2022 Du politique au poétique (séminaire 2) Du politique au poétique (séminaire 2)
The idea for this seminar came after reading Leslie Kaplan’s book L’Excès-l’usine, at once a book of poetry and a document on the experience she lived as a worker willingly “established” for political reasons in a factory at the end of the sixties. Written in the aftermath of the experience at the beginning of the eighties, this first book evokes in extremely spare poetic prose the language of Duras while marking a distance. Leslie Kaplan allows us to profoundly sense the feeling of being enclosed in the factory, a place that abolishes time and image. Her language translates the experience of being a worker by a process of reviving memory and distancing. L’Excès-l’usine appeared shortly after Robert Linhart’s book L’Établi. But Kaplan does not position herself as an intellectual writing an essay but as a poet who manages to transcribe, transpose and translate in aesthetic and corporal terms her life in the factory as an experience of language. We are dealing with language and image, not words or testimony. Given this, what could be the cinematic translation of this experience of writing?
The documentary films shown here extend beyond the classical questioning of militant film. They deconstruct the model of a cinema engaged alongside workers, to open up to forms that do not confide all their meaning to the transmission of speech, plunging us within a territory of translation and a sense driven fashioning of the experience of work.
L’Excès-l’usine is an experimental and poetic documentary form, emerging at the time when the classical forms of political documentary, the tract, the pamphlet, the testimony, had exhausted their possibilities. Getting hired in a factory becomes the material for language and for the image, and not only a testimony of what has been lived. The films of this seminar attempt to transpose the lived experience into the ground of poetry and thought, phenomenology and perception. With Robert Chenavier and Nicolas Hatzfeld, we will explore the genealogy of this kind of writing in Simone Weil’s Journal d’usine, and will reflect on the historical link that might connect the experience of the philosopher in the thirties with that of the “established” intellectuals following 68 up until today. Who are the filmmakers and photographers who attempted to create a sensory aesthetics to represent labour, exploitation and alienation? How can a gesture be filmed to communicate to the spectator a sense of the weight, heaviness and violence exercised on workers bodies? How can political documentary film become poetry, overcoming the conventions of direct testimony and embodying political thought and criticism?
Federico Rossin and Christophe Postic
In writing L’Excès-l’usine, I wanted to transmit what I had felt, the sensation that “everything is at the same time real and unreal”, “everything is true, everything is impossible”. Transmit the astonishment, the amazement. A place where words lose their meaning, “we’re working”, really? “It’s a table”, really? Transmit the Real, not the reality. People try to represent the reality from the outside, by explanation, via unionised, political or even literary discourse. I wanted to try to transmit from the inside the truly mad world of the factory, mad in the strictest sense, opposed to a vision where the factory belongs to the normal – social – banal – habitual, of that factory which founds the mass industrialised society in which we all are. Reality goes in the direction of the known, the norm of the moment, whereas the Real searches out the encounter, the surprise, the event, the emergence. Without letting myself be intimidated by that inevitable question that comes up in all the debates and discussions that have taken place since the appearance of the book: “So what do you propose, hey?” So against naturalism, against the point of view of “it’s like that”, putting the accent on what I later called “the detail, the jump and the link”: the detail, a splinter of the Real, a condensation; the jump, from Kafka’s observation, “writing means jumping outside of the line up of assassins”; and the link, discovering the links, relations, bridges between the things which seemed without connection. Attempting to grasp the factory from the interior goes together with the paradox of the “one” which immediately is forced upon us: the “one” that is a subject in a universe where subjectivising is impossible. Or to put it differently: all this reflection stimulated by L’Excès-usine helped me to understand that the Real, if one is attached to it, contains fiction and following on from that, helped me to confront new questions, when the “one” has become an “I”, when time has been able to exist and when characters and narrations have appeared.
Leslie Kaplan
At the age of twenty, full of strong ideas and resolute programmes, I thought that factories were an obligatory passage for the revolution to be carried out: labour, its capitalist exploitation, the working class, conflicts, the essential was concentrated in that site. I went there. It was in the mood of the time, 68 and just after. But history has followed other stories. Factories have been relegated to the background of political action while they have shriveled in on themselves. Many have closed. This disqualification opened the way to new and welcome curiosities, for work remains one of the most significant experiences of modern life.
The experience of work is complex, often ambivalent. For example, the effort that characterises it can be lived in pain; it can also give the satisfaction of having overcome the difficulty. The discipline of gestures and acts corresponds sometimes to an effective elegance and sometimes to an unbearable constraint. Workers, men and women, are marked by the activity as much as they execute it. Furthermore, work is linked inseparably to the activity itself and its results. A fine piece of work or a shitty job comprise the entire gamut of conditions and meanings that we attribute to these activities.
These considerations stimulate thinking about the multiple social inscriptions of work: what is designated as such and what remains invisible, what gets transmitted from one generation to the next, the origin of qualifications and inequalities, the cooperative activities that are organised, commands and constraints, the spaces occupied, techniques and their definition, the profits made and the way they are distributed, etc. The connection of these social relationships is variable, and interferes profoundly with other changes that effect societies: migrations, gender relations, consumption, authorities and institutions, cultural representations. From this point of view, tracing the history of work nourishes our understanding of society and the changes it is undergoing.
A final remark: if the experience of work interferes profoundly with our imaginations which is what I think, then cinematic representations constitute a choice passage point.
Nicolas Hatzfeld
Simone Weil (1909-1943) experienced the shock of “real life” by going to work in a factory (december 1934 - august 1935). She observed that her work comrades were almost always making false complaints, their humiliation created zones forbidden to thought, covered in silence. It is true that a talented writer who has not experienced such a trial can, by exercising the imagination, to a certain extent divine and describe the experience felt by someone bruised by reality in this way, like Jules Romains in a chapter of his “Men of Good Will”. However this authentic work of a writer does not attain the “true relation” between good and evil. To express this relation is to bring to consciousness the paradoxical reality of the factory, a place of exile where, simultaneously, one feels indispensable to the “great breath” of collective labour. What makes the superiority of the greatest works in the expression of such a complex reality is that the words assembled make the reader conscious of ceaselessly contradictory lived experiences, between monotony and acceleration, consciousness falling asleep and brutal awakenings spurred by an incident or a foreman’s order, indifference or moments of rare human warmth. This mode of expression also allows one to perceive that certain forms of the organisation of labour cannot create the conditions for a poetics or spiritualisation of the activity. They must be suppressed. One becomes aware then that workers need poetry as they need bread; but this poetry cannot remain locked up in words, for the “word cannot long remain in the stratosphere of words” (René Char). Those who work need their lives to become poetry in the gestures carried out, in their rhythm and harmony. Subordination and uniformity are afflictions inscribed in the very essence of labour, but there is a social oppression which, added to them, degrades. We must distinguish the necessity which is in the order of things – that which can be the basis of a spiritual or poetic vocation – and the false necessity of the oppression that we have the obligation to abolish because it is a “crime against the spirit”.
Robert Chenavier
With Leslie Kaplan (writer), Nicolas Hatzfeld (historian) et Robert Chenavier (philosopher).