Universidad de la República, Montevideo
1. Introduction
The division and mechanization of work in modern factories,
as developed during the nineteenth century, has promoted many theoretical
discussions and inspired many esthetic images. Since the very last years of
that century and the first decades of the next, two areas of crucial
transformations intensify the presence of this issue both in the sphere of
discourses (from public opinion and political discussions to theoretical and
philosophical texts) and in ordinary, everyday life and perception. These
transformations are: changes in the management that operated both inside and
outside the factory, but thatattained public
visibility mainly in the diagram of the process of production within the
factory -which and, therefore, of the factory itself-, that are usually called fordism, and rationalization in the use of time, the
corporal movements and other aspects of workers´ activity within the factory,
which was the object of several theories and the result of several techniques (Rattansi 42-45), but that is usually called from the name
of the most famous one: taylorism.
In this text, I will try to show the importance of taylorism as a modeling figure in the scene of the German
avant-garde.[1]
I will focus on what was the mayor objection of the many sociologists,
politicians, artists, and, of course, workers who criticized it from the 1890’s to the 1920’s: that the constant
repetition of a reduced series of pre-settled movements in the anomic immensity
of the assembly line is a severely alienating activity. The job, these critics
said, does not require -indeed, it forbids- any intellectual or creative
participation by the workers, who are reduced to the function of a machine.
Moreover, the relation the workers can establish between their actions and the
whole production process is highly abstract: they can see the final objects
they are producing but they do not have a holistic perception of them. Without
a global vision of the project, the worker fails to recognize it as a project,
and therefore fully (which means: both completely and organically) to
incorporate him/herself to it. He or she can “know” the point
of his/her actions but cannot “experience” their sense.
All the early twentieth century German texts and films
discussed in class show the incapacity of an individual either to understand
the sense of his actions and/or to take control of them, which is in most cases
related to the obscure relation[2]
of the figure with the master plan of his work or actions (as occurs to
Gregorio Samsa, the protagonist of The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari, and the Tiller Girls). In most
cases, the text or film confronts the reader or spectator with the difficulty
or even the impossibility of having an overview of the story and/or of its
sense. I will examine first the references made to industrial production,
factory workers and the fordist-taylorist system in
two theoretical texts seen in class: Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of
Art”, and Sigfried Kracauer’s
“The Mass Ornament.” Then I will discuss how the imaginary of taylorism, described by these analysts, permeates Alfred Döblin’s
2. Benjamin and Kracauer
in the Age of Taylorism
2.1 Benjamin and the factory worker
In the “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin compares the relationship between the film
actor and his work with that between the factory worker and his own:
While facing the camera, he [the actor] knows
that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the
market. This market, where he offers his labor but also his whole self, his
heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting, he has as little
contact with it as any article made in a factory. (231)
The foreground of this reference to the modern factory is
Marx’s analysis of work in the big factories,[3]
links as well as its reformulations by critics of taylorism.[4]
Just like the factory worker, the film actor is alienated, both in the
literal and sociological sense of the term.[5]
Neither of them has a complete image nor a precise understanding of the
concrete process in which he or she is participating.[6]
He or she repeats an action that has only a fragmentary and theoretical
relation with the final object, not an integrated, experienced one -among other
reasons because he or she cannot develop a mental map of the project leading to
the production of the object, nor, therefore, locate him/herself in such a map.
Benjamin’s observation has to
do with fordism and taylorism,
but also with the Marxist opposition between use-values and exchanges-values,
since not only the product of his work but even his or her own person becomes a
commodity:[7]
The film responds to the shriveling of the aura
with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the
studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry,
preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the
personality”, the phony spell of a commodity. (231)[8]
What it is stressed in these passages is the alienated and
fragmentary character of work in the context of early twentieth century
capitalism. According to Benjamin, works of art, esthetic theories, and
technologies of representation share these features. While
the painters obtain a “total” picture, “that of the cameraman
consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law”
(234). The concepts of fragment and assemblage in film are made
implicitly to refer to the universe of the modern factory, and compared
explicitly to some avant-gardes (mainly Dadaism, but also Cubism and Futurism)
in a way that will have to be reconsidered in our discussion of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Indeed, according to Dietrich Scheunemann, was in his article on Döblin’s
novel than Benjamin introduces for the first time in literary theory the
concept of montage, which “originates from the realm of industry”
(88).
