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.is sought after like that of happiness either in the gustatoryProducts based on chlorine and ammonia are without doubt thecategory (foie gras, entremets, wines), in that of clothing (muslin,representatives of a kind of absolute fire, a saviour but a blind one.tulle), or that of soaps (filmstar in her bath).Foam can even be thePowders, on the contrary, are selective, they push, they drive dirtsign of a certain spirituality, inasmuch as the spirit has thethrough the texture of the object, their function is keeping publicreputation of being able to make something out of nothing, a largeorder not making war.This distinction has ethnographicsurface of effects out of a small volume of causes (creams have acorrelatives: the chemical fluid is an extension of thevery different 'psychoanalytical' meaning, of a soothing kind: theywasherwoman's movements when she beats the clothes, whilesuppress wrinkles, pain, smarting, etc.).What matters is the art of35 36having disguised the abrasive function of the detergent under thedelicious image of a substance at once deep and airy which canThe Poor and the Proletariatgovern the molecular order of the material without damaging it.Aeuphoria, incidentally, which must not make us forget that there isone plane on which Persil and Omo are one and the same: theplane of the Anglo-Dutch trust Unilever.Charlie Chaplin's latest gag has been to transfer half of his Sovietprize into the funds of the Abbé Pierre.At bottom, this amounts toestablishing an identity between the nature of the poor man andthat of the proletarian.Chaplin has always seen the proletarianunder the guise of the poor man: hence the broadly human force ofhis representations but also their political ambiguity.This is quiteevident in this admirable film, Modern Times, in which herepeatedly approaches the proletarian theme, but never endorses itpolitically.What he presents us with is the proletarian still blindand mystified, defined by the immediate character of his needs,and his total alienation at the hands of his masters (the employersand the police).For Chaplin, the proletarian is still the man who is hungry; therepresentations of hunger are always epic with him: excessive sizeof the sandwiches, rivers of milk, fruit which one tosses asidehardly touched.Ironically, the food-dispensing machine (which ispart of the employers' world) delivers only fragmented andobviously flavourless nutriment.Ensnared in his starvation,Chaplin-Man is always just below political awareness.A strike is acatastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by hishunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-classcondition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincideunder the gaze (and the blows) of the police.Historically, Manaccording to Chaplin roughly corresponds to the worker of theFrench Restoration, rebelling against the machines, at a loss beforestrikes, fascinated by the problem of bread-winning (in the literalsense of the word), but as yet unable to reach a knowledge ofpolitical causes and an insistence on a collective strategy.But it is precisely because Chaplin portrays a kind of primitiveproletarian, still outside Revolution, that the representative force ofthe latter is immense.No socialist work has yet succeeded in37 38expressing the humiliated condition of the worker with so muchviolence and generosity.Brecht alone, perhaps, has glimpsed theOperation Margarinenecessity, for socialist art, of always taking Man on the eve ofRevolution, that is to say, alone, still blind, on the point of havinghis eyes opened to the revolutionary light by the 'natural' excess ofhis wretchedness.Other works, in showing the worker alreadyTo instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of itsengaged in a conscious fight, subsumed under the Cause and thedrawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical butParty, give an account of a political reality which is necessary, butincontrovertible means of exalting it.Here is the pattern of thislacks aesthetic force.newstyle demonstration: take the established value which you wantto restore or develop, and first lavishly display its pettiness, theNow Chaplin, in conformity with Brecht's idea, shows the publicinjustices which it produces, the vexations to which it gives rise,its blindness by presenting at the same time a man who is blind andand plunge it into its natural imperfection; then, at the last moment,what is in front of him [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]