Labor Exploitation and Resistance in Spain: Inoperative Figures of Work (1930- 2014)

Abstract

This dissertation traces the changing cultural representations of dispossessed and displaced workers in 20th and 21st-century Spanish society. I concentrate on the figures of the migrant worker, the unemployed laborer, and the striker, with a critical interest in how their discursive montages, both literary and filmic, are articulated. I orient my focus towards film montage and literary composition and examine how they juxtapose (select, join, and order) the different sections of the discourse that produce a specific temporal and spatial structure. I analyze the montages that explicitly make visible the discursive articulations of exploitation and resistance labor during the 30s, 60s/70s, and 2000s in Spain. Rates of migration, unemployment and social conflicts during these three periods rose dramatically in response to transformations in the labor paradigm of production (from Fordism to Post-Fordism) triggered partially by international economic crises. Cultural genres that mostly reflected these changes in Spanish society were documentaries and social realism narratives. These genres challenged traditional discourses in order to trace a social reality that was changing and required different categories of conceptualization. Through an analysis of works of these genres, I identify one main type of montage that characterizes discursivities of emancipation in each historical period studied: the pedagogical during the Second Republic, the militant during Francoist dictatorship, and the spectral in 2007/8 recession. I adopt the concept of inoperative or unworked (désoeuvrée) from the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and his essay The Inoperative Community (1986) in order to rethink how the logic of productivity and utility is denaturalized and disarticulated. These inoperative cultural representations juxtapose heterogeneous spaces and temporalities in their montages in order to interrupt a discursivity that reproduces the modern capitalist temporality of progress criticized by Walter Benjamin. Each chapter focuses on a specific figure of the inoperative worker as represented across these three periods. Chapter One, "The Migrant Laborer," explores the worker’s alienation resulting from the status of foreigner in an analysis of Imán (1930) by Ramón J. Sender, Galicia (1936) and Romancero marroquí (1939) by Carlos Velo, El largo viaje hacia la ira (1969) by Llorenç Soler, Vikingland (2011) by Xurxo Chirro, and Edificio España (2012) by Víctor Moreno. Chapter Two, "The Unemployed Laborer," examines how the subjectivity of debt/guilt is structured through the analysis of Las Hurdes (1933) and Viridiana (1961) by Luis Buñuel, No se admite personal (1968) by Antonio Luchetti, Queridísimos verdugos (1977) and Casas Viejas (1997) by Basilio Martín Patino, El taxista ful (2005), by Jordi Soler, and En la orilla (2013) by Rafael Chirbes. Chapter Three, "The Striking Worker," explores the interruptions of the capital cycle of economic retribution led by working class struggles in order to stop the temporality of progress which I understand as a productivity aimed toward accumulation. For this purpose, I analyze the collectivization of the film industry by anarchists (1936-1938), Tea Rooms. Mujeres obreras (1934) by Luisa Carnés, O todos o ninguno (1975-76) by Helena Lumbreras, and La trabajadora (2014) by Elvira Navarro. Because remnants of these discursive articulations continue to shape our understanding of working life in the current age of globalization, the aim of this research is to explore how these representations of laboring life provide a cultural perspective on the transformation of the modern concept of work focusing in the gap between the industrial and postindustrial eras and its grievances.