The Figure of the Worker between Cinema and Politics Event

Luka Arsenjuk: The Workers’ Century. The Figure of the Worker between Cinema and Politics

The American cultural historian Michael Denning has recently suggested that the twentieth century should be called “the workers’ century.” Indeed, the emancipatory struggles that went on in the twentieth century can hardly be conceptualized without recognizing at their center the effects of the figure of the worker. But if the first half of the political twentieth century is traversed entirely by the search for and the construction of worker power, then the second half can be said to have been characterized by the seeming exhaustion of the figure of the worker, its crisis, and by the emergence of other-multiple-figures of politics. The lecture will suggest that the difficulty of imagining new contemporary forms of politics and political organization today stems from our uncertainty about the present political status of the figure of the worker. It will then propose to examine how the figure of the worker has been conceived in that other well-known twentieth century, “the century of cinema.” The aim of this investigation, however, is not to transpose the crisis of politics onto the terrain of art, or to show how the cultural logic of cinema “solves” the problem of the figure of the worker. The aim is more modest: to trace the parallel histories of the two centuries, of the figure of the worker in politics and in cinema, and ask about the ways they might or might not elucidate each other.