2.2. Kracauer
on dismembering
Although
the masses give rise to the ornament [the figures created by the
“girls”], they are not involved in thinking it through. As linear
as it may be, there is no line that extends from the small sections of the mass
to the entire figure. […] The more the coherence of the figure is relinquished
in favor of mere linearity, the more distant it becomes from the immanent
consciousness of those constituting it. […] Everyone does his or her task
on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the
totality. Like the pattern in the stadium, the organization stands above the
masses, a monstrous figure whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its
bearers, and barely even observes it himself.–It is conceived according
to rational principles which the
Kracauer claims that in Tiller Girls performances,
like in factory work, the unified body is dismembered by a repetitive,
“geometrical” activity, and the organic subject turned into a
passive object,[10] with no volition or creativity,
repeating like a machine the movements someone else (the big boss, the big
brother, the big male) previously designed.[11]
These physical dismembering and alienation apply, like he says, to “the
soul as well.”
3. From
single body to proxemics (taylorism,
robots and segmented work)
Kracauer’s analysis is discussed by Andreas Huyssen, who accuses him of perpetuating the traditional
“inscription of the feminine on the motion of mass culture” (Mass
Culture 48). However, as we saw above, Kracauer does
not write about women’s legs, but rather about what some men -beginning
with Manchester choreographer John Tiller, from who the group receives its
name- did with those legs, (the way in which they used them, in which they put
them to work), and also about the way in which some other people, mainly men,
looked at them. In his text, the issue of
rationalization and standardization does not depend on nor is it related to
women, but to some -rather “male”, or basically
“male-minded”- activities. In Kracauer’s
analysis, women have no volition in the process: they are mentioned as a
passive part of a process whose logic is developed by “male” or
“male-minded” choreographers and producers. Just like the body, the
person itself -that is, the woman- is alienated, erased.[12]
Here we should make a
clarification, however. The main choreographic tradition of popular
performances that can be compared to the Tiller Girls (such as French
varieties, German cabaret, strip-tease shows, and the like), are usually based
on quite a different proxemics (the “economy of
the bodies” on the stage). In all those popular performances, that
otherwise are quite different, the group is organized around a main figure, who
stays more or less static at the center of the stage. This is one of the oldest
traditions in Western theatre, running from Greek tragedy and medieval plays and
moralities, to Broadway musicals and many contemporary TV shows. In early
twentieth century popular theatre, the sun-figure (the star, diva or vedette) stayed at the center of the stage,
receiving all the attention, all the gazes; every character had to walk to the
center of the stage to talk to him or her, then move to the side again,
according to a structure which had been customary in “high” theatre
and opera until the late nineteenth century. Tiller Girls’ choreographies
(like French “cancan” and other contemporary developments) are
quite different. The sun-figure disappears, and the collective of dancers
occupies the whole stage. The structure centered on an individual protagonist
(the Star) is substituted by a collective that is entirely anonymous (the
girls).
Indeed, both models
usually mixed, producing new forms of sun-centered choreographies, rather than
“collective” ones. Broadway musicals and the new forms of
“cabarets” popularized in the early twentieth century are good
examples of that transformation: there is still a star where all the lines
converge, but he or she is now much more dynamic -moving around the whole
stage, “going to” the others, etc. The contrast between a
“central” figure and the anonymous chorus of dancers and singers
persists, albeit in a different way.
