First as Farce, Then as Tragedy
Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde
Pluto Press, 240pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780745336015
reviewed by Benjamin Noys
There are two things you might not associate with the communist avant-garde of the 1920s: a taste for comedy and a taste for all things American. You would be wrong. Owen Hatherley’s The Chaplin Machine is an exploration of this seemingly unlikely conjunction, of a world where Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, and Lenin are all being thought and brought together. Hatherley aims to recover this strange utopian moment, in which constructing socialism involved a turn to the potentials of comedy to subvert the rigidity of capitalist labour. His book constructs its own avant-garde montage – a series of discontinuous explorations that range from the reception of American comedy to the development of the sound film. For those familiar with Hatherley’s studies of architecture, which often involve engaging personal reflection, this is a more scholarly (it is based on Hatherley’s PhD) and a more austere work. While the subject is comedy, the stakes are deadly serious.
In fact, the real confrontation or combination is Chaplin plus Taylor; Taylor being Frederick Winslow Taylor, inventor of ‘scientific management’ as the art of extracting maximum work from the worker by treating them as a machine. This hyper-capitalist style of management exerted some attraction on the Bolsheviks, including Lenin, but especially on the communist avant-garde of the 1920s. What appeared to be a radical dehumanising treatment of the worker as a machine was seen by the avant-garde as promising more production for less labour. Becoming a machine offered higher efficiency and even the chance to dream on the job while the body went through its mechanical motions. This doesn’t seem very funny. The Charlie Chaplin of Modern Times (1936) offered a comic satire of the worker crushed by industrial production, as Chaplin finds himself literally caught in the cogs of the machine.
Against this humanist vision, the avant-garde saw the early Chaplin as a figure of the comic potential of being like a machine. The French philosopher Henri Bergson had already suggested comedy as the result of human beings acting like machines, and the point of laughter is to free us from this tendency. Bergson is a surprising absence from this book, considering his influence on the various avant-gardes. The avant-garde saw possibilities in this ‘mechanical’ acting for a comedy of the new machine age. Chaplin, who certainly now appears as a very strange figure, was equally strange then. He appears not only as the clown, but as an inhuman machine or puppet. Chaplin could be read as the ‘new man’ of communism and this ‘Chaplinism’ as the dream of the flexible and graceful worker, able to fit to the demands of industrial production.
This adoption of Chaplin as the figure of the new worker is evident in ‘biomechanics,’ the new discipline of bodily activity taken-up in the workplace and in the theatre and cinema productions of the avant-garde. Once again, this seems like the most extreme fantasy of ‘totalitarianism’: the body reduced to a mechanical unit, like the numbered workers of Zamyatin’s satire of 1921 We (a book reviewed by George Orwell, and a huge influence on his Nineteen Eighty-Four). In contrast, Hatherley stresses how these integrations of life in the machine produce something rough, comic, and changeable. Contrary to the Taylorist regulation of the worker, the avant-garde sought a type of work somewhere between sport and the circus. Communist ‘Taylorism’ was, in this vision, not so much about mechanical efficiency, but the ability to pull off new ‘tricks,’ as in the physical demand and grace of the circus act.
Of course Hatherley is aware of the dark side of this vision. Even at the time Lenin and Trotsky would regard the extremes of the avant-garde with some scepticism and distrust. The relation of these experiments to the violence of Soviet industrialisation becomes particular evident in Hatherley’s final chapter on sound film. Developed by the Americans, Soviet directors were soon fascinated by the possibilities of the sound film. The first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer, premiered in 1927, a year before the first five-year plan in the USSR. In an avant-garde film, like Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931), synchronised sound was used to create a hymn to the shock industrialisation of the plan. In this film, and others, Hatherley traces an ‘industrial sound,’ eerily predictive of later ‘industrial music’ of the 1980s. Here the celebration of industrial development risks being subsumed into a Stalinist politics of production. While Stalinism stressed the humanity of the worker, this was humanity capable of superhuman efforts of production. Biomechanical man was replaced by the ‘man of steel’ – ‘Stalin’ is based on the Russian word for steel and, coincidentally, Superman first appeared in DC comics in 1938.
The Chaplin Machine is not just an historical reconstruction, but also a polemic. Hatherley has two main targets. The first is the consensus that the avant-garde was already totalitarianism in the making, celebrating the worst of the submission to the machine and to production that would be realised by Stalin. Hatherley belongs with a number of post-Cold War scholars who have stressed the complex lines of disagreement, contention and debate within the Soviet and European communist avant-gardes that don’t simply fit with Stalin’s later politics of production. The second is the more recent tendency in cultural studies and so-called ‘postmodernism’ to uncritically celebrate popular culture as a site of energetic subversion. For Hatherley the work of the avant-garde in engaging with popular culture is one that takes that culture seriously as a site of multiple forms and possibilities, negative and positive. Also, the avant-garde reworks and changes the popular, trying to transform American popular culture in a communist direction.
This polemic also allows us to reflect on Hatherley’s own approach across his burgeoning series of works. In his characterisation of the communist avant-garde, Hatherley notes how they turned to the most disturbing elements of capitalism, submerged themselves in popular culture to turn it to communist ends, and forensically investigated the landscape of industrialism. It is not difficult to assume Hatherley’s identification with this project, as his own work ranges from sympathetic accounts of brutalist architecture to the possibilities of popular culture to critique contemporary capitalism.
