The Excess-the Factory: A Literary Exploration of Proletarian Consciousness

Extract

[...] Only the foremen, the intermediate managers, the production controllers, are named. The latter are associated with industrial cadences and are ultimately assimilated to executants even if they have a power of control. It seems that the factory is in this poem the metonymy of a project of social bureaucratization. The unconscious of the factory refers to this project of domination that the members of the group and the review were evoking. Socialism or Barbarism. The barbarism of the factory is linked to the destruction of all initiative, 'the system, by its logic and its real functioning, denies it to the executants and wants to transfer it to the leaders. [...]

[...] The small directions go in all directions. / The cement is on the ground. / There is oil on the rags" (Kaplan, 1987: 36). The objects (rags, planks, sheet metal, cement) seem to function together and form a system in a space where workers do not exist. The attribute of the subject "weak" is inappropriate for a rag. We find similar elements in Robert Linhart's writing. "Iron, cast iron, metal, sheet metal, walls and floors, fabrics, skins, everything is hot, everything is burning, fumes and sweat, oils and greases" (Linhart, 1978b: 40). [...]

[...] "From where comes the establishment?". Les Temps Modernes, vol. 684-685, n. 16-23. -Lefort-Favreau, J. (2015). "The literary communities of Leslie Kaplan. From the factory to the writing workshop, the equality of intelligences."" Tangence, 55-72. Doi: 10.7202/1033950ar -Lévy, B. (2007). Power and Liberty. Paris: Verdier. -Linhart, R. (1978a). [...]

[...] She had entered the factory for political reasons in a context of solidarity between students and workers4. The hypothesis we would like to propose is that of a writing of work that accounts for a psychological and social alienation experience. This alienation is translated by the representation of a world structured methodically around industrial production. Thus, it would be by perceiving the point of rupture that is the factory that the reader could be aware of what underlies the social organization of work. [...]

[...] The objects are laid out in their boxes, detached. / We pass between the shelves. We touch a bit. / We see ourselves in the glass, the mirrors. We try on one garment or another. / The things, we love them for themselves' (Kaplan, 1987: 89). Here we have one of the most important aspects of the book concerning what Jean Baudrillard calls the system of objects, which is actually a system of meanings. The world of work is revealed by the availability of these objects and their horizons of meaning. [...]