Tramps and nomads: Figures of youth in flight in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times

http://you.sagepub.com

Young

DOI: 10.1177/110330880701500201 2007; 15; 115 Young

HANS SKOTT-MYHRE and JAN C FRIJTERS Tramps and nomads: Figures of youth in flight in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times

http://you.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/15/2/115 The online version of this article can be found at:

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Young Additional services and information for

http://you.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:

http://you.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

© 2007 Tidskriftforeningen YOUNG, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at BROCK UNIV on November 11, 2007 http://you.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://you.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://you.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav


A R T I C L E

Copyright © 2007SAGE Publications(Los Angeles, London,New Delhi and Singapore)www.sagepublications.comVol 15(2): 115–2810.1177/110330880701500201

Tramps and nomads Figures of youth in fl ight in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times

HANS SKOTT-MYHREBrock University, Canada

JAN C. FRIJTERSBrock University, Canada

AbstractThe fi lm Modern Times was singular in its historical moment as a work that considered youth as a creative and social force in itself. Indeed, while there are many ways to read the major themes in a fi lm such as Modern Times, this article, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, engages Charlie Chaplin’s fi lm as a vehicle for exploring a certain kind of becoming-youth as a question of force. The kind of force that is explored here is the production of youth as a specifi c kind of radical social subjectivity; that is to say, as a subjectivity comprising multiple collisions, contestations and struggles between sets of proscribed social roles. The article investigates how the fi lm engages the question of youth-adult identity as a social binary that can be collapsed into a relation that fl ees the social containment of both youth and adult.

Keywordssocial construction, youth identity, war machine, cinema, resistance, lines of fl ight

Nordic Journal of Youth Research

Young



116 Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

At the opening of A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari start out by saying:

We wrote [this] together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as that which was farthest away … all this constitutes an assemblage … a little machine … what is the relation of this machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine etc.? (1987: 1)

In this article — a literary machinic assemblage, a crowd or to use the Spinozist term deployed by Paolo Virno (2004), and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), a multitude — we propose to investigate cinema as machine. To be specifi c, we pro-pose to produce Charlie Chaplin’s fi lm Modern Times (1936) as a particular kind of machine and further to examine what such a machine might produce when examined in the light of youth-adult relations. The specifi c kind of machine we are interested in is what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call a war machine. However, before delineating the characteristics of this kind of machine, let us describe the way in which we are deploying the term machine.

We are borrowing the term from the works of Deleuze and Guattari who use it ex-tensively in their joint writings to describe the process by which an assemblage enters into ‘becoming’. Our specifi c use of the term ‘becoming’ will be addressed later; it is essential to this analysis, providing a template for reading youth and youth-adult relations in Modern Times. The machine we are concerned with is distinguished from non-machinic forms such as the organic or the mechanical, which are in states of stable equilibrium (Massumi, 1996: 192). In opposition to this, the machinic is an assemblage that produces without predictable form or limit, hinged between the infi nitude of virtual possibility and the instantiation of material actuality. The machinic operates thus within the logic of immanent production and may deploy organic or inorganic elements, enfolding entire static systems as elements within a machinic assemblage.

However, the question remains — is it a war machine? William Hipwell following Patton refers to the war machine in Deleuze and Guattari as:

A nomadic form of group subject which is outside and hostile to the state and has the power to deterritorialize sendentary structures … the war machine is a disruptor, an agent of becoming and difference — inherently unstable — operating ceaselessly against identitarianism. Wherever it is able to act, a war machine deterritorializes State structures. (Hipwell, 2004: 362)

The war machine is of particular interest for us with reference to Modern Times and the question of youth within that fi lm, to the degree that it engages the protagonists as nomads or tramps as fi gures in fl ight but also as fi gures of resistance. In short, we hold an interest in fi gures that disrupt, become and refuse a clear social identity. We will argue, in what follows, that youth constitute just such a fi gure and that the fi lm Modern Times constitutes an assembled war machine in its portrayal of youth and youth-adult relations.



Skott-Myhre & Frijters Tramps and nomads 117

Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

YOUTH IN MODERN TIMES

If the pool of nominees for the 1936 Academy Awards is an indication, Modern Times was singular in its historical moment as a work of cinema in its consideration of youth. Only two fi lms that year had non-adult themes or characters. The fi rst, Romeo and Juliet (1936), a fi lm of impeccable literary accuracy and appealing characteriza-tion, ignored youth with leading actors well into their thirties and a careful excision of Shakespeare’s willingness to grapple with ambiguous youth-adult boundaries. The second, Three Smart Girls (1936), a comedic trifl e to showcase the singing skills of Deanna Durbin, recruited the energy and enthusiasm of three sisters to solve the relationship problems of their parents. This left Modern Times as unique in its con-sideration of youth, not youth as proxy for beauty or passion of adults, nor youth as a vehicle appropriated to solve adult problems, but youth as a force in itself.