A cinematographic
example of this new, moving-sun centered economy of the space is the most
famous work of art literally based on taylorism:
Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times. One of the most important attempts
to develop a “collectivist” proxemics, on
the other hand, is another film where the relation between work, technology and
common people is a central issue: Sergei
Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkim
(1925). In the first movie there is a single protagonist opposed to an anonymous
collective, but rather than staying at the center, as is the case in film
d’art, he spends most of his time running around the whole frame,
“forcing” the camera to follow him.[13]
In Potemkim, the individual-collective
opposition fades and even disappears, and the camera, rather than focusing on a
single subject, displays either panoramic and/or collective scenes. While in
the “sun-centered” model the individual is presented as a metaphor
of the “ideal” (or anti-ideal, as in Chaplin’s movie), the
“collectivist” one constructs the collective as a metonymy of the
“people” -in a manner similar, in some ways, to that of films like Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of Will.
Chaplin’s and
Eisenstein’s movies show how “choreographic” models, such as
the one found in the Tiller Girls, are directly related to our central issue:
the individual perception of the whole project in which he/she is involved.
Chaplin’s hero is never aware of his role in the factory, nor in the
labor system at large. The film puts this on view when the character becomes
the leader of a workers’ manifestation without even noticing it.
Eisenstein’s figures, on the contrary, are the very conscious architects
of their own destiny. The single individual in the assembly line, like the
Tiller girls on the stage, loses his subjectivity, while the sailors in the
battleship take the wheel.
The legs of the Tiller
Girls, like the arms of Chaplin’s character, had become a tool. Therefore,
they are no longer part of a human body, and they can even turn against the
subject. Chaplin’s arms run out of control, becoming something like
autonomous machines, subhuman or semi-human sort of creatures, not too far from
the (subhuman?) female robot in Metropolis and the male ones in The
Terminator and Terminator II, or the (semi-human?) protagonists of Caligari and Frankenstein.
In many cases,
(including Frankenstein, of course, but also Blade Runner and 2001
A Space Odyssey, as well as their original novels), human-like creations
(that resemble their creators physically, like robots, or intellectually, like
computers), take control of their “lives,” becoming to some extent
“more than humans” -more sentimental (Frankenstein), more
obedient and efficient (Metropolis), stronger (Blade Runner),
more intelligent (2001), and so on. Indeed, it is their (usually unexpected)
ability to develop volition and undertake their own projects that makes them
threatening creatures, instead of useful servants (Schmitz-Emanz
835). But this is not the case in Metropolis, Caligari,
Modern Times, or the Tiller Girls. Nor is it, according to classical
descriptions of labor, the case of taylorism.[14]And it is not the case of Franz Biberkopf Berlin Alexanderplatz,
either.
4. The impossible project: life and
the self in Döblin’s
Georg Simmel made perhaps the most significant contributions to
the paradigm of reflection about the modern city in early twentieth century
Simmel was not the first to
establish a link between division of labor and alienation in modern society,
obviously. His view is clearly influenced by another sociologist, Émile Durkheim,[18]
author of the most influential treatise on the topic written between late
nineteenth and early twentieth century: The Division of Social Labor (1893,
the same year
Simmel’s picture of life in
modern cities shares some of its main aspects with the one Döblin
produces in his novel, with a few years of difference and in a very close
context.[20] Both stress things like the
fragmentation, proliferation, diversity, velocity and intensity, even the
contradiction of the inputs that the individual receives,
the city dweller’s development of new sensorial capacities as a result of
the stream of inputs, and the concomitant decline of integrated images of the
city and of holistic experiences of it. The main thing to retain, perhaps, is
that Simmel remarks, in the same way as Benjamin and Kracauer, the individual’s incapacity to understand
the sense of the actions he or she is guided to conduct, and to plan a
coherent, self-determined life project (not to say to undertake it).
The impossibility of
understanding the meaning of life, of making sense of it all, and the
consequent impossibility of designing a meaningful life project constitute the
issue Berlin Alexanderplatz is all about, if
we listen to the narrator: he states from the very beginning that Franz Biberkopf’s basic mistake is to try to develop a
reasonable life project. The “benefit” of reading his story, he
concludes, is to discover that life has no transcendental or global sense,
and men should just try to make a living, on a day-to-day basis (1-2).
The emphasis on life
projects is made clear from the first page of the novel.
