For a diverse range of contemporary thinkers, it remains difficult to conceptualize exploitation without making reference to nineteenth-century industrial labor and its abuses. In this presentation, Professor Zachary Samalin asks why the historical scene of Victorian exploitation continues to perform this rhetorical function in theories of work and violence. There are two parts to his discussion. First, Samalin contrasts two nineteenth-century texts that theorize the relationship between labor and violence as an effect of control over the elastic nature of time: Karl Marx’s chapter on “The Working Day” in Capital, and “Time and the Hour,” an essay by Victorian sociologist Harriet Martineau, describing the labor conditions of a watch manufacturing workshop. He describes how Victorian economic thinkers of varying stripes envisioned the violence of work through the consideration of the production and allocation of time, understanding time not merely in terms of the punch clock but as historical progress as well. In the second part of the presentation, Samalin shifts gears and considers some ways that contemporary economic theory and its critiques carry forward this ambivalent nineteenth-century entwinement of exploitation, time and progress.
The Cultures and Knowledge Workshop launched in the 2016-17 academic year. Presentations range across historical and disciplinary boundaries and provide a major component of SIFK's inquiry into the process of knowledge formation and transmittal from antiquity to present day. Research-in-progress is welcomed and will receive constructive feedback. Lunch will be provided to those who RSVP.