Geographies of affect (original) (raw)
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Portrayal of the Modern Industrial Factory Worker Charlie Chaplin's satirical film Modern Times (1936) is a classic of the medium that offers a comedic yet cogent critique of workers' conditions in modern industrialized factories, and the impact that these conditions have on the social and mental life of the average assembly line worker in the early twentieth century. Specifically, Chaplin's protagonist everyman, Little Tramp, suffers a mental breakdown due to the pressures placed upon him by his work and the working conditions there, by the machinery that enslaves him daily to a series of absurdly repetitive actions, and by the inhumane treatment that he receives from his section's over-looker and, ultimately, by the bourgeois manufacturer running the factory. Indeed, Modern Times' emphasis on the plight of the proletarian assembly line worker clearly resonates with Karl Marx's critique of capitalism in his masterful work, The Communist Manifesto; in particular, Modern Times highlights the ephemeral nature of Modern life in capitalist society, its attendant issues of speed, and the need for the bourgeoise to constantly revolutionize the means of production. Modern Times highlights the ephemeral nature of Modern life in capitalist society. As society shifted from a mostly agrarian lifestyle with a feudal system of trade and its attendant guild system to an urban industrialized capitalist one, the pace of Modern life accelerated dramatically during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The film establishes this motif during the opening credits with the presence of a clock that is relentlessly keeping time. The use of the clock symbolically gestures towards the capitalist dictum that 'time is money' and furthermore, that the life of the average industrial factory worker is 'on the clock.' This, of course, suggests that the factory worker, when under the employ of the bourgeois manufacturer, is nothing more than an instrument pushed to their physical and mental limits in order to reach the capitalists' goal of exponential growth. This impossible goal of exponential growth demands the greatest
Biting Back at the Machine: Monkey: Wrenching and Food-Filching in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times
Senses of Cinema, 2011
The themes of eating in general and the filching of food in particular are pervasive in Charlie Chaplin’s films. In Modern Times (1936), the leitmotifs include man-eating machines, foraging for food, and consuming materialism. I will tease out an inverse counter-current to these forms of ingestion, which together constitute a revolution by rejection. Men swallowed by machines are spit out in transfigured form and engage in sabotage; the filching of food by the poor disrupts the social order and calls into question its morality; and the apparent devouring of consumer dreams is in fact a humorous/satirical undermining of their logic.
Work, Ideology and Chaplin's Tramp
Resisting Images, 1991
Only jokes that have a purpose run the risk of meeting with people who do not want to listen to them.-Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the U~zconscious (London, lW), p. 90. Chaplin's comedy was unique. His wide-ranging jabs at institutions and authority as well as his propensity for crude, even dirty jokes were allowed no other comedian of his time. His humor was so effective that it vanquished its opposition. When audiences were under the spell of his comedy, almost anything became permissible. And yet this shattering of respect was not without risks, particularly once Chaplin's humor waned-as it did later in his career. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Chaplin came under attack for his politics as well as his personal life, sympathetic American critics tried to rescue his reputation and his films. After briefly surveying the already substantial writings on Chaplin, Theodore Huff concluded that the screen character he created was a little man buffeted by life. The comedian "worked out a common denominator of fun and feeling that accords with something in every age, class, and race of people the world over. Chaplin is universal and timeless." This strain of criticism was prominently and adeptly amplified, though in a more ironic mode, by Walter Kerr. For him, The secret of Chaplin as a character is that he can be anyone. That is hi pmblem. The secret is a devastating one. For the man who can, w i t h a flick of a finger or the blink of an eyelash, instantly transform himself into absolutely anyone is a man w h o must, i n his heart, remain no one2 These efforts to defend Chaplin's integrity as an artist severed him not only from the very social, economic and cultural context in which he worked, but also from the context in which his films were initially seen. While intended as a defense, or at least a sympathetic reading of Chaplin's comedies, these writings might more aptly be seen as efforts to bowdlerize them, to make his humor safe for that universal audience. In contrast, this article seeks to resituate RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW 41 1988
Immaterial and affective labour: explored
Ephemera: theory and politics in …, 2007
That capitalism has undergone a series of transformations over the past few decades, and that these transformations have been reflected -at least to some extent -in a qualitative change in the nature, form and organisation of labour is increasingly undisputed. Also widely recognised is that these developments have in turn had a reconfigurative effect on the political organisation of workers and their resistance. The precise extent, nature and implication of these mutations, however, are far more widely contested. It is within the literature addressing precisely these issues that concepts such as 'immaterial' and 'affective' labour are gradually becoming the object of debates with consequences that are far more than simply academic.
In this paper, I elaborate on the value of the notion of affect and the related concept of affective labour for a feminist-materialist critique. The core argument is that an affective conception of the relationship between subject and structure would allow for a constructive intervention into the definition of ‘materialism’ that builds the ground for any critical social theory, but remains unfinished in the Marxist tradition. For that purpose, it will however be necessary to develop the concept of affect beyond the common, decidedly a-political interpretations that are part of the New Materialist Feminism, as well as beyond the overly emphatic connotations that the post-Workerist tradition has attached to it with regards to its immeasurable characteristic that might allow for the creation a noncapitalist future from within our present.