualified life, and they do it by declaring the fetus killable (homo sacer). Furthermore, Agamben concludes that zoé sometimes becomes what is called homo sacer (translated as the “sacred man”), someone who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (emphasis in the original).81 In other words, it is someone who is outside of both human and divine law and can be killed without repercussions (Agamben here refers to thanatopolitics, or the politics of death, specific to Nazism, where this murder was “permitted”). Găbit ̦a exhibits this nexus between zoé and homo sacer because she identifies with the fetus she carries, and whom the women deem as killable (or the biopolitical equivalent of homo sacer). In so doing, they act to dissociate Găbit ̦a from the effects of the oppressive “law” in the ultimate solution as resistance.

Conclusion Resistance to Communism was not visible or knowable to the West at the time, and thus, the question about the lack of overt opposition to the regime persisted in people’s minds. Slavoj Zizek explains resistance through what he calls “the One” in the context of the Nazi camps when he states that the majority of people in the camp “broke down and regressed to an almost-animal ‘egotism,’ focusing their efforts on sheer survival, even managing to do things which in the normal world are considered ‘unethical’ (stealing food or shoes from a neighbor) in order to survive.”82 However, while this dehumanization succeeded, Zizek emphasizes the presence of “the One,” or that particular

 Ibid., 8.  Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 75. 81 82

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individual who did not break down—who in the midst of the unbearable conditions which reduced all others to the egotistic struggle for sheer survival, miraculously maintained and radiated an “irrational” generosity and dignity: in Lacanian terms, we are dealing here with the function of Y’a de l’Un: even here, there was the One who served as the support of the minimal solidarity that defines the social link proper as opposed to collaboration within the frame of the pure strategy of survival.83

Following Zizek’s analysis, Otilia  in 4,3,2 is therefore “the One” who, altruistically and in solidarity, maintains the dignity of both, opposing, subverting, and resisting the regime’s attempt at reducing all women to zoé—or to their reproductive, libidinal, and biological dimensions. Otilia has the quality of bios or qualified life in the democratic conception. Critics of Ceauşescu’s dictatorial regime often underscored people’s reduction to what Zizek describes as egotism and focus on sheer survival. Like Zizek’s character of “the One,” Otilia’s mere presence provides the necessary support in the face of this oppression. In fact, Otilia displays qualities quite opposite to what Zizek calls “almost-animal ‘egotism’”: Although not pregnant, and thus not in need of solutions for herself, she altruistically fights for another, embodying the “excess of the inexplicable miracle of solidarity [that] has to be embodied in a One.” Zizek shows that “it was not so much what this One actually did for the others that mattered but, rather, his [sic] very presence among them (what enabled the others to survive was the awareness that even if they were reduced to survival-­ machines for most of the time, there was the One who maintained human dignity).”84 On account of such commonalities between Communism and Nazism, the situation of many people in Communist Romania is comparable to the category that Zizek characterizes as having regressed to “almost-animal ‘egotism,’ focusing their efforts on sheer survival,” doing “unethical” things. The only option allowed the Romanian woman by the Communist government was to submit to the state natalist policies and consequently accept her prescribed role, giving birth to an unwanted child for whom no possibility of adoption existed, in a society that was traditional enough to stigmatize and outcast such a mother. Going forward with the pregnancy would ruin her life. In order to resolve this situation, Găbit ̦a needed an  Ibid.  Ibid.

83 84

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ally. Otilia represents here the One mentioned by Zizek, who by mere presence could resist the dominant narrative and offer an alternative discourse, albeit embodied. These two characters together make up the complex yet ambivalent woman of Romania’s late-Communist regime. Although the human dignity as described by Zizek85 is paradoxically maintained in Mungiu’s film by executing an abortion—in fact, and arguably, a killing—the women eventually assert themselves as valuable political partners by expelling the symbol of the regime’s totalitarian biopolitical intervention on the women’s body. By using biopower, that is, the power of their own bodies, Otilia and Găbit ̦a subvert the well-established body-­ regulating legislation of an oppressive totalitarian regime. Only by expelling the fetus are they cleansed. The women resort to resistance tactics to avoid the dominant, hegemonic ideology which colonized Găbit ̦a’s body.86 However, they use violence the same way as the state apparatus has used it on them. Finally, the violence is further present when the abject erupts on the screen in its materiality. In the visual rhetorical economy of the film, the scene of the aborted fetus in Mungiu’s 4,3,2 is both the abject and the jouissance. The director intently allows our gaze to linger on it for what seems like an interminable stretch of time (15 seconds, in fact). Through this visual violence that the film insists upon, we experience a catharsis, a sense of liberation; it is as if this abortion makes visible all the problems that had previously troubled the two women and which are now represented as material, tangible, and, most importantly, external to their bodies. Their “otherness,” objectification, and abjectification are now materialized outside the body, leaving the women the opposite of all that—purified and no longer contaminated or colonized by the regime. In this bearing resides the film’s sublime or cathartic quality. All the violence in the film references the regime’s political violence, which was always epistemological in that it was intrinsically linked to ideological regime change and then the law-preserving by persecution. Because those who resisted similarly resorted to violence to reverse the regime’s effects, I call the violent response also an epistemic violence and the film’s disruption a visual epistemic violence: Mungiu employs a visual rhetorical cinematography to make visible this aspect of the Communist reality.  Zizek, 75.  See my interpretation of the fetus as a representative of the communist totalitarian discourse that needs to be expelled from the woman’s body (Gradea, 2016, p. 110). 85 86