Indeed, while there are many ways to read the major themes of a fi lm such as Modern Times, we are interested in engaging a minor thread of a certain kind of becoming-youth (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) as a question of force. The force that we are interested in comprises two central protagonists of the fi lm, in the sense of their production as a specifi c kind of social subjectivity; that is to say, as a subjec-tivity constituted as a horizon that is always receding at the edge of our perception of its instantiation in any given moment. In this case it is a subjectivity comprised of multiple collisions, contestations, and struggles between sets of proscribed social roles such as worker, child, adult, youth, male, female, inmate and guard. Of these, we are particularly interested in the way in which the social binary of youth-adult is collapsed into a relation that fl ees the social containment of both terms.

The role of Chaplin himself in Modern Times holds just such an ambiguity. Clearly, he stands in relation to youth in an ambivalent position of adulthood. However, his character is not fully adult and seems incapable of actually entering adulthood through any of the preferred channels. He forms an assemblage with a young woman, who we know is juvenile by virtue of her subordination to the juvenile authorities. Leaving aside the social approbation such an alliance might make in bourgeoisie soci-ety, it is an alliance that melds youth and adult into a politics of common purpose that seems to transcend the traditional categories of youth and adult. Such an alliance formed through collision of radically idiosyncratic subjectivities deployed to a series of common creative and productive purposes is redolent with the political project of Spinoza’s concept of multitude, particularly as articulated by Hardt and Negri (2004).

However, can we utilize this assemblage to rethink youth as a category outside the defi nition of age and the teleology of development? Does Modern Times offer the pos-sibility of thinking of youth as a war machine constituted by its status of non-arrival? To put this another way, does Modern Times offer us a social category of subjects who cannot be assimilated or digested and hence do not ever arrive as adults? Can we, in short, begin to conceptualize youth as a Deleuzeo-Guattarian (1987) instance of what they refer to as becoming-child?

The … child [does] not become; it is becoming itself that is a child … The child does not become an adult any more than the girl becomes a woman; the girl is the becoming-woman



https://www.researchgate.net/publication/37705437_A_Thousand_Plateaus_Capitalism_and_Schizophrenia?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-f0e85ee7e235c0c2a5b55751856f7764-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzMzQxNDU4NztBUzo5OTEwMzE1NzUyMjQzMkAxNDAwNjM5NDQzMzk1

118 Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

of each sex, just as the child is the becoming-young of every age. Knowing how to age does not mean remaining young; it means extracting from one’s age the particles, the speeds and slownesses, the fl ows that constitute the youth of that age … It is age itself that is a becoming-child. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 277)

The becoming-child constitutes a subject for Deleuze and Guattari distinct from the socialization frameworks and biological determinism of developmental science and reconstitutes a subject that never becomes adult nor remains young. Instead, the child is constituted as subjectivity extracted from chronological time or age in its intensities and productions; that is to say, as a subjectivity that never arrives but is constantly renewed as an idiosyncratic expressive extraction of both location and temporality.

Youth as becoming-child holds an ambivalent position within the context of the industrial capitalism of the fi lm and perhaps even a more ambivalent position in our current age of post-modern capitalist production. This positioning of a subject that never fully arrives and cannot be digested or assimilated into the patterns of domin-ation is a theme that we argue runs throughout Modern Times. For us, this is a line that functions both at the level of plot and within the mechanisms of cinematography, temporality, and aesthetic voice that structure and de-structure the fi lm itself.

Indeed, one might argue that Modern Times operates within the logic of Nietzsche’s notion of the untimely in its production of a thoroughly post-modern subject that constantly creates an exception to the rules of domination through the expression of its own idiosyncratic force, without ever making any effort to engage a transcend-ent outside to the mode of production within which it is situated. Such a subject, who never arrives and never leaves, might well presage the advent of what Deleuze (1995) describes as a social subject inhered fully within a system of infi nite deferral. Such a system of infi nite deferral holds an ambivalent function for the subjectivities operating within its regime. For example, a system of infi nite deferral can serve as a mode of domination through its denial of entry into any form of security or fi nal fi scal or social stability. But as Hardt and Negri (2000) point out, such a system also produces new formations of the proletariat that, through their exclusion from either security or stability, form new political forces. In this sense, the category of youth as becoming-subject holds the capacity to create new worlds that hold its status of in-between as a certain kind of war machine.

