CFP

CFP: Dictating the Pace?  Power, Authority and Temporality in Contemporary Screen Culture. University Paul-Valery Montpellier 3

Montpellier, 28-29 September 2023

                                                           Chronocenosis is a way of theorizing not simply the multiplicity but also the conflict of temporal regimes operating in any given moment. Our point is that power and time interface amid intensely competitive temporal formations and not simply parallel or layered ones (…) We argue that power operates by arranging, managing, and scaling temporal regimes and conflicts. At the same time, these fault lines function as seams of structural weakness and possibility: power is often undone in the cut and thrust of temporal antagonisms.  (Edelstein, Geroulanos & Wheatley, 2020, 4).

This conference will center on the conflicts between contemporary forms of political power and multiple temporal regimes at any given moment; and on other forms of ‘authority’ that operate in multiple temporal regimes simultaneously and manipulate time in screen culture.        

One focus will obviously be political power in its manipulation of temporality, when introducing unpopular legislation, brutal reforms or leading a country to war – one may recall George W. Bush’s Chief of Staff quipping (regarding the timing of the White House media campaign to invade Iraq), “You don’t roll out a new product in August.” In screen culture, the relation between those who govern and those who are governed takes the form of the latter watching the former on screen, within a calendar that includes traditionally televised speeches (Inauguration or State of the Union speeches), at an increased rate during certain periods (electoral campaigns, for instance). This institutional framework can however be shattered by authoritarian power, in the form of coups or attempted coups, like the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, encouraged by the president who had just been voted out of office, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the certification of the results and the inauguration of the president-elect. On a broader scale, the rise of far-right extremism in the US and in Europe can be seen as an invitation to rethink the era of liberal democracy as possibly coming to an end, whether our societies are on a course towards dystopia (with the return of fascism in Western Europe, threats of a world war, or even nuclear war), or towards utopia (a revolution towards a more equal society). The economic system that gave birth to liberal democracy, capitalism and its dogma of economic growth meanwhile seems on a collision course (on another timescale) with the reality of climate change. Its unsustainability requires a collective veering (Royle) now, if life on this planet, including human life, is to go on.

            Political power might thus appear constrained by multiple temporalities it cannot in fact control, including the various states of emergency that have led to today’s “polycrisis” (in the terms of historian Adam Tooze). These crises themselves were, however, decades and even centuries in the making – see Timothy Mitchell on the history of capitalist democracies as inseparable from the history of fossil fuels, from coal to oil. They are also the result of deliberate inaction and lies (see Naomi Klein on climate-change denial financed by billionaires). Against a backdrop of clashing views as to what constitutes the true emergency, the struggle between different forms of power and authority becomes clearly apparent (IPCC scientists versus politicians, Extinction Rebellion activists versus traditional political parties, etc.). At a time when the sixth extinction has already wiped out 65% of the planet's living species (Kolbert), when the melting of 50% of the world's glaciers is now irreversible, when wars over scarce resources such as water loom and neologisms such as “solastalgia” (Albrecht) are coined to express the specific forms of contemporary eco-anxiety, it still often feels as if we were living in the satire Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021).

            Papers on the ways in which the relationship between power and temporality is highlighted or obscured in screen culture will be welcome. Even if audiences can negotiate or contest ideological discourse (Stuart Hall), resisting political messaging generally requires stepping back from televisual “flow” and the “manufacture of consent” (Chomsky). Both Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Bourdieu have underlined how televisual formats – not only in live interviews with authority and power figures, but also in debates or so-called “news” programs – make it impossible to check political power through critical discourse. Only by freezing the frame, rewinding and re-viewing, thanks to the audiovisual archive (Baron, Doane) can spectators / citizens achieve real critical distance. Here, the intelligence work of political documentary (Kahana, Nichols) can be contrasted with that of much of the media.

            But we also invite papers on how fiction, especially in cinematographic or serial audiovisual narratives, can highlight the multiple temporalities in which political power is exercised, and immerse the spectators in these temporalities, from season to season, whether in The West Wing or, in a more brutally demystifying way, in House of Cards. Fiction allows us to live temporal ruptures; to experience dictatorial forms of power and authority before they happen, in hopes that such fiction will prevent their advent. Works of speculative fiction (literary or cinematographic) indeed most often stage an alternative reality where questions of power and resistance are central (see The Man in the High Castle). Dystopian and/or post-cataclysmic texts that rely on a temporal rupture – before and an after disaster – thus allow us to project a future and to examine it in relation to our (real) present, reminding us of our own agency. Whether they come in the shape of oil narratives (Mad Max Fury Road), patriarchal dystopia (The Handmaid's Tale), or post-apocalyptic eco-fiction (Station Eleven), such narratives highlight the political stakes linked to the control of time and temporality as much as of territory; the space and the temporality of the narratives – including intradiegetically – opens breaches into known worlds and known texts, onto possible horizons. Since, according to the Doomsday Clock, we are now, in the spring of 2023, only 90 seconds from midnight, we will ponder whether speculative fiction can allow us to break free from presentism (Bertrand Gervais, François Hartog) and paralysis, and whether it can enable us to imagine the political as well as the temporal rupture for our collective survival in a more just world.

This conference will be the last of the cycle “Power and Authority in Screen Culture” organized by five research centers (EMMA UR 741, TransCrit, ACE, HCTI, and Figura) within five universities (Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Paris-8, Rennes-2, UBO, and UQAM), after « Monitorer le présent: L’écran à l’ère du soupçon » (UQAM, Fall 2019), « Biopower in screen culture » (Rennes2, September 2021) and « Power and Authority in the Face of Vulnerability » (Paris-8, September 2022). It is also the second conference (after « Temporalités alternatives: Uchronies, mondes parallèles et rétrofuturisme », UQAM, 17-19 May 2023), in a new cycle of conferences around the notion of temporality that will bring together Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Université Paris-8, UQAM, Université Rennes-2, UBO, Université de Bourgogne (TIL research center) and Université de Poitiers.

We welcome papers from all disciplines – history, political science, philosophy, contemporary literature, film studies, television studies, cultural studies (etc.).

500-word abstracts including a short bio-bibliography are to be uploaded – in PDF exclusively – at the following link : https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=clock23

Deadline to submit a 500-word abstract and short bio: June 1, 2023.

Confirmation of acceptance: June 15, 2023.

Advisory board :

Lucie Bernard (U. de Bourgogne), Karim Daanoune (UPVM), Elaine Després (UQAM), Bertrand Gervais (UQAM), Mélanie Joseph-Vilain (U de Bourgogne), Hélène Machinal (Rennes 2), Camille Manfredi (UBO), Hervé Mayer (UPVM), Denis Mellier (U de Poitiers), Monica Michlin (UPVM), Arnaud Regnauld (U Paris-8), Raphaël Ricaud (UPVM) Shannon Wells-Lassagne (U de Bourgogne).

Organizing Committee : Karim Daanoune, Philippine Fauchier, Manon Lefebvre, Hervé Mayer, Monica Michlin, Raphaël Ricaud, Joséphine Sourgnes.

Bibliography :

Adams, Barbara. Timescapes of Modernity. The Environment and Invisible Hazards. New York : Routledge, 1998.

Albrecht, Glenn et al. “Solastalgia :  the  distress  caused by  environmental  change,” Australian Psychiatry, vol. 15 Supplement, 2007, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/10398