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References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Kevin Attell, 2005. Andreescu, Florentina. “The Changing Face of the Other in Romanian Films.” Nationalities Papers, 39, no. 1 (2011): 77–94. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. In Material Feminisms, edited by S.  Alaimo and S. Hekman, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. Batori, Anna. “Power and Acts of Resistance in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 7, no. 2 (2016): 127–138. Blaier, Andrei. Ilustrate cu flori de câmp. (Postcards with Wild Flowers) Romania: Casa de Filme Trei, 1975. 1 hr, 31 min. Breu, Christopher. Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Bucur, Maria. “AHR Forum: An Archipelago of Stories: Gender History in Eastern Europe.” American Historical Review, 113, no. 5 (2008): 1375–1389. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 1997. Gradea, Adriana Cordali. “Communist Authoritarian Discourses and Practices in Romanian New Wave Cinema.” In Commanding Words: Essays on the Discursive Constructions, Manifestations, and Subversions of Authority, edited by Lynda Chouiten. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Gradea, Adriana Cordali. “A Psychoanalytical Approach to Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” Journal of European Studies, 48, no. 3–4 (2018): 295–307.

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Gries, Laurie E. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2015. Haliliuc, Alina. “Who Is a Victim of Communism? Gender and Public Memory in the Sighet Museum, Romania.” Aspasia. The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, 7, (2013): 108–31. Havel, Vaclav. The Power of the Powerless, London and New York: Routledge, 1985. Hesford, Wendy S. and Brenda Jo Brueggemann. Rhetorical Visions: Reading and Writing in a Visual Culture. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Linz, Juan J. Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder, CO and London, UK: Rienner, 2000. Meadows, Donella. “Ceaușescu’s Longest-Lasting Legacy: The Cohort of ‘67.” In The Donella Meadows Archive: Voice of a Global Citizen. Sustainability Institute, 1990. Retrieved from http://www.donellameadows.org/archives/ ceausescus-­longest-­lasting-­legacy-­the-­cohort-­of-­67/ (accessed November 20, 2022) Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Moane, Geraldine. “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision.” In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, edited by Kirby, P., Gibbons, L., and Cronin, M.  London: Pluto Press, 2002. Monaco, James. How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond. Fourth edition. New Oxford University Press, 2009. Mungiu, Cristian. 4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile. (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) Romania: IFC Films, 2007. 1 hr, 53 min. Palmer-Mehta, Valery and Alina Haliliuc. “The Performance of Silence in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.” Text and Performance Quarterly, 31, no. 2 (2011): 111–29. Palterinieri, Luca. “Italian Theory and Feminist Materialism: A Reappraisal.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 135–47. Spivak, Gayatri. C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L. London, UK: Macmillan, 1988. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Uricaru, Ioana. “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: The Corruption of Intimacy.” Film Quarterly, 61, no. 4 (2008): 12–7.

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CHAPTER 7

Back to the Future?

The title1 of this concluding chapter hints at history’s nonlinearity. In Roberto Esposito’s words, history is “always in crisis,” lacking the “linear, progressive trend that Enlightenment and romantic philosophies of history would like it to [have]; it is disjointed, consisting of leaps forward and steps backward.”2 This thought, while not new, highlights the urgency in learning the necessary lessons in the aftermath of failed regimes. The Communist past should be examined rigorously and systematically so that we can learn from it. It is our duty as rhetoricians to demystify it, especially those of us who have lived through it. At the same time, we must acknowledge that current Eastern European societies are still affected by their past in specific ways. Post-Communism brought about what Borcila calls the “spectral dynamics between the interlocking gazes of East and West,”3 and Slavoj Zizek points out that “in Eastern Europe, the West seeks for its own lost origins, its own lost original experience of ‘democratic invention’” while “the real object of fascination [is] the supposedly naïve gaze by which 1  I am indebted to friend and scholar Noemi Marin for suggesting the title of this chapter as it invokes the dangers of repeating the past at the same time as it links to the previous chapter’s topic involving film analysis. 2  Roberto Esposito, “Unfinished Italy,” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 128–134. 3  Andaluna Borcila, American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, And Post-Cold War Narratives (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), p. 2.