RESISTANCE AND FLIGHT

For us, as we have mentioned earlier, the question of youth as post-modern nomad, or that subject which never arrives, is produced and perpetuated by the dual fi gures of resistance and fl ight. We want to propose that the fi lm Modern Times offers us a subjective assemblage that hinges its movement and force precisely in such a mutual production of fl ight and resistance. The two fi gures of the Gamin and the Tramp pro-vide a very specifi c and particular trajectory across the social driven by these two movements. The Gamin, we would argue, constitutes a fi gure of resistance while the Tramp constitutes the fi gure of fl ight. To examine this let us look at two scenes where the Tramp and the Gamin begin their movement towards collision with one




Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

another. In these scenes, which we will call the ‘fl ag scene’ and the ‘stealing bananas scene’, we have two different responses to the problematics of a particular social and historical moment.

The series of events we are constituting as the ‘fl ag scene’ begins with Chaplin, as the Tramp, being discharged from the hospital following a nervous breakdown. He is given the advice to ‘Take it easy and avoid excitement’. In the world into which he is sent, this is obviously impossible. Through a series of vertiginous and rapid shots of big city life and sounds such as jackhammers and factories, the industrialized world is presented as a space in which the body, mind and spirit are under constant assault on all fronts. It should be noted that the Tramp does not overtly resist such a world. In fact, throughout the fi lm the Tramp will do his very best to accommodate this world and to assimilate himself into it. It is an endeavour that will fail and each failure will propel him into fl ight.1

In the scene we are examining, the Tramp leaves the hospital and begins to walk around the city. As he is walking down the street, a truck goes past him and drops a red fl ag marking the back of its load of lumber. He stoops to pick it up just as a labour demonstration comes around the corner behind him. As he runs to catch up with the truck to return the fl ag, he waves it above his head to catch the driver’s attention. As the demonstration approaches him from behind, he begins, unwittingly, to appear to lead it, waving a red fl ag. Suddenly, in front of him police appear on horseback. They charge into the demonstration and the Tramp is caught between the police and the demonstrators. He takes refuge by dropping down a manhole but is dragged out and misidentifi ed by the police as the leader of the demonstration, and arrested.

Can we see this accident of placement and time, which leads to the Tramp’s arrest as leader of the striking workers, as a component of the war machine? Rebecca Raby in her excellent tracing of the concept of resistance states the following:

Subordinates identify power relations but must often suppress, mask or regulate their anger towards dominant groups, only to have this rage emerge in actions that are evident in ‘hidden transcripts,’ to escape persecution. While overt resistance is fairly easy to iden-tify, hidden transcripts are often elusive to the researcher. (Raby, 2005: 159)

Are the actions of the Tramp in Modern Times a ‘hidden transcript’; a transcript through which the ambivalent positioning of those continually excluded, disposed and deferred play out elements of opposition, framed through actions designed to accommodate but which fail due to the very constituted nature of the subject as an outsider? This is the fl ight of the nomad as hunger artist or as Clech Lâm (1996) would have it, that element of the multitude which capital simply cannot digest and which gives it what she hopes is terminal digestive distress in the form of revolution.

Perhaps a clearer example of overt resistance is the scene in which the Gamin steals bananas. In this scene we are shown a young woman leading a group of younger children in a raid on a boat carrying bananas. She leaps onto the boat and is throwing bananas back to the younger children when the boat owner appears and chases her around the marina. She escapes and stands on the dock in a heroic pose while peeling and devouring a banana, backlit against the horizon. It is our introduction to the fi gure that will be known as the Gamin. Such an introduction stands in marked contrast to the introduction of the Tramp who we are introduced to fully under the supervision



120 Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

and domination of the factory. The fi gure of the banana thief and that of the factory worker constitute an apparent binary that will collapse itself into a relation of force through the aleatory collisions that constitute the aesthetic of the fi lm.

It seems to us that the fi gure of resistance posited in such philosophers as Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and Negri is premised on a relation of force. This force is one which always asserts its becoming in the face of ongoing capture and appropri-ation. In a term we have used before, it is the force of life itself (Skott-Myhre, 2005). In the ‘stealing bananas’ scene, we have the fi gure of life as desire. From the act of thievery to the actions of escape and the distribution of the bananas to the other chil-dren and fi nally the glory and pleasure of free consumption, we have an anthem to life in full force. This type of resistance holds no resentment. It is simply life as an assertion of force. It is, in Spinozist terms, the extension of what a body can do. In Deleuzian terms it is resistance as desire; however, not the desire for some myth-ical ideal outside but desire as pure virtuality or freedom through infi nite action. The Gamin acts and in acting produces her life and the modes of her escape from domination. To follow Raby here again, ‘Foucault also suggested resistance through bio-power, seeking to “reinvent the body by creating new modes of desire and pleasure”’ (Best and Kellner, 1991: 58 cited in Raby, 2005).