Franz Biberkopf, an erstwhile cement- and transport-worker
[…] has just been discharged from prison […], and is now back in
And,
at first, he succeeds. But then, though economically things go rather well with
him, he gets involved in a regular combat with something that comes from the
outside, with something unaccountable, that looks like
fate.
Three times this thing crashes against our man,
disturbing his scheme of life. (1)[21]
The untitled preface from which these sentences are quoted
may seem the introduction to a typical naturalist novel by an author who prided
himself on being somehow a naturalist (Murphy 75-77). The unaccountable thing
“that looks like fate” could be easily assimilated to genetic or
social determination, as in many naturalist novels and even films.[22]
But in Döblin’s book there is not scientific
discourse framing or giving sense to the story. After a long time, Biberkopf is finally “given to understand how it all
came about. To wit, through himself, that’s obvious, through his scheme
of life, which looked like nothing on earth, but now suddenly looks […]
prideful and impudent, cowardly withal, and full of weakness. [/] This awful
thing which was his life acquires a meaning.” (2)
Biberkopf’s final “understanding”
of life, “a process of revelation of a special kind,” (632) appears
in the text under the sign of parody. The enigmatic ending of the novel remains
one of the most polemical topics in Döblin’s
criticism, leading to answers that range from the interpretation of the final
pages as a clear, consistent, ‘affirmative’ statement on specific
ways of action (Zimmermann), to understanding them as a last, definitive parody
that erode any possibility of ‘message’ or moral, as we will see.
After 600 folios of parody, carnivalesque montage of
discourses, and the systematic subversion of almost any widely-accepted value
or affirmation of modern society (from the ways of making a living to the ways
of obtaining gratification by sexual intercourse, to the ways of solving social
problems), the idea of a final, definitive meaning, delivered in the last
couple of pages, does not seem very convincing (Komar
Technique, 333). Indeed, fragmentation, montage and carnivalization
remain untouched until the end of the novel:
Often
they march past his window with flags and music and singing. Biberkopf watches coolly form his door,
he’ll not join the parade any more. Shut your trap, in step, old cuss, march along with the rest of us. But if I march along, I
shall have to pay for it later on with my head, pay for the schemes of others.
That’s why I first figure out everything, and only if everything’s
quite O.K., and suits me, I’ll take action. Reason is the gift of man, jackasses replace it with a clan.
Biberkopf is working as assistant door-man,
takes numbers, checks cars, sees who comes in and goes out. (633-634)
The abrupt changes of
focus (different points of view and even changes in direct discourse are
juxtaposed without any mark) and the montage of discourses are as present as in
the rest of the novel. But most important is the flagrant identity of what is
presented as the character’s new ideas about how to conduct his life, and
the ideas he manifested before the revelation. To “figure out everything”
and to find out if everything “suits” him
before making decisions is the attitude Biberkopf
openly showed during the whole novel. The same applies to his rejection to
being part of a clan. His contacts with the Nazis (and any other group, institution
or “clan”) were brief, superficial, and marked very rare exceptions
in the life of a highly individualistic man. What best defines him in this
point is his response to the anarchist: “A man’s got only himself,
just himself. I look after myself. I’m a self-provider, I am!” The
worker insists: “And I’ve told that three dozen times already: you
can’t do anything alone. We need a fighting organization.” Biberkopf don’t even reply: “Franz laughs and
laughs.” (373)
At the end of the novel,
the “self-provider” becomes an employee, and at the same time
recognizes the need of being with other people.
Now
at last he is the assistant door-man in a medium-sized factory. He is no longer
alone on Alexanderplatz. There are people to the
right, and people to the left of him, some walk in front of him, others behind
him.