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Eastern Europe stares back at the West, fascinated by its democracy.”4 Since then, in the decades after the historic 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent demise of the Cold War, post-Communist (or post-­ Socialist) studies have emerged. Indeed, Eastern Europe has been changing—politically, economically, and socially. However, Eastern European societies have been expected to burn through stages of economic and political development and quickly align to the West as if the decades since WWII and the Communist period had never happened. Consequences of the fact that Eastern Europe skipped stages throughout the twentieth century are numerous. The last decades of hastened transformations have not quenched new and old debates concerning the Communist period. Old discourses have persisted because, like history, they are always in flux, and together with social inertia, they have slowed down the transition process. We need to acknowledge what Andaluna Borcila calls the “traumatic and deforming impact of [C]ommunism on Romania.”5 Perhaps unbeknownst to many of us, the Romanian Communist regime perpetuated and inscribed in us totalitarian dualistic attitudes through propaganda. The state apparatus blended totalitarian practices with Socialist ideology, which resulted in rhetorical, political, cultural, social, and ideological entanglements that require further unpacking efforts. Certain entanglements are veritable Gordian knots that I would be remiss not to mention. Legacies of totalitarian thought pattern have affected the understanding of East–West and Left–Right binaries: Ideological perplexities about issues concerning East versus West; definitions of the political Left and Right (and their extremes, Communism and Nazism); an intensification of political emotion; a distrust of authority and its narratives; a paradoxical obsession with politics while at the same time rejecting the political class and political involvement; black-and-white thought patterns and a need for clear-cut solutions; an unapologetic conflation between Conservatism and Fascism; and various kinds of nostalgia for Communism. It is time to deconstruct the anger, violence, and ideologies, and to clear the debris of this traumatic experience of transformation. Visual and material objects that are interlinked with the Communist past still exist. What has happened to propaganda materials in the decades since the fall of Communism? How do people engage with the visual signs

4 5

 Ibid.  Borcila, p. 185 (emphasis in the original).

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of that period?6 Apart from a ban on Communist symbols, the solutions found for reusing the Communist propaganda materials reflect people’s attitudes: From nostalgia, to poking fun, to the commercialization of the sentiment for profit. According to historian Theodora Dragostinova, these transformations show the “seeming randomness of how the monuments have been dealt with across the former ‘Soviet bloc’: some blown up or knocked down, others shunted off to museums, and still others left standing and re-purposed for today’s political and cultural needs.”7 In most of the countries in the region, such statues have been removed from the public space altogether. Hungary, for example, has banished statues from the Communist era to a specifically designed park, Memento Park in Budapest. There, statues are confined to a strict perimeter, away from the more accessible public space so that only people who intentionally seek such symbols would go to see them. In another manner of dealing with monuments, the statuary group of Soviet Army soldiers in Sofia, Bulgaria, was repainted in American pop culture figures in 2011, which was a remarkable statement in itself.8 Additionally, people who have lived in totalitarian regimes are more conflicted, cannot easily reconcile with the past, are trying to forget, or engage in nostalgia. Communist tours and bars throughout Central and Eastern Europe feature propaganda materials to attract tourists. At the other end of the spectrum is an entire subculture of nostalgia in Russia and “Ostalgie” (a coinage of “East” plus “nostalgia”) in Germany, whose connotations range from extreme nationalism to tongue-in-cheek irony. Some people may forget or even idealize the past. For example, writer Slavenka Drakulic, who grew up in Yugoslavia, observes that, in the last decades, Russia has perpetuated a “mass ‘Soviet nostalgia’ industry that pictures the USSR as the lost ‘golden age’” and which has caused the new generations 6  A combination of conspiratorial thinking and the misunderstanding of the Romanian Revolution’s ideals manifested during the events of January 6, 2021, at the Washington D.C.  Capitol. The Holed Flag of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 fluttered during the popular insurrection of January 6, 2021, at the Capitol building in Washington D.C., to the utter surprise of Romanian Americans like myself. It was allegedly taken there by a Romanian American. 7  See Theodora Dragostinova’s article of November 2014, titled “Empty Fountains: Communist-Era Monuments Revisited” that answers the question: “What is the afterlife of an old Communist Statue?” available at https://brewminate.com/empty-fountains-communist-era-monuments-r evisited/?fbclid=IwAR3Gw30VHpqVUtuM0d-imw XTFMNP40MKPZ_AR3A_KYBHLLm3qCQijZegndo. 8  Ibid., n.p.