AESTHETIC MACHINATIONS

As we mentioned earlier, it would be our contention that Modern Times serves as a war machine both through the subjects of the Tramp and the Gamin as fi gures of fl ight and resistance, but also through the machinery of aesthetic deployment and use of temporality to explode and implode the social binaries that comprise the system of domination of industrial capital. To engage this level of our proposed war machine we contend that we need to approach the essence of Chaplin’s aesthetic vocabulary. In Cinema 1, Deleuze identifi es the ‘law of the index’, the minute and transparently crafted differences between action and alternate action or between situation and al-ternate situation that amplify thematic distances:

Chaplin knew how to select gestures which were close to each other and corresponding situations which were far apart, so as to make their relationship produce a particularly intense emotion at the same time as laughter, and to redouble the laughter through this emotion. If a slight difference in the action induces very distant or opposable situations — S and S’ — and makes them alternate, one of these situations will be ‘really’ touching, horrifi c and tragic. … (Deleuze, 1986: 170)

The ‘law of the index’ weaves through the fi lm as its primary aesthetic fuel. In some cases S and S’ are placed in immediate relation to each other. An image of the massed, herded sheep of the pre-modern agrarian society being sent to the slaughterhouse is followed immediately by a scene in which herded workers emerge from the subway and stream toward the factory. Here at the fi lm’s opening, Chaplin alerts the viewer to watch for the Tramp who tries to adapt and perform as an adult, but is always slightly out of place as the one black sheep in the herd. The Tramp is one component of the war machine, who as a fi gure of youth, cannot succeed at adult rituals within the sedentary structures of organized, industrial capital.



https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238126175_Postmodern_Theory_Critical_Interrogations?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-f0e85ee7e235c0c2a5b55751856f7764-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzMzQxNDU4NztBUzo5OTEwMzE1NzUyMjQzMkAxNDAwNjM5NDQzMzk1

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248988766_Towards_a_Minoritarian_Psychology_of_Immanence_and_a_Psychotherapy_of_Flight_Political_Meditations_on_the_Society_of_Control?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-f0e85ee7e235c0c2a5b55751856f7764-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzMzQxNDU4NztBUzo5OTEwMzE1NzUyMjQzMkAxNDAwNjM5NDQzMzk1


Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

The relation between S and S’ prime is often determined by a complex algorithm. Entire scenes can be transformed when the ‘law of the index’ is implemented in different ways. Soon after the Tramp and the Gamin escape, they fi nd themselves imagining a paradisiacal suburban domestic scene. Later in the fi lm, having found a falling-down shack on the edge of the city, the two share a meal in the style of that fantasy but within a ‘home’ that is anything but the stuff of fantasy. Chaplin holds the situation constant, but modifi es the setting from the fi rst to the second: the straight-jacket of naïve fantasy in suburbia amplifi es the possibilities of escape within a broken-down and in-between home. The pair awkwardly comply with the trappings of adult suburban life but fi nd ‘the fl ows that constitute the youth of that age’ in their genuine wreck of a home at the edge of the city. The fi rst, sterile fantasy creates a more acute sense of hunger, failed satisfaction and a fruitless search for work. In the second setting, the pair play again at domestic life but the play is genuine, joyful and is followed by one of the few scenes where basic human needs (in this case for food) are satisfi ed. Though the Tramp bumbles about destroying the Gamin’s breakfast table, the second setting is characterized by shared problems, immersion in life and ultim-ately the news, ‘factories reopen’. The physical realities of homelessness and hunger become the fuel for play and fantasy, opening possibilities for real engagement with life in an impossible situation. These contrasted scenes paint the capacity of youth to engage, transform and appropriate the trappings of adult life for play that produces without predictable form or limit.

Chaplin also uses the ‘law of the index’ to fl irt with the distinction between the two modes of machine that are found within Modern Times: the mechanical and machinic. The mechanical mode, occurring early in the fi lm, is shown when the Tramp is used as a test case for the ‘feeding machine’. Frustration and mechanical break-down result when the organizational excesses of the feeding machine, essentially a portable factory, are applied to human needs. An automated corncob spit turns too fast for chewing, soup is tipped too far and splashes down his coveralls, and the machine cannot distinguish between chunks of meatloaf and errant bolts placed on the plate by a mechanic, shovelling both into the Tramp’s mouth. The comic excess in this scene is best illustrated by the mouth blotter, which swings in on a mechanical arm to clean the Tramp’s mouth after each course, whether the food was delivered properly or a piece of pie was plastered over his entire face.

The obverse mode, the machinic, is illustrated upon the Tramp’s return to the fac-tory late in the fi lm as a mechanic’s assistant. The mechanic, who has become trapped in the other great machine of Modern Times, needs to be fed. From a roasted chicken as a tea-funnel to the shovelling of a pie into the mechanic’s mouth, the Tramp is equally as ineffective as the feeding machine. The essential distinction between the machine and the Tramp is in the adaptability that allows the human to create virtual possibility by appropriating the mechanical for production of compassion. From the terms in our introduction, the mechanical mode closes off possibility, is in a state of stable equilibrium and actively works to eject elements that threaten this equilib-rium. To the plant owner and inventor, the feeding machine appears to break down during demonstration, but the breakdown happens with such intentionality that we are left with a visual message that the Tramp is an extra-mechanical threat to sys-temic equilibrium that cannot tolerated. Further illuminating youth as the subject that never arrives, the Tramp cannot be digested or assimilated into the feeding machine.