Much
unhappiness comes from walking alone. When there are several, it’s
somewhat different. I must get the habit of listening to others, for what the
others say concerns me, too. (632-633)
In the previous
quotations we saw that the “new” man is nothing but the same, old Biberkopf. Here we find an incongruity between what the
character just said to the men in the parade (I don’t march along, I stay
aside) and what the omniscient narrator says about him (he marches among the
others). The flagrant contradiction appears in the same page. Moreover, the
fact that Biberkopf was never “alone on Alexanderplatz,” nor anywhere else, is remarked
throughout the novel, both by the persistent and often detailed mention of the
people that actually walk around him in the street and by the importance that Biberkopf’s friends, relatives and acquaintances have
in his life. If the plot of the novel were to be reduced to a brief phrase, it
could be: Franz Biberkopf walking (both in the
figurative and the literal sense) around people in
Biberkopf, then, is neither “less
alone”, nor more aware, nor acting in a different way by the end of the
novel than before the “revelation.” The only transformation he
seems to have undergone, indeed, is that he no longer expects anything from
life -as if he were too tired. It seems then that the “revelation”
is one more gag about “life projects,” a derision dedicated, this
time, to the project of living with no projects -a new level of parody. In
fact, the passage about the revelation is the last of the text’s many
self-stereotyped parodies.[23]
The parody is organized
following a well-known theatrical and narrative parodical
scheme, frequently employed in XVIII century comedies and novels. A pompous
announcement is made, stating that a big Truth or revelation is about to occur,
then a digression, usually accompanied by a spectacular or verbose apparatus,
distracts the audience or the reader. When the digression is over, the
revelation is supposed to have taken place. The public just
“missed” it. In order to show that strategy, we will need to review
the whole passage.
Immediately
after the trial Biberkopf is offered a job as
assistant door-man in a medium-sized factory. He accepts I have nothing further
to report about his life.
We
have walked along a dark road, at first there was no street-lamp burning, we
only knew it was the right road, but gradually it grew bright and brighter,
till at last we reached the light and under its rays were able to make out the
name of the street. It was a process of revelation of a special kind. Franz Biberkopf did not walk along the streets the way we do. He
rushed blindly through this dark street, knocking against trees, and, the more
he ran, the more he knocked against the trees, he shut his eyes tightly. His
head al bunged up, almost at his wits’ end, at
least he reached his goal. As he fell down, he opened his eyes. Then the
street-lamp shone bright above him, and he was able to read the sign.
Now
at last he is assistant door-man in a medium-sized factory. (632).[24]
The self-stereotyped
parody is organized in three paragraphs.[25]
In the first one Biberkopf enters in the formal labor
system; the “self-provider” (370) becomes an employee, and the
narrator put an end to the “story of FB,” with a parody of
bureaucratic or judicial discourse, or of a police report: “I have
nothing further to report.” In the second paragraph the great
announcement is made: the climax is just about to be reached, and the
revelation with it. The text is no longer down to earth, but becomes
transcendental and meaningful. A blank space marks the change of dimension, as
the style moves from the unadorned mundane “report” to the
pomposity of an ecumenical Truth. A change of focalization takes place:
although the narrator keeps using the first person, now he shifts from the
singular (I) consistent with the discourse of a witness, to the plural (We),
which incorporates the reader in the space of the revelation (epiphanies, as
Benjamin pointed out about the works of art, can only happen in praesentia).[26]
The third step is the
revelation, which understandably takes a much longer paragraph. Indeed, the
extension derives from a change in the pragmatic dimension. The first paragraph
closes up Biberkopf’s worldly story; the second
one announces its profound sense. Both things are resolved straightforwardly.
