‘Ça tient qu'à toi’: Cartographies of Post-Fordist Labour in Laurent Cantet's L'Emploi du temps

Abstract

L'interprétation de L'Emploi du temps de Laurent Cantet s'effectue dans le cadre d'une approche deleuzienne, notamment sa lecture de Michel Foucault, ses livres sur le cinéma, et son concept de la société de contrôle. Vincent, le personnage principal, est plongé dans un environnement décousu aux dimensions parfois irréelles et liminales, et cette ambiance de ‘flottement’ transmet le paysage affectif du travail immatériel dans l'ère post-fordiste (dans ce cas le consulting). L'analyse de L'Emploi du temps en termes d'un diagramme – terme deleuzien – de composants discursifs et non-discursifs permet de comprendre le fait de privilégier la construction d'une réalité sociale que Vincent trouve problématique et écrasante, plutôt que la représentation d'un drame psychanalytique et purement familial. La théorisation contemporaine de l'hypermoderne et de l'individu hypermoderne permet d'analyser le comportement de Vincent en tant que subjectivité typique produite par une société de contrôle. L'individu hypermoderne est souvent fragile, isolé et instable, sujet aux comportements marqués par l'excès. Tandis que le film précédent de Cantet, Ressources humaines, avait dramatisé d'une manière saisissante une crise de l'identité sociale, L'Emploi du temps dépeint une crise individuelle et collective de confiance.

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.

Notes

[1] The film is loosely ‘inspired’ by the ‘affaire Romand’, which was widely reported and discussed in the French media on the 1990s. Over a period of 18 years Romand, having failed his second year of medical school in 1975, maintained the fiction of a career as a doctor with the WHO in Geneva. He took money from friends and relatives for non-existent investment schemes, and he sold fraudulent cancer drugs. In 1993, when it became clear that he was about to be discovered, he killed his wife, children and parents, and attempted to kill his mistress: he subsequently attempted to kill himself. In 1996 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The author and film director Emmanuel Carrère followed the trial of Romand and corresponded with him. His analysis of the affair was published as L'Adversaire (2002), and a film of the same name appeared in 2007.