122 Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

The scene involving the trapped mechanic stands in stark contrast. The machinic mode creates possibility, adaptively absorbs and reconstitutes ‘everything that [comes] within range’. Though the Tramp’s attempts to feed the trapped mechanic are as inept and ineffectual as the machine’s attempt to feed the Tramp, the Tramp shows adaptability and humanity in the attempt. Thus, the Tramp–machine–mechanic–food–lunchtime constitutes a machinic assemblage that opens possibilities around and within the assembly-line equipment, the prototypic closed and mechanical machine.

The ‘law of the index’ as an aesthetic device is repeated so often in Modern Times that the fi lm appears perpetually in danger of dissolving into a string of disconnected tableaus. Chaplin’s excessive use of this creates a type of cinematic pointillism. Props, scenes, characters and situations do not matter in this fi lm, but props, scenes, char-acters and situations standing ‘in relation to’ constitute multiple machinic assem-blages. The Gamin and the Tramp as fi gures of youth do not matter as entities as much as they matter in relation to the machines, the law, bananas, the broken-down spaces of urban life. The feeding machine, the factory lunch-hour and the prison mess room are fruitless as fi gures of adult life: no one is ever fed successfully. Belying a common characterization of youth as selfi shly consuming for their own satisfaction, only the Tramp and the Gamin, as fi gures of youth who share freely and without re-sentment, successfully feed others. The Tramp feeds the trapped mechanic and the children on the street; the Gamin feeds her siblings with stolen bananas and fi nally feeds the Tramp in their broken-down home on the edge.

COLLISIONS AND FLIGHT

As we have argued earlier, the war machine that Chaplin is assembling in Modern Times is composed of a series of aleatory collisions. The war machine cannot be com-posed by bounding, defi ning, predicting and proscribing its elements. Its components are assembled out of the infi nitude of the virtual. It is in the collision, between what Spinoza would call modes, that new aspects and assemblages of the war machine are composed. Such an assemblage is composed in the series of scenes in which the Gamin and the Tramp are literally thrown together and then literally thrown out.

This series begins with Chaplin being unwillingly released from jail where he had attained some level of comfort as a result of foiling a prison break. He had fallen into the good graces of the jailers and was living a far more comfortable life on the inside than he would in the depression-era economy on the outside. Unfortunately, his ‘good deed’ leads to an act of clemency and early release.

Following a disastrous attempt at work, he literally runs into the Gamin on the street. She, having escaped from the juvenile authorities following the death of her father, has stolen a loaf of bread and is fl eeing the police. When the police arrive to fi nd the Tramp and the Gamin in a heap on the ground following their collision coming around a street corner, the Tramp sees the opportunity to do a good deed and re-attain incarceration. He takes responsibility for stealing the bread and is arrested. However, a witness intervenes and tells the police that it is in fact the Gamin who stole the bread. Chaplin is released, much to his frustration, and the Gamin is re-arrested. The Tramp then decides to intentionally break the law by dining sumptuously at a




Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

restaurant and refusing to pay the bill. He summons a policeman who arrests him and as the policeman is summoning the police van, he steals cigars and hands them out to a couple of young boys who happen by. The Tramp and the Gamin are both placed in the police van from which they escape and go on the run.

We would like to focus on three elements in this series: the collision between resistance and fl ight; the nomad as a stationary fi gure atop movement;2 and fi nally the question of cracks and fi ssures in the edifi ce of domination. Let’s begin with a quote from Viano and Binetti:

Flight does not mean necessarily an escape into some mythical outside free from social conditioning. It is rather a moment of active creation of autonomous spaces within the existing order. Flight enables you to try to elude the status quo which subjects individuals to its political power […] The creation of a ‘window’ or of a ‘security exit’, inside an apparatus whose self preservation relies on the blockage of every outlet or fl ight, means then to keep open the conditions necessary to avoid our entrapment in the dominant political and cultural grid. (1996: 252)

In this series of scenes we have precisely the creation of multiple windows, security exits and autonomous spaces within the existing order. Beginning with the assertion of the body’s desire as expressed in the theft of the bread, we will engage a series of collisions that escalate rhizomatically into a line of pure fl ight and overt escape. Ironically, it is in the oscillation between Chaplin’s desire to be captured and enter into a space of enclosure which accommodates him well (that is, the jail), and the re-sistance of the Gamin to the forces of social order that would deny her right to bread, that will produce the fi nal moment of overt escape. This all begins, of course, with the actual collision of the Gamin or moment of resistance and the Tramp, our moment of fl ight. From that collision the forces of social domination attempt repeatedly to contain these two moments; fi rst arresting one and then the other and then releasing one and then the other and then capturing them again.

