Tramps and nomads

Abstract

The film Modern Times was singular in its historical moment as a work that considered youth as a creative and social force in itself. Indeed, while there are many ways to read the major themes in a film such as Modern Times, this article, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, engages Charlie Chaplin's film as a vehicle for exploring a certain kind of becoming-youth as a question of force. The kind of force that is explored here is the production of youth as a specific kind of radical social subjectivity; that is to say, as a subjectivity comprising multiple collisions, contestations and struggles between sets of proscribed social roles. The article investigates how the film engages the question of youth-adult identity as a social binary that can be collapsed into a relation that flees the social containment of both youth and adult.