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to misunderstand many images from the Communist period. Idealizations of the past are in the tradition of the countries in the area. While it is a genuine  topic of interest for many researchers, nostalgia takes different forms across the region and is more understandable in Russia given that the Communist Revolution began there. This aspect, however, is significant in that it differentiates Russia from the post/Communist spaces of Central-Eastern Europe, proving once again that revisiting the Communist period through various lenses is still necessary. Symbols of the past run the risk of becoming empty vessels. When we forget about their meaning, we in fact obliterate it. However, in our enthusiasm to erase the Communist past and its visual symbols from our memory, we should not neglect teaching the youth. In her 2016 book, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Drakulic warns about this mistake: It is not that I mind the demolition of the [Berlin] Wall—I am delighted about that—but the way it was done, the obvious haste with which this tumor was removed not only from the face of the city, but from the memory of the people, too, acting as if it is really possible to unite instantly, to become one Berlin, one nation, as if the past, the division of that nation, doesn’t count at all anymore and should be instantly forgotten. […] I thought, the erasing of memory begins right here, right on this spot near the Potsdamer Platz, right when Goering is reduced to a very famous person, and the Wall to tiny bits of painted concrete selling for 5 Deutschmarks, when the whole history of this nation is reduced to souvenirs and fame. What I feared is already here: incoherent bits and pieces of the past that don’t make sense anymore. That, in fact, are not important. But the sooner we forget it, the more we’ll have to fear.9

Instead of pretending Communism never happened  just because that period is over, we need to know and discuss more about it. The passing of memory to generations born in post-Communism is an important part of rebuilding and the decommunization efforts, the latter meaning moving away from Communism (i.e., from a centralized economy and a totalitarian mindset) and toward a multi-party system and a democratic mentality. Drakulic discusses the failure to pass of memory in her subsequent 2021 book, Café Europa Revisited,10 she stresses the difficulty of discerning the  Slavenka Drakulic, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York: Harper Collins, 2016), p. 40. 10  See Chap. 3, where I present Oksana Zabuzhko’s analysis of this fact. 9

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good from the bad in post-totalitarian times if we continue to “foster an inherited totalitarian politics and mind-set”; insisting on the need to teach the younger generation about “how dreary the past was” lest they will have to rediscover how to fight for freedom themselves, she references the Ukrainian Maidan Revolution of 2014, stating that, “[i]n a newly democratized Ukraine, the recent past is still delicate ground upon which to walk.”11 This, in fact, holds equally true for other countries in the former Communist Bloc. When the Romanian 1989 Revolution broke, new discourses invaded the realm of what Noemi Marin calls the rhetorical “fortress” created by Ceauşescu.12 A flood of hybrid narratives inundated the public space in ways that both preserved features of the old and clashed with newly found discourses, and society was not ready for a cacophony of voices after decades of a single “Truth.” In post-Communism, given the propaganda’s former ubiquity, Communist rhetorical detritus continued to linger in so-­ called “discursive crossings”13 or a hybridity of discourses that further complicated the already troubled sociopolitical life. In general, discourses compete to occupy the public or private spaces in a kind of dialectic engendered by political power and fueled by propagandistic means. Jean-­ Francois Lyotard’s concepts of the dissolution of and “incredulity toward” what he calls master-narratives14 in postmodernity perfectly illustrate post-­ Communism in Eastern Europe. The postmodern reality with its “invention of other realities”15 created further problems in post-Communism. Nevertheless, dissatisfaction with Communism’s modernist master-­ narratives caused rhetorics of resistance to brew under the surface already during the Communist regime, although in a more subdued manner. Totalitarian regimes distort the social dialog by virtue of the total control the political establishment holds over the public sphere and the power to corrupt public rhetoric. Although an artificial landmark, because nothing happens overnight, the 1989 Revolution can be seen as the point of  Slavenka Drakulic, Café Europa Revisited (New York: Penguin Books, 2021), p. 36.  See Noemi Marin, “Totalitarian Discourse and Ceauşescu’s Loss of Words: Memorializing Rhetoric in 1989 Romania.” In The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History, ed. Vladimir Tismăneanu and B. C. Iacob (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2012). 13  Ibid, S171. 14  Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1979), p. xxiv. 15  Ibid., pp. 79, 77. 11 12

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distinction between modernist and postmodernist rhetorics in Romania based on the death of master-narratives. However, the chronic, historical gap16 between that region and the West had existed before, and Romania’s Communist period merely froze the country’s development into a prearranged ideological project. Marcel Cornis-Pope explains that the line demarcating postmodernism from modernism is a lot “fuzzier in the east-­ central European area” because of the different “socio-cultural conditions in this part of Europe, before and after 1989,” given that some of these countries lacked a “developed consumer society and information industry that could support the emergence of postmodernity.”17 However, in the subsequent years of decommunization, the struggle for change led to sentiments of disappointment in democratic and capitalist reforms, at the same time as the rhetorics in the public space also became heterogeneous in their blending of the old and the new. Throughout this book, I show how secondary narratives find ways around the Communist master-narrative, despite the absence of a proper locus. I discuss how the absence can assert its presence when it is assumed as nonexistent. Furthermore, I call this alternation to power of various rhetorics or discourses the dialectic of discourses, which ebbs and flows similarly to the circulation of ideas, determined as it is by social, political, and historical conditions. By virtue of this dialectic, what sociopolitical forces in power intently make invisible today, by deliberate intervention, can become visible tomorrow as a result of social change. The dynamic of rhetoric changes together with what Foucault calls the “episteme” extant within each regime or historical period, namely, the underlying epistemological set of discursive assumptions. Therefore, we should continue to focus on the way people relate to power structures especially after they are dismantled. The “decommunization” process that followed the events of 1989, however, is remarkably similar to decolonization; practices and behaviors learned during oppressive 16  Cf. Daniel Chirot (Ed.), The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1991), 3: “Eastern Europe was in some sense economically backward long before it was absorbed into the broader Western world market. This backwardness had roots in the very distant past, not in any distortions imposed on Eastern Europe in the last few centuries.” 17  Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Local and Global Frames in Recent Eastern European Literature: Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and Postcoloniality.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48, no. 2 (2012): 143–54, p. 145.