The fi gure of Chaplin becomes that of the nomad described by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as sitting motionless while riding upon the camel in motion. Much like the category of youth in our current society, who seek to both become adults and hence stable citizens, Chaplin seeks to arrive, to cease moving; to become the motionless nomad. Yet, like youth who, while desiring the security of family, school and community, fl ee the strictures of adult conventionality, events continue to propel him into ongoing fl ight.

The Tramp is happy to be incarcerated and out of harm’s way. It is after all a far more humane existence than that of the vagaries of industrial capital. In fact, upon his realization that seeking incarceration can produce the conditions by which he can fully satisfy his desires, Chaplin is freed to engage in full expenditure. He eats with-out restriction and gives away to the young boys that which he appropriates without restraint. When fi nally arrested, he can relax within the confi nes of the law while oper-ating fully outside it.

The Tramp’s stationary position atop the camel of the law, however, is short-lived as he again collides with the fi gure of resistance. The law cannot fully contain life, just as no concept of adulthood can fully overwrite the desires of youth. In the police van, the Tramp and the Gamin are again literally thrown together in a fi eld of living




124 Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

subjects. As they respond to this situation, he with the certitude and comfort of being contained within the law and she in the despair of capture, an odd assemblage of passions is produced. The Tramp, basing his position in the security of being lawless within the law, attempts to comfort the Gamin. She, faced with compassion and caring, fi rst breaks into despair that then overfl ows into revolt. She leaps to her feet, unsettling the stability of the vehicle of the law and in the ensuing confusion both she and the Tramp are thrown out of the law along with an offi cer.

These events produce a series of fractures and schisms in the seamless fabric of containment. The Tramp, now inadvertently thrown from the camel into the desert of the contested social, is set in an ambivalent position. He wants to belong to the law so as to appropriate its safety and containment to his own needs and yet the moment of resistance and fl ight is calling him. It is a call he reluctantly engages in and then, once in motion, joyfully accepts.

BODIES IN FLIGHT

If the core of Chaplin’s aesthetic is the ‘law of the index’, the source of much of its comedy is the Tramp’s physicality. Chaplin does not move the Tramp from one place to another, as much as the Tramp is constantly in motion — motion being movement with gesture. Modern Times simulates a post-industrial control society via the rapidly changing contexts that the Tramp encounters — factory, prison, street, shipyard, sub-urbia, broken urban, rural, transient/vagrant. Because of the shifting context, there is no adaptation and the Tramp is continually ‘ejected’:

Variation as control forms an interlinked and interdependent set of social relations that are constantly modifi ed and that constantly modify the subjective identifi cation of the individual … No one’s social position is secure and no one knows for sure who they are or how to achieve success within the realm of shifting social expectation. (Skott-Myhre, 2005: 45–46)

The comedy inhered by the Tramp’s physicality allows fl ight and resistance to em-body the same fi gure. In one scene that illustrates how chance events simulate shifting social and functional relations, lunch is served in the prison mess. The Tramp is by chance seated next to an inmate who has hidden ‘marching powder’ in the saltshaker closest to the Tramp. Prison food seasoned with cocaine energizes the Tramp. The lunch bell sounds to indicate an orderly return to cells and the Tramp marches, twirls, and then ultimately spins himself into an adjacent courtyard, missing the lock down completely.

A subsequent prison break attempt by other inmates is subverted by the diminu-tive Tramp, having gained extraordinary strength and (more importantly) oblivion of his stature and capabilities. Modern Times is often identifi ed as a physical comedy but more than this it is a burlesque. This scene typifi es how the relatively solemn places and modes of being are ridiculed and transformed by a combination of aleatory events and the irrepressible physicality of the Tramp. The schedules and procedures that constitute prison as a punitive environment are deterritorialized by the Tramp’s poetic motion through them. The most dignifi ed places and scenes of modern life —




Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

factory, prison, street, shipyard, suburbia, broken urban, rural, transient/vagrant — be-come undignifi ed and are opened-up when the Tramp and Gamin fl ow through them.

Much of the comedy in the fi lm emerges from the Tramp’s partial understanding of local axioms, or more functionally, his understanding when subverted by the aleatory contingencies introduced when the Tramp’s physicality disrupts his own at-tempted compliance. The ‘little man’ is not attempting Promethean feats but seeking to satisfy basic human needs for food, work, companionship, or even going for a walk (Ingrao, 1981). In the prison mess hall scene, the cocaine, or ‘Bolivian marching powder’, amplifi es the movements recruited for compliance, which creates a chain of contingencies ultimately subverting a parallel but active and futile act of resistance on the part of the rebelling prisoners.