The revelation, instead, takes a detour: the narrator embarks on a parable-like
passage, which runs lines and lines while the reader expects the announced
revelation. It is the usual distractive device -textual grandiloquence and biblical
imagery, in this case.[27]
So far, Döblin has applied the formula quite carefully. He even
follows a long tradition of this kind of parody,[28]
which consists of returning from the “revelatory” digression to the
core storyline in a particularly vulgar, coarse or plain scene that
counterpoints the previous profound images. In the novel, the contrast is
particularly apparent: “Now at last he is assistant-door in a
medium-sized factory.” However, in the last sentence of the third
paragraph Döblin betrays the formula in a way that
shows the large distance that lies between eighteenth century parodies and
avant-garde derision. Traditionally, the detour is closed with a sentence that
ironically “reminds” us of the revelation “made” during
the detour (as if the audience were not to notice it because it was paying
attention to the secondary story, or the impressive device).[29]
Instead, Döblin’s narrator shows the character
in the moment of the revelation, right in front of the reader’s eyes:
“Then the street-lamp shone bright above him, and he was able to read the
sign.” While the traditional formula supposedly induces
the reader to react with something like “Oh, no. I missed
the explanation of it all!” Döblin’s
clause is more likely to produce something like “So, what is
the explanation?!!” By doing that, the parody itself becomes parodied
-and the margins of representation relocated. The narrator-story-reader
relation changes, by including the text itself in the carnivalization,
to an extent that only some baroque works had done thus far.[30]
In baroque works the reader or spectator was frequently included in the space
of representation: either addressed in the second person (“Idle
reader”, as Cervantes heads his text) or by a quite complex play of
absences and presences (as for the hidden “original viewer” of
Velazquez’s Meninas).[31]
Döblin goes further, using
the plural of the first person, but where he really breaks the framing is when
he makes the reader participate in the diegetic
universe, by making him or her participate of the very moment of the revelation
-with only the gap of the past tense, customary of indirect style.[32]
In this point, Döblin’s parody affects the
whole structure of representation by presenting an impossible device, where
baroque and modernist works presented very complex but “soluble”
structures. According to Bürger and Murphy, this
would be one of the things that define an avant-garde work.[33]
4.2. Self-providers, flaneurs, factory workers, door-men, and other devices
We have discussed Biberkopf’s “revelation” to support the
idea that from beginning to end the novel derides any attempt to design a life
project -either by accepting fate, using reason, replacing it with a clan,
trying to be decent (or indecent, or anything else), walking alone, walking in
a group, or by any other means. The only solution to the “big
questions” of life would be, then, that there is no answer.[34]
An answer that could lead to inactivity, if activity were not something imposed
to living beings -even in suicide.[35]
Biberkopf’s response to his
“revelation” is the renouncement of any expectation from life,
other than “a piece of bread and butter.” The
“self-provider” becomes stabilized, both in the sense of finding a
post and getting a position, and of staying situated in a single place,
watching the others, seeing “who comes in and goes out” (634). What
Biberkopf calls “self-provider” is to
some extent an outsider, like the flaneur
-someone who moves erratically by the social scene- and the homeless -who
stay aside, living in the interstices, reappearing here and there. For the
assistant door-man, he is not exactly the contrary of an outsider (somebody
completely incorporated in the system) but rather someone on the very limit
between the inside and the outside. He does not have control of who can enter, he is just an assistant -the one who helps,
and also the one who’s there, watching.
Now, after his long
quest, he will stay still, watching the others pass by. Indeed, this is his new
attitude in life. In the last two pages, after the passage of the revelation,
he appears only two times actually doing something: watching who comes
in and goes out at work, and watching “coolly from his door” the
parade that goes past his window. As happened during the whole novel, it is not
clear if his attitude toward life models his labor activities, or vice versa.
What is clear is that both are always symmetrical. The waywork
determinates our lives (and vice versa) seems to be an important aspect of Döblin’s novel.
Like the flaneur, Biberkopf’s
“new” relationship and attitude regarding other people are based on
the gaze.[36] Within the dominant tradition of
cultural theory, the flaneur has been the most
productive image of the moving individual gaze in the modern metropolis. For
the still gaze, I would argue that at least two significant figures could be
mentioned. Both are, to some extent, a counter-equivalent of the flaneur. The first are the people seated in public squares
and outdoors cafés -individuals who, rather than exercise themselves in
Baudelaire’s “fantastic fencing” (155),[37]
assume the attitude of a spectator, as in film or theatre. This first figure
can be related to dandyism, flaneurie, and
spectacle, and, like all of them, unproductiveness. The second one is connected
rather to their opposites -respectively: working classes, commuters, everyday
life, and productivity. This figure is the worker on the assembly line. In
these two specular series,
Baudelaire-Benjamin’s flaneur would be mirrored
by commuters and ambulant vendors, while people in downtown cafés would find
their corresponding image of the second series in people who are seated
outdoors downtown, like them, many times in front of a cup, and like them,
watching passersby, not to distract them but rather to ask them to put some
money in the cup.