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regimes can be perpetuated through different historical times and take time to change. Populations emerging from colonialism provide a most relevant illustration in this sense. For example, Geraldine Moane identifies in the Irish population certain “cultural pathologies” (denial and doublethink, social irresponsibility, distortion of sexuality, alcohol, and drug consumption) and “cultural strengths” (creativity and imagination, spirituality, and solidarity and support).18 These are all patterns that easily apply to postCommunist societies. Thus, scholars should consider both the totalitarian dimension in extremes of the Right and the Left and the resemblances between the Second World and post/colonial spaces (see Chap. 4). The comparison with Nazism’s totalitarian aspect has a longer tradition,19 while the analogy with post/colonialism is a more recent undertaking. Both call for a more critical engagement with the knowledge/power structures, their nexus with visual rhetoric, and the effect of oppression in post/Communist situations. Especially in relation to sociopolitical systems of oppression, concepts borrowed from postcolonial theory such as the imperial gaze, post/ colonial gaze, hybridity, doublespeak, subaltern, and epistemic violence, to name a few, are productive to analyses of life in post/Communist regimes, as Chaps. 3 and 6 have demonstrated. One of the reasons for misunderstanding the past is the lack of truthful recounts of history in the times of Communism. In Europe, the political “center” had collapsed throughout the twentieth century, and antagonizing the extremes was the new normal. The absence of genuine debate about the Fascist past has prevented Romania from properly understanding how to assume the Fascist regime or Nazi collaboration (cf. Cristina Bejan’s book20). This lack of public debate was a result of the same manipulation of silence discussed in Chap. 3 where I show that the absence of any voices (of opposition or simply disallowed opinions) results in a  Geraldine Moane, “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision.” In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, ed. Kirby, P., Gibbons, L., and Cronin, M. (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 109–23. 19  See Hannah  Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism. Seventh edition (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1962); Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes  (Boulder, CO and London, UK: Rienner, 2000); Anne  Applebaum,  Gulag: A History  (New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004); and Vladimir Tismaneanu,  The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century  (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012). 20  See Cristina A.  Bejan, Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 18

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rhetorical silence. Over time, people have learned that the authorities’ silence means that things are intentionally hidden from sight, that there is always “something more” to every aspect than the  things said/heard aloud. This reminiscence from Communism and totalitarian mind-set is at the basis of the epidemic of conspiratorial thinking; it goes hand in hand with the distrust of authoritarian narratives. After being exposed to decades of propaganda and untruths parading as the “capital T truth”, people now distrust institutional voices of authority at the same time as they suspect there are hidden “truths” they need to seek. Furthermore, people of the former Second World must detach the Good from the Bad that resulted from the combination of Communism and totalitarianism in the aftermath of those regimes. For example, totalitarian thought made it so that one could either be a Communist or an anti-Communist, or either a Nazi or a Communist, and these affiliations were a matter of life and death. Silvia Foti writes about this acute dichotomy in the article “No More Lies. My Grandfather Was a Nazi”:21 “my grandfather was a man of paradoxes, just as Lithuania—a country caught between the Nazi and Communist occupations during World War II, then trapped behind the Iron Curtain for the next 50 years—is full of contradictions.” Foti says that during the time countries in Eastern Europe fell under Soviet occupation or sphere of influence, respectively, “there was a deep freeze on the truth,” and even a rewriting of history that resulted in the present failure to denounce the crimes of both Nazism and Communism. Cristina A. Bejan calls it a “contemporary inability […] to grapple with this difficult legacy” and contrasts it with the situations in Italy and West Germany which were better positioned after World War II to face up to their controversial Fascist past because their democratic postwar era did not have to deal with Communist propaganda.22 Unfortunately, in the minds of many people scarred by totalitarian thinking, seeing and accepting nuances is still an impossible exercise; many people feel they have to take sides. Foti explains how the tangling and untangling took place in her grandfather’s case: Transforming a Nazi collaborator into a national hero requires four steps of manipulation. One step shifts all the blame to the Nazis, even though my 21  Silvia Foti, “No More Lies. My Grandfather Was a Nazi.” The New York Times, January 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/opinion/jonas-noreika-lithuania-nazicollaborator.html (accessed March 18, 2021). 22  Bejan, p. 7.

