
Teddie Adorno and Charlie Chaplin meet at a party in Malibu in the mid-1940s. Standing next to each other, they are parodies of themselves. Both in auto-exile, neither belongs to the hologrammatic fantasy of California. They are each always other.
Adorno is introduced to an actor, recently returned from war, whose missing hand has been replaced with an iron claw. As soon as the actor turns away, Chaplin, standing centre stage, mimics Adorno’s split-second expression of abject shock, that one frame in a moving image that contains the recoiling and guilt of recoiling, compensating and guilt of compensating, as the claw is sighted and the handshake ritual glitches. Chaplin captures the expression—barely a glint—and apes it. It is both an exact resemblance and a gross exaggeration, copy and caricature.
Years later, Adorno remembers this encounter in celebration of Chaplin’s 75th birthday: “All the laughter he brings about is so near to cruelty;” says Adorno, “solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its legitimation and its element of the salvational.” Such cautious reverence is significant. Elsewhere, Adorno superimposes laughter and cruelty as a key moment of ‘culture industry’: “[A] laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everything else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity.”
What separates Chaplin, and perhaps what earns him this reverence, is his unknowableness, his elusive playfulness, his suggestiveness. He is not merely a producer of cultural capital, in the sense that he is not an actor or filmmaker by way of trade or profession. He is an incessant performer. His off-screen performativity is his social mode, and each banal act of clowning, each momentary update, complicates a sense of his ‘true’ self, so that the very notion of a true self might finally collapse. Chaplin is Chaplin is Chaplin. He is beyond schizophrenia and towards compulsive multiplication.
In Modern Times, Chaplin’s frequently sampled other, the Tramp, negotiates the pathological shittiness of Depression-era capitalism. The factories, when still running, are Fordist panopticons. Some workers are revolting, others are having nervous breakdowns, the majority are ground to automatons. Beautiful waif-girls are stealing bread and bananas. Cops are herding riff-raff. Gaols bloom with Commies and misfits. The rich waft past like rakish ghosts. Chaplin’s Tramp moves through the scenes as an odd composite: despite his earnest Protestant work ethic and his infallible ‘goodness,’ he is exceptionally naughty and is constantly being carted away by police. He corrupts the micromanaged body-economics of the factory assembly line by failing to cope with the repetition of bolt-wrenching. When the system corrupts Chaplin begins to dance, a truly non-profitable economy of movement for the productive industrial capitalist.
It is too simple to say that in Modern Times the Tramp performs a perfect allegory for the human spirit under threat from modernity. Indeed, it is too simple to say ‘human spirit,’ and it is certainly too simple to say that capitalism operates outside the human in order that it might threaten some organic essence. It is certainly a seductive temptation, to pit the Tramp against the superstructure and to hope that the human prevails and the machine is corrupted sufficiently. Yet it might be more interesting to imagine the Tramp—rather than exemplifying the human or standing-in for a human whole—as a composite or hybrid that operates on a plane beyond representation. In other words, Chaplin as performer becomes the Tramp as a series of cinematic images, not singular but many. His body is a collection of film grains, and the composition of the Tramp as a celluloid object has three resonances. Firstly, the material of his body as it changes through space, that is, his mime and slapstick, shape and form. Secondly, its reproduction in light. Thirdly, the relationship between the body’s movement, its cinematic image and technological processes that produces it. The Tramp is as human as the camera lens that images him, orders his composition in frames. His ego is no longer a psychological or even emotional continuum.
Walter Benjamin was excited by the implications of the cinematic body in respect to contemporary audiences (that is, contemporary in the 1930s), proposing a model of ‘innervation,’ with Chaplin as a key example. Innervation here refers to the affective flow of the on-screen body’s movement-images to the perceiving audience, so that the experience of perception simulates (and stimulates) the sensation of ‘being alongside,’ attuned with, the movement capabilities of the new cinematic technologies. So the engagement with the filmed body excites a kind of electrodynamic response in the nervous system of the perceiving body. Sensations of dissonance, acceleration, cuts and swerves. “In its jerky and technologically mediated movements,” says Nieland, “Chaplin’s Tramp promised, as it modeled, a kind of being best suited to modernity’s public world: distracted and forgetful, dislocated and improvisational, aimless and instantaneous, at home in modernity’s mechanical world of things.” Benjamin, continues Nieland, goes even further, suggesting that Chaplin’s “anarchic personality exploded bourgeois models of personality; its “negative expressionism” set him drifting from the demands of bourgeois sociality – moral propriety, consistency of character, domestication.”
Yet there is now another danger: in setting up a loose analogue between human and machine, we approach another simple model, in which the human is not imagined in opposition to the machine, but in terms of self-similarity or psychological identification.
So, while still playing with a notion of self-sameness but complicating it, here is another idea: the parasite. In French, ‘parasite’ has three meanings. Two are shared in English, that is, the parasite as biological organism and the parasite as a relationship of social dependence. The third meaning in French is what we call, in English, static. So the parasite, as Serres suggests, might refer to any productive interference in a transmission. The parasite-as-interference model suggests any meaning transfer that is complicated, deviated, changed or added to by interloping static. In this sense, the parasite is neither wholly guest nor host, and in fact, the guest/host dialectic has no distinction in French, where both subjects of a parasitic relation are known by the same word, hôte. Rather, the parasite is the creative, corruptive, potential-filled agent of change, differentiation, agitation. The parasite doesn’t destroy the system it interferes with, but nudges it, plays with it, improvises its structural organisations. When we watch Modern Times we can imagine that Chaplin’s Tramp parasitically engages with industrial capitalism while industrial capitalism parasitically engages with the Tramp. The interference is two-way or many-ways. Subject/object structures collapse. “What is essential,” says Serres, “is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations.”
In this model, the difference produces the thing. Chaplin’s Tramp is a play of differences: if we can say that the Tramp is a character, then the character is known as a complex of minimum differences. Each movement of the body, facial expression and deviation from what is expected, framed in long and short shots, allow Chaplin’s Tramp to interfere as a mode of existence. The humour of Chaplin is in the resonances of differences and sameness, the ability to play on what is banal and fantastic, expected and unexpected, closeness and distance, intimacy and alienation. This is clowning, among other things. We laugh because play of difference is key to experience: fluctuation, attraction and repulsion, atomic collision, the pleasures of opposition, synaethesia, hyphens, the burlesque. Each making the other. Interference might have political mobility if we imagine the parasite as an organised cell of activism. Interference might imply a radical approach to clock time, where clock time operates at the unit of onward production. In this sense, interference might be anti-progress, where progress is accumulation of systemised time-units in an economy of productivity. As a parasitic relation, the Tramp works these differences. The sensation of the world and of being in the world. Tea gurgling in the gut, twisted hankie up the nostril of the boss, coffee poured through the cavity of a roast chook.
It feels appropriate to end with another snippet of Adorno’s strange and lovely birthday dedication. The reverie of comparison here is almost incomprehensible – Adorno moves from synaethesia to total eccentricity, and yet in a movement that feels entirely appropriate, fucking with the smoothness of metaphor. He writes:
The one who comes walking is Chaplin, who brushes against the world like a slow meteor even where he seems to be at rest; the imaginary landscape that he brings along is the meteors’ aura, which gathers here in the quiet noise of the village into transparent peace, while he strolls on with the cane and that so become him.