Abstract

Abstract:

The article examines early-Soviet figurations of cinema as a vaccine capable of inoculating workers with corporeal efficiency. Within this cultural fantasy, Charlie Chaplin was appropriated by the Soviet avant-garde to play an unlikely role of an expert in the theory and practice of labor. Tracing the cultural contexts of Chaplin's cameo in Iprit (1925), a science-fiction novel by Viktor Shklovsky and Vsevolod Ivanov, this article shows that the search for immunity from labor exhaustion opens wider vistas of the history of labor that run through the biocapital of slavery into the Soviet adoption of Taylorist practices of bodily standardization.

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