The assistant door-man
does not fit in this twofold serialization. He is not just watching people, but
he is not asking money from them. In some aspects, the closer figure to the
door-man would be the worker in the assembly line: both are employees in a
factory, and the work of both is based on something that is “passing
by.”[38] But the door-man does nothing with what
is passing except watch it. He makes nothing. He is in the
factory, as he has been incorporated into the formal labor system, but still
as an ancillary component. He is no longer an outsider; but he is not a
complete insider.[39]
5. Conclusions
“On the assembly
line, the image of the asylum was a real
condition, rather than a metaphor.”
(Meyer 40, rephrasing
workers’ statements from 1923)
Avant-garde works, on the contrary, deconstruct the very
possibility of such a reconstruction; by the way of laying traps the receptor
cannot overcome, negating any possible meaning or sense in the work, and the
like. In this paper I tried to show that factory workers, rationalization and
division of labor were very present in the context of German avant-gardes, both
in social and aesthetic theories. I attempted then to illustrate how the
fragmentation, alienation and lack of metaphysical transcendence present in
Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, that critics have related to the
experience of life in the modern metropolis, could be also illuminated in
connection with the modern experience of fordist-taylorist
factories. I don’t refer, of course, only to the actual work in
factories, but rather to the way in which that kind of experience affected the
way people lived -altogether with many others, such as “life in the big
city,” the First World War, new communication technologies, means of
transportation, and so on.
If new models of labor
have a special relevance in any single aspect of modern life, it is in the way
of developing life projects. A good example is the idea of the personal life or
trajectory as a career, which arises during the nineteenth century,
along with the new big factories, companies, and institutions of knowledge, and
which rapidly becomes a major alternative to the population of cities. By the
early twentieth century, however, in most places, the impact on everyday life
of alienating factors such as work rationalization, and the shocks produced by
phenomena such as severe unemployment and hyperinflation (all things that had
special significance in Germany) eroded the dream of “making a
career”, and indeed, for many, the dream of any life project. In such a
context, the ominous image of the worker in the assembly line, the individual
dehumanized and alienated by the repetition of a simple and meaningless task,
became not only a popular icon (as in Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times,
or René Clair’s 1931 Ŕ nous la liberté!), but also a plastic, configurative pattern in
the social imaginary -i.e. something that contributes deeply and actively to
the formation of images, symbols and narratives, even in some cases where there
is no literal or direct connection between the model figure and the concrete
image.[42]
In Berlin Alexanderplatz,
such a relation is suggested: the final acceptance by Franz Biberkopf
of the meaningless character of life is directly related to his incorporation
into the labor market, as employee in a factory. Biberkopf’s
individualistic and odd personality, which makes him almost unemployable
(he seems more apt to become a gigolo or a philosopher than a common employee)
and his remarkable disdain for any manual activity remains identical. Instead
of using his hands to change what is “passing by,” he will keep
watching and noticing, as he has done during his whole life. He never will be
“on the line.”
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[1] In most technical
literature nowadays this paradigm is called rationalization (and the particular
theories and practices conducted by or inspired on
[2] A relation that is
a perfect example of what Freud calls the "uncanny.”
[3] The classical and
most influential remarks by Marx on factory work are in the chapters VII.1,
XIV, and XV of the first book of The Capital.
[4] By the time
Benjamin wrote the text both fordism and taylorism had became the object of extended discussions in
critical theory, avant-garde art, and popular culture. Some of the closest
examples are Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and Lewis Mumford’s Technics
and Civilization (1934).
[5] Earlier in his
text Benjamin makes a similar remark about the film actor: “His creation
is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances
[…] [due to] elementary necessities of equipment that split the
actor’s work into series of mountable episodes.” (230) Montage on
the making of film would follow the same pattern that assemblage on the making
of industrial products.