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grandfather, like many Lithuanians willingly participated in slaughtering Jews. The second step creates a victim narrative, asking how a Jew killer could be sent to a Nazi concentration camp. The third step discredits counternarratives by labeling them as Communist propaganda told by enemies of the state. The final step refuses to accept that two seemingly contradictory truths can coexist: Noreika bravely fought against the Communists and shamefully participated in killing Jews.23

Paradoxically, Communism has become the region’s Conservatism for some; for others, a return to Conservatism means the apology for the Fascist regime that preceded the Communist one. Socialist rhetorics in general should be understood as dynamic, contextual, and nuanced. For instance, in the aftermath of the 1989 events, street protests in Romania (and other Eastern European states) that resulted in changes of political leaders and established administrations can be seen as directed toward “former Communist” or “neocommunist” practices or political personalities. However, one can also see the same protests from a socialist angle, informed by ideologies that criticize the indiscriminate commodification of wealth and new capitalist practices at the expense of social justice or the environment. From the latter perspective, the protests can be construed as promoting what traditional Marxism calls “class consciousness” and “class struggle.” The mere act of peaceful protest to effect change in political decision-making reflects awareness that the organized group holds sociopolitical force in society (see the Conclusion to Chap. 4 for a discussion of the Communist subaltern). Additionally, while the 1989 Revolution is known as an anti-Communist uprising, can it be seen as inherently leftist in its ideals of toppling a dynastic power? The fine line between political orientations becomes once again blurred in this sense. Moreover, had the totalitarian regime become so oppressive that it became more similar to a Fascist one, given its nationalistic component? Was it dynastic? Are all the anti-totalitarian revolutions inevitably leftist in pursuit? Consequently, I argue that issues of the political Right and Left should be further reevaluated in the aftermath of the fall of the one-party Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, especially considering the burned stages of development and the rise of nationalisms. People shared visions of post-Communism, capitalism, and democracy with idealism or

 Foti, n.p.

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apprehension, placing on them undeserved aspirations and violently vilifying Communism with which we identified the familiar totalitarian system. Rhetoric that antagonizes East and/versus West has a long tradition that goes back generations in Eastern Europe; it still imbues the public and private spaces to this day. During Communism, people’s predilection in favoring all things Western was often construed as a withdrawal from the aggression of the Communist propaganda (coming from the East) rather than a quest for authenticity, although it was often misunderstood that way. However, new rhetorical practices that resuscitate this dichotomy have resurfaced. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolutions of 1989, the post-Communist East and the capitalist West finally looked at each other without resentment, generally speaking. At the time, Eastern and Western Europe saw alterity in each other to a greater extent than they do today, when they have been integrated in larger European administrative structures such as the European Union. The society I experienced growing up in Communist Romania was also imbued with hard-to-escape political propaganda that flooded the public spheres,24 leaving little space for nonpolitical issues. It is understandable that, when the Communist regime fell, we hurried to detach ourselves from it and immediately vilified the nation’s political past (and continue to do so). Mimicking the dominant discursive practices we had witnessed in Communism, we did our best to forget the past, to deny it, to bury it, to make it invisible. Coming out of an extreme Communist totalitarian regime, we longed for everything that was deemed as the opposite of our experience, giving in to the belief that the West was the epitome of perfection and political righteousness. We looked at capitalism, consumerism, commodification, and hedonism as the “pursuit of happiness” in the “promised land” of material well-being. People valued success by the degree they could obtain material objects they had long hungered for during Communism. These were merely antidotes to the past, or cures for a post-traumatic past: post-­ Communist ills. Before arriving to the United States in 1997, which still held all the past significances of the “New World” and the “promised land” in the Eastern European imaginary, I had been immersed in a world 24  I am aware there are more than one public spheres. Nancy Fraser clarified that “a clear line can be drawn at all times between public and private and pleaded for a more inclusive and flexible notion of the ‘common good’” (cited in Marie-Louise Semen, “Searching for the Public Sphere in Communist Central and Eastern Europe.” Master’s thesis. Arizona State University, 2009, p. 4).