Why should the Tramp’s unintentional subversion succeed and the honest resist-ance of the prisoner fail? Attempting to comply with the rules, a march becomes a dance and the dance carries him away from the assembly line of prisoners being processed from the mess hall and into their cells. This accidental hero knows enough of the local rules to transform them into ‘points of axiomatic knowledge [that] would only serve as exits into lines of fl ight and becoming’ (Skott-Myhre, 2005: 50). Chaplin has provided in the Tramp a fi gure that inadvertently recruits fl ight into a form of resistance that circumvents the mechanical equilibrium of the prison. As a fi gure of youth, who are outside the machinery of society by virtue of being constructed as ‘incomplete adults’, the Tramp’s resistance deterritorializes without straining against a machine in equilibrium. Youth, because of their unique position — even because they have been constructed as ‘incomplete adults’ — retain the capacity to recruit aleatory events for becoming through acts of resistance that can transform the mechanical. The Tramp in motion is the war-machine of youth that creates new forms — creates machinic assemblages which enfold the mechanical without the fruitless resistance that threatens mechanical equilibrium.

DEFECTION

In the fi nal scene, we fi nd our pair on the side of the road. They have escaped into full indeterminacy. As they sit on the side of the road, the Gamin is in despair while the Tramp is seemingly without a care. He notices her despair and comforts her. He tells her not to worry, that they will ‘get along’. They head off down the road that (in contradistinction to other endings where the hero rides off into the sunset) has two horizons.

In this fi nal moment we contend that fl ight combines with resistance. The two moments are combined into what Deleuze (1984: 283) refers to as being thrown. Like much of America at that time, our two characters are thrown out of the slavery of industrial capital and onto the road. However, the question for all freed slaves is what to do now. After all as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 449) point out, ‘What counts is not the particular case of the freed slave. What counts is the collective fi gure of the outsider’. For youth as the subject which never arrives, the outside constitutes the primary site of social geography. If such a collective outside holds the kind of political force posited by the writings of Deleuze, Foucault and Negri we can, as we



126 Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

suggested earlier, see youth as that moment of fl ight and resistance; the moment when the old psychological binary of fi ght or fl ight collapses into itself and forms a social subjectivity that reconstitutes both categories as something new.

To be thrown into freedom out of an inability to become a successful slave proposes youth as a category beyond a certain developmental or chronological status. In fact, it is to propose youth as a certain kind of machine of constantly mutating indeterminate function that produces new social worlds through throwing subjective assemblages against the canvas of evolving social production. Within such a movement of being thrown, the subjects of the fi lm, the Tramp and the Gamin, escape the confi nes of what Spinoza refers to as that concept not even worthy of philosophical consideration: the disciplinary enclosure of free will.

Such a throwing draws upon the elements of between-ness that hold in tension all the solid elements of being-ness. It engages the spaces that crisscross in infi nite profusion the apparent coherence of bounded identity. Such an identity is founded in a combination of uncertainty and desire that never reaches conclusion or a fi nal resting place. As signifi ed here, at the end, by the double horizon, there is no beginning to such a place and no ending — it is a space of radical indeterminacy. Such a space holds no utopian promises of arrival through discipline and planning. That possibility is inimical to a social subject who is thrown into freedom ontologically. Youth, as such an aleatory set of thrown collisions and trajectories within the fi lm Modern Times presages what Hardt and Negri propose as a certain kind of prophecy:

What was really prophetic was the poor, bird-free laugh of Charlie Chaplin when, free from any utopian illusions and above all from any discipline of liberation, he interpreted the modern times of poverty, but at the same time linked the nature of the poor to that of life, a liberated life and liberated productivity. (2000: 159)

The question remains, prophetic of what kind of world? Perhaps a world a bit less successful; for if modernity had gifted us with progress and productivity, a teleology of constant improvement and goal oriented futures, then perhaps such gifts, like the Trojan horse, might be worthy of examination. If the belly of the horse of modernity has held an invasion force that has infl icted its disciplinary logic on the world’s popu-lation, then perhaps the category of youth described in Chaplin’s fi lm as a war ma-chine might be of some use in refusing such gifts. In this sense, if the question of revolution in our historical moment is, as Illuminati has pointed out:

above all a question of the objective forms wherein the defection can realize itself, if we can even imagine the passage from the laws of wage slavery to the rules of an activity that is free from the very form of work, its coercion, equivalence and abstractness (1996: 181–82)

then perhaps Modern Times with its category of youth as the subject that never arrives and always fails, provides an approach to the question of youth, if we are interested in any sort of project of liberation. The war machine assembled within and through this cinematic instance provides an alternative to the developmental and the teleological. Our analysis of Modern Times suggests that the unique production of youth may well be as Samuel Beckett (1995: 87) puts it, ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’




Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

Notes

1 Chaplin wrote the score for this fi lm and it is important to note that each failure to assimi-late, each expulsion, each fl ight is accompanied by the song ‘Hallelujah I’m a bum’, which was originally recorded by Harry McClintock who was a wobbly (International Workers of the World) labour organizer. The words to the song evolved over time but almost always included the following verse:

Why don’t you work like other folks do? How the hell can I work when there’s no work to do?