If read alongside Hatherley’s recent broadside against austerity chic, The Ministry of Nostalgia (which I reviewed here), The Chaplin Machine becomes a work that tries to reconstruct a useable past for our crisis-ridden present. Of course, as Hatherley is well aware, the historical conditions are wildly different. The result is a dark comedy, in which the comic energies released by the communist avant-garde contrast with the exhaustion and cynicism of our moment. Hatherley’s gamble is something can result from this comic clash. Marx’s comment, after Hegel, ‘first as tragedy, then as farce,’ has become a repeated mantra in recent times. Hatherley’s return to the revolutionary past, to this melding of tragedy and farce, is an attempt to politicise the current farce.
In fact, the real confrontation or combination is Chaplin plus Taylor; Taylor being Frederick Winslow Taylor, inventor of ‘scientific management’ as the art of extracting maximum work from the worker by treating them as a machine. This hyper-capitalist style of management exerted some attraction on the Bolsheviks, including Lenin, but especially on the communist avant-garde of the 1920s. What appeared to be a radical dehumanising treatment of the worker as a machine was seen by the avant-garde as promising more production for less labour. Becoming a machine offered higher efficiency and even the chance to dream on the job while the body went through its mechanical motions. This doesn’t seem very funny. The Charlie Chaplin of Modern Times (1936) offered a comic satire of the worker crushed by industrial production, as Chaplin finds himself literally caught in the cogs of the machine.
Against this humanist vision, the avant-garde saw the early Chaplin as a figure of the comic potential of being like a machine. The French philosopher Henri Bergson had already suggested comedy as the result of human beings acting like machines, and the point of laughter is to free us from this tendency. Bergson is a surprising absence from this book, considering his influence on the various avant-gardes. The avant-garde saw possibilities in this ‘mechanical’ acting for a comedy of the new machine age. Chaplin, who certainly now appears as a very strange figure, was equally strange then. He appears not only as the clown, but as an inhuman machine or puppet. Chaplin could be read as the ‘new man’ of communism and this ‘Chaplinism’ as the dream of the flexible and graceful worker, able to fit to the demands of industrial production.
This adoption of Chaplin as the figure of the new worker is evident in ‘biomechanics,’ the new discipline of bodily activity taken-up in the workplace and in the theatre and cinema productions of the avant-garde. Once again, this seems like the most extreme fantasy of ‘totalitarianism’: the body reduced to a mechanical unit, like the numbered workers of Zamyatin’s satire of 1921 We (a book reviewed by George Orwell, and a huge influence on his Nineteen Eighty-Four). In contrast, Hatherley stresses how these integrations of life in the machine produce something rough, comic, and changeable. Contrary to the Taylorist regulation of the worker, the avant-garde sought a type of work somewhere between sport and the circus. Communist ‘Taylorism’ was, in this vision, not so much about mechanical efficiency, but the ability to pull off new ‘tricks,’ as in the physical demand and grace of the circus act.
Of course Hatherley is aware of the dark side of this vision. Even at the time Lenin and Trotsky would regard the extremes of the avant-garde with some scepticism and distrust. The relation of these experiments to the violence of Soviet industrialisation becomes particular evident in Hatherley’s final chapter on sound film. Developed by the Americans, Soviet directors were soon fascinated by the possibilities of the sound film. The first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer, premiered in 1927, a year before the first five-year plan in the USSR. In an avant-garde film, like Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931), synchronised sound was used to create a hymn to the shock industrialisation of the plan. In this film, and others, Hatherley traces an ‘industrial sound,’ eerily predictive of later ‘industrial music’ of the 1980s. Here the celebration of industrial development risks being subsumed into a Stalinist politics of production. While Stalinism stressed the humanity of the worker, this was humanity capable of superhuman efforts of production. Biomechanical man was replaced by the ‘man of steel’ – ‘Stalin’ is based on the Russian word for steel and, coincidentally, Superman first appeared in DC comics in 1938.
The Chaplin Machine is not just an historical reconstruction, but also a polemic. Hatherley has two main targets. The first is the consensus that the avant-garde was already totalitarianism in the making, celebrating the worst of the submission to the machine and to production that would be realised by Stalin. Hatherley belongs with a number of post-Cold War scholars who have stressed the complex lines of disagreement, contention and debate within the Soviet and European communist avant-gardes that don’t simply fit with Stalin’s later politics of production. The second is the more recent tendency in cultural studies and so-called ‘postmodernism’ to uncritically celebrate popular culture as a site of energetic subversion. For Hatherley the work of the avant-garde in engaging with popular culture is one that takes that culture seriously as a site of multiple forms and possibilities, negative and positive. Also, the avant-garde reworks and changes the popular, trying to transform American popular culture in a communist direction.
This polemic also allows us to reflect on Hatherley’s own approach across his burgeoning series of works. In his characterisation of the communist avant-garde, Hatherley notes how they turned to the most disturbing elements of capitalism, submerged themselves in popular culture to turn it to communist ends, and forensically investigated the landscape of industrialism. It is not difficult to assume Hatherley’s identification with this project, as his own work ranges from sympathetic accounts of brutalist architecture to the possibilities of popular culture to critique contemporary capitalism.
If read alongside Hatherley’s recent broadside against austerity chic, The Ministry of Nostalgia (which I reviewed here), The Chaplin Machine becomes a work that tries to reconstruct a useable past for our crisis-ridden present. Of course, as Hatherley is well aware, the historical conditions are wildly different. The result is a dark comedy, in which the comic energies released by the communist avant-garde contrast with the exhaustion and cynicism of our moment. Hatherley’s gamble is something can result from this comic clash. Marx’s comment, after Hegel, ‘first as tragedy, then as farce,’ has become a repeated mantra in recent times. Hatherley’s return to the revolutionary past, to this melding of tragedy and farce, is an attempt to politicise the current farce.