[6] It’s
well known that in Hitchcock’s movies actors and even cameramen and
technicians often didn’t know “what he was doing” (Truffaut 17).
[7] Marx understands
the “alienation” of factory work as a key factor in the
substitution of “use-values” by “exchange-values” (Capital,
first book, I.2 [48-54] and VII.1 [197-207]); for a discussion of Marx’s
analysis s. Rattansi 152.
[8] Needless to say
that factory worker’s life or personality does not receive such a
magnification.
[9] An English group
of military trained women dancers, created in the late nineteenth century, and
hired in
[10] This aspect has
already a place in Marx’s analysis of work in the modern factory, where
“the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which
makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realized” (quoted in Gorz 2).
[11] The dismembered
body, altogether with the dismembered subject, were two mayor obsessions of the
epoch, that appear in some way or another in most artists, from Grosz to
Magritte in painting, from Buńuelto Dreyer in film,
and from O. Girondo to R. M. Rilke
(as Andreas Huyssen pointed out [Paris]), in poetry.
-Dismemberment, by the way, seems to play a key function also in Fassbinder’s filmic adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rentschler).
[12] The Tiller Girls,
according to Kracauer’s description, are
“female” objects practicing the typical “female”
exposure in a new, slightly different way. In order to be able to do that, they
are subject to “male” or “male-minded” techniques: both
regarding the education of their bodies (these women received a military
training, in an age in which such a thing was exclusively “male”)
and the physical routine they performed.
[13] This was, indeed,
the most common structure of silent comic films, developed among others by
Chaplin himself. In some way, it is the equivalent to the parallel montage of
the “last minute rescue” (two converging lines of action, e. g.
threat and help approaching simultaneously) that was the most common resource
of early action movies, as developed mainly by David W. Griffith. At the basis
of these two developments lay the two big poles of film-making: the montage and
the tracking shot, two different procedures that symbolize quite well another
polar difference: the two most innovative models of making objects in early
twentieth century Western societies: avant-gardes and fordism-taylorism.
In action movies, at least
since
[14] It is worth
remember than a similar relation between ‘bodies that work’ and
‘minds that think’ was developed within fascism, even in the less
“productive” activities. The preparation of the German boxing team
for the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 was based in this principle: very smart
–and usually weak- coaches, and very strong and unintelligent boxers.
[15] Some authors frame
these features in a quite different way, however. Judith Ryan, for instance,
relates them to “the social criticism that is the book’s central
aim” (Vanishing 864); the author has further (and more convincingly) developed
her position in a later essay (From Futurism).
[16] Just a few
examples: “Biberkopf is “a victim of the
divisions and separations between the city’s various discourses” (Scherpe 174); “the mass which gives life to the city
is, in turn, robbed for the life which defines its historicity through the loss
of its individuality as well as through its subjugation to the lifeless
municipal structure. The mass -the human- becomes entrapped in a static
image;” “the police function mechanically as they control the flow
of the human masses on the square. While controlling, they are in turn
controlled by a higher authority, a hidden mind (Sibley Fries 46, 49)). These
could be transformed in one of the countless figures of work in the fordist-taylorist factory (like Modern Times), if we
just substitute “factory” for “city” in the first two
quotations, “assembly line” for “square” in the third
[17]
“Metropolitan life, thus, underlies a heightened awareness and a
predominance of intelligence in metropolitan man. The reaction to metropolitan
phenomena is shifted to that organ which is the least sensitive and quite remote
from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve
subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and
intellectuality branches out in many directions and is integrated with numerous
discrete phenomena.” (Simmel 410-411)
[18] Many of Durkheim’s thesis were, in
turn, largely based on German sources (Jones).
[19] “The division of labor has been often accused of reducing individual to the role of a machine. And, indeed, he doesn’t know the end of the operations that he is asked to do; if he can’t link them to any objective, he only can accomplish them [s’en acquitter] by routine. Every day he repeats the same movements, with a monotonous regularity, but with neither interest on nor understanding for what he is doing. He is no longer the living cell of a living organism, who