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where both Communist and anti-Communist ideas, class-related issues, materialist obsessions, consumerism, and conversations about East and West were visible, audible, palpable, and present in everyday parlance, though sometimes in diametrically opposite terms. As one who understands embodiment, I try to avoid active participation in East–West binaries or in the Communist–capitalist reductionist frame; at the same time, I understand that I also exist in the capitalist imaginary. As a post-­Communist subject, I will forever be marked and shaped by hybridities, including internal conflicts about Communism and capitalism as concepts and embodied knowledges. However, the need for clear-cut answers about society’s problems is, therefore, a legacy of totalitarian “black and white” or “us versus them” thought patterns. Most importantly, while people in Eastern Europe have been slowly learning how to negotiate through the multi-party political system and the rhetorically diversified publics, they experience an intensification of public emotion more acutely than people in the West. Having held no power under totalitarianism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite, people still feel disinvested and disenfranchised in public participation at the same time as they continue to follow politics with more passion than most people in the West do. Expectations for a deus ex machina “better life” promised by the regime change from Communism and intense emotion about politics have often brought the post-Communist societies to crises (an example is the ongoing  massive emigration from some of the Eastern European countries to the West). The intensification of political emotion in post-Communism is a result of the politicization that had taken place in Communism. Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko points out that many people obsessively are more interested in politicians than movie stars. She stresses the “sinister symptom” of a society that has “internalized politics and ideology to the extent that they become ordinary phenomena [… and to] the degree to which politics dominates their everyday lives, their private time, their associations, memories and emotions. ‘Big Brother does not need to watch you; he is already inside you, like a worm in an apple,’” writes Zabushko.25 It is important that people should be politically involved in any society; however, the interest in politics is more pregnant in former Communist countries while the genuine political participation is less so than in the West. People will

 Drakulic (2021), p. 28.

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sooner believe that “all politicians are the same” irrespective of party affiliation and thus cast doubt on any political involvement in general. I would also warn against the dangers of assigning too much to the Communist totalitarian legacy. For example, Romanians have blamed the “de-contextualization of Romania from global realities”26 on the Communist past, as Andaluna Borcila observes. Many disappointments in post-Communism are in fact about the imperfection of human society in general. The idiosyncrasies that neo-liberal, late-capitalist society has to offer are only another layer over the disappointments of the past for the countries emerged from the decades of Communism and post-Communism. In an interview for The Guardian, film director Cristian Mungiu says that some of his films (referring mainly to Graduation here) are received better in countries that have not experienced Communist control: “In Italy and Greece, it felt like it could happen there as well—wherever people feel they don’t progress or advance in society based on their own merit.” The interview, called “Cristian Mungiu: ‘We Were Called the Sacrifice Generation—And So Were Our Parents,’” continues as follows: Under communism, he says, “people did not have information” about the west and “just fantasized about it”; it was not just a question of money, but of “a place where everything goes better: people are more honest, rules and regulations are respected.” “For us, if you live 50 years in a country where the authorities were so corrupt, so unfair to people, all this moral compromise you see today is a result of that period. Maybe we had too high hopes, but we were very naïve: we thought after the fall of communism that not only that freedom will come, but wealth will come as well. It never happened like this.” Mungiu itemises the process of disillusion: he was in his early 20s when the revolution happened, and most of his generation, “decided to just leave” […] As a new generation grows up, however, “it’s much more complicated. For people now it’s very clear: it’s hopeless to think you can change things in Romania for your own lifetime, but maybe it’s worth for the children.”27  Borcila, p, 185.  Andrew Pulver, “Cristian Mungiu: ‘We Were Called the Sacrifice Generation—And So Were Our Parents.’” March 29, 2017, The Guardian.  Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/29/cristian-mungiu-romanian-film-maker-cannes4-months-3-weeks-graduation (accessed March 2021). The interviewer, Andrew Pulver, states that “The metaphor of an illegal abortion defines the new society’s birthing agonies in 4 Months, and gruesomely illustrated the stillborn hopes of post-Ceauşescu society”; however, I cannot disagree more: It merely illustrated the end of the previous regime. 26 27

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The visuality of Communism I created in this book should help with the understanding of the past. More work remains to be done, and more engagements with the recent past can help Western scholars contextualize foreign and domestic political matters in relation to the world of post-­ Communist regimes. Certain authors have decried the lack of the Second World from transnational research or comparisons with post/colonial situations 28 while striving to bring the region into what Borcila calls “strategic visibility in transnational feminist, media, and literary studies.” At the same time, others have drawn attention to the “post-communist hybrid spaces” and their importance of the “post-communist subject to the study of transatlantic connections,”29 as Borcila shows in her book. I concur with Borcila that “U.S.  Americanists have yet to engage in their significance,”30 although more can be done in Europe also. Finally, this book is not another demonstration of “good ideas gone wrong” about philosophies born at a time when industrialization called for the restructuring of society’s oppressive socioeconomic forces, and when wrongs such as slavery (in the United States) and serfdom (in Eastern Europe) had to be righted. It is meant to help demystify the hybridity of ideas, the contradictions inherent to historical times, and the way we visualize rhetorics of power and resistance in society. Consequently, I contend that totalitarianism should be seen as in opposition with democracy, not along lines of origin in the political Left or Right as we claim to know them. Without entirely neglecting ideologies that inform these excesses, this distinction between extremes and center is indeed fundamental and should be discussed more in contemporary public rhetoric.31 The very topic of the book forces me to transgress borders or walk across mined territories or grounds of blurred landscape, and nothing seems more so than engaging with terms of the Left and the Right. It is difficult to disentangle the ideological ideals of Communism from its leftist ideological applications. Identifying the characteristics specific only to one type of totalitarianism may be challenging: I often find that many of them are commonly discernible in totalitarian/authoritarian regimes in 28  Adrian Oto̧ iu, “An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: The Postcolonial, the Postcommunist, and Romania’s Threshold Generation.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23, no. 1–2 (2003): 87–105. 29  Borcila, p. 11. 30  Ibid. 31  This distinction was ever more important in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s regime in the United States and the apparent movement toward the extreme right of a part of his electorate.

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general. This makes it hard for both researchers and research as long as post/Communist and post/totalitarian scholarship remains scarce. I am aware that the visual rhetorical theory I construct in this book is only one way of seeing the recent past, an invitation to look at history again through a different lens. However, by repetitively turning our sight toward the past, we uncover new layers of representation that enhance the visualization of history and the mechanisms that made events possible. This book clears a path for future interdisciplinary research that is more concerned with and responsive to totalitarian rhetorics, including the visual rhetorics of Communist totalitarian regimes, and it is also designed for the public outside academia.

References Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2004. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Seventh edition. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1962. Bejan, Cristina A. Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Borcila, Andaluna. American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives. New  York and London: Routledge, 2014. Chirot, Daniel. (Ed.). The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Cornis-Pope, Marcel. “Local and Global Frames in Recent Eastern European Literature: Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and Postcoloniality.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48, no. 2 (2012): 143–54. Dragostinova, Theodora. “Empty Fountains: Communist-Era Monuments Revisited.” November 2014 https://brewminate.com/empty-­fountains-­ communist-­era-­monuments-­revisited/?fbclid=IwAR3Gw30VHpqVUtuM0d-­ imwXTFMNP40MKPZ_AR3A_KYBHLLm3qCQijZegndo (accessed December 1, 2021). Drakulic, Slavenka. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. New York: Harper Collins, 2016. Drakulic, Slavenka. Café Europa Revisited. New York: Penguin Books, 2021. Esposito, Roberto. “Unfinished Italy.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 128–34. Foti, Silvia. “No More Lies. My Grandfather Was a Nazi.” The New York Times, January 27, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/opinion/jonas-­ noreika-­lithuania-­nazi-­collaborator.html (accessed March 18, 2021).

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Index1

B Biopolitics, 18, 24, 29–32, 31n61, 31n66, 42–43, 49, 49n6, 85, 114, 187, 188, 192, 193, 197–201, 205, 208, 210

G Gaze, 6, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 27, 30, 37, 38, 43, 44, 50–53, 50n10, 59, 60, 62, 64, 81, 92, 111–117, 133, 137–140, 152, 157, 187–214, 219, 220, 225

C Cult of personality, 8, 38, 83, 84, 104–111, 126, 138, 139, 146, 151, 152, 179, 196

H Hyperbole, 38, 83, 105–111, 117n88, 143, 146, 149, 152, 155, 157, 179

E Epistemic violence, 17, 64, 83, 93, 93n31, 117, 118, 120, 121, 130, 142, 171, 182n35, 183, 187, 193, 194, 205–212, 214, 225

M Militarism, 11, 38, 105–111, 152 Monologism, 97–105, 139, 179 O Otherness, 29, 89–90, 90n21, 214

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cordali, Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18806-0

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INDEX

P Panopticism, 59, 111–117 Post-Communist, 22, 24, 25n45, 27–29, 33, 40, 41, 64, 132, 176, 179, 190, 220, 225, 228, 229, 231 R Revolution, v–viii, 5, 15, 25, 33–35, 38, 52, 55, 55n21, 56, 72, 98, 104, 105, 111, 113, 119–122, 131, 145, 148, 163–183, 191, 223, 227, 228, 230 S Self-affirmation, 97–105, 131, 139, 152, 179 Soviet Union, 37, 41, 66, 91–93, 97, 99, 120, 128, 130, 149n35, 175 State apparatus, 20, 23, 27, 32, 35, 41, 42, 105, 109, 157, 165, 188, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201, 208, 209, 214, 220

Surveillance, 19, 24, 27, 38, 50, 60, 62, 69, 93, 93n28, 111–118, 152, 155, 156, 158, 206 T Trope, 17, 21, 33, 35, 38, 50, 65, 93, 98, 102, 106, 109, 114, 119, 125–131, 136, 138–142, 146, 148, 149, 151, 170, 177, 191, 197, 204, 205 V Visual epistemic violence, 17, 64, 117, 155, 205 Visuality, 6, 16, 17, 18n29, 19, 21, 24, 34, 39, 43, 56–65, 83, 84, 92, 113, 169, 199, 200, 203–212, 231 Visual rhetoric, vi, viii, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 33, 38, 39, 41, 43, 56, 57, 60, 64, 65, 83, 105, 112, 117n88, 132, 141–143, 163–164, 174, 176–179, 187–214, 225, 232