‘Ça tient qu'à toi’: cartographies of post-fordist labour in Laurent Cantet's L'Emploi du temps

Marks, John (2011) ‘Ça tient qu'à toi’: cartographies of post-fordist labour in Laurent Cantet's L'Emploi du temps. Modern & Contemporary France, 19 (4). pp. 477-493. ISSN 1469-9869

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Abstract

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's work on Michel Foucault, control societies and cinema, Laurent Cantet's L'Emploi du temps is analysed as a cartographic rendering of post-Fordist labour. The film creates a pervasive ambiance of liminality and dreamlike disconnection—‘flottement’—around the central character of Vincent in order to convey the affective landscape of post-Fordist immaterial labour (in this case business consultancy). Approaching L'Emploi du temps as a diagram—in Deleuzian terms—of discursive and non-discursive components helps to explain the ways in which the film goes beyond psychoanalytic drama in order to convey a more general sense of a social reality that is frequently problematic and overwhelming for Vincent. Recent work on hypermodernity and the hypermodern self is employed in order to analyse Vincent's behaviour as an example of the kinds of subjectivity produced by control societies. In many cases, the hypermodern individual is fragile, isolated and unpredictable, prone to excessive behaviours and periodic breakdowns. Whereas Cantet's previous film, Ressources humaines, powerfully dramatised a crisis of place, L'Emploi du temps conveys an individual and collective crisis of confidence.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/708744
Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Modern and Contemporary France on 9 November 2011, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09639489.2011.610166
Keywords: Laurent Cantet, post-Fordism, hypermodernity, control society
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Arts > School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies > Department of French and Francophone Studies
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2011.610166
Depositing User: Marks, John
Date Deposited: 28 Jun 2016 07:48
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 16:31
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/34419

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