[ALTERNATE LAST LINES: How the hell can I work when the sky is so blue? OR: How can I get a job when you’re holding down two?]

CHORUS: Hallelujah, I’m a bum, Hallelujah, bum again, Hallelujah, give us a handout To revive us again. Oh, why don’t you save all the money you earn? If I didn’t eat, I’d have money to burn.

It is important to note in this context that more than any other fi lm, it was Modern Times that got Chaplin branded as a Communist and led to his fl ight from the United States, to which he never returned. For our purposes here though, it is the element of contingency as the engine of fl ight that is compelling.

2 ‘The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space … the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart … of course the nomad moves, but while seated and he is only seated while moving’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 381).

References

Beckett, Samuel (1995) Nohow on: Company, Ill seen Ill said, Worstward ho: Three novels. New York: Grove Press.

Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1991) Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: The Guilford Press.

Clech Lâm, Maivan (1996) ‘A Resistance Role for Marxism in the Belly of the Beast’, in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl (eds) Marxism beyond Marxism, pp. 255–64. New York: Routledge.

Deleuze, Gilles (1984) Difference and Repetition (Translated by P. Patton). London: The Athlone Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema 1: Movement-Image (Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of

Empire. New York: Penguin Press.Hipwell, William. T. (2004) ‘A Deleuzian Critique of Resource-use Management Politics in

Industria’, The Canadian Geographer 48(3): 356–77.Illuminati, Augusto (1996) ‘Unrepresentable Citizenship’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt

(eds) Radical Thought in Italy, pp. 166–85. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.Ingrao, Pietro (1981) ‘Chaplin: the Antagonism of the Comic Hero’ (Translated by Rudolf

Arnheim), Film Quarterly 35(1): 22–24.







https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227723332_A_Deleuzian_critique_of_resource-use_management_politics_in_Industria?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-f0e85ee7e235c0c2a5b55751856f7764-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzMzQxNDU4NztBUzo5OTEwMzE1NzUyMjQzMkAxNDAwNjM5NDQzMzk1

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227723332_A_Deleuzian_critique_of_resource-use_management_politics_in_Industria?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-f0e85ee7e235c0c2a5b55751856f7764-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzMzQxNDU4NztBUzo5OTEwMzE1NzUyMjQzMkAxNDAwNjM5NDQzMzk1

128 Young 15:2 (2007): 115–28

Massumi, Brian (1996) A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Raby, Rebecca (2005) ‘What is Resistance?’, Journal of Youth Studies 8(2): 151–71.Skott-Myhre, Hans (2005) ‘Towards a Minoritarian Psychology of Immanence and a Psycho-

therapy of Flight: Meditations on the Society of Control’, Parallax 35(2): 44–59.Viano, Maurizio and Binetti, Vincenzo (1996) ‘What is to be Done?: Marxism and Academia’,

in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl (eds) Marxism beyond Marxism, pp. 243–54. New York: Routledge.

Virno, Paolo (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude (Translated by Isabelle Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson). New York: Semiotext(e).

HANS SKOTT-MYHRE is an interdisciplinary cultural theorist whose primary research area is the development of models of child and youth work that promote new political possibilities for youth-adult collaboration that challenge global capitalist empire. His research includes the investigation of new forms of community, identity, body practices, and creative expression that hold potential for resistance or fl ight for youth and adults working towards common political purposes. He holds a Ph.D. in Work Community and Family Education from the University of Minnesota and is completing a second doctorate in Cultural Studies with a focus on revolutionary subjectivity. Address: Department of Child and Youth Studies, Brock University, 500 Glenridge, St Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada. [email: [email protected]]

JAN C. FRIJTERS is an educational psychologist whose primary research area is the study of reading, reading disability and the development of motivation for reading throughout childhood. He has interests in the application of statistical models to change over time, especially for techniques that help sort out how developmental processes unfold within specifi c learning contexts. Much of this work is carried out at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, where he is investigating the working relationship between remedial teacher and student, attributions of success and failure at reading, and motivation for specifi c academic tasks. Address: Department of Child and Youth Studies, Brock University, 500 Glenridge, St Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada. [email: [email protected]]





Tramps and nomads: Figures of youth in flight in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times

Documents

Transcript of Tramps and nomads: Figures of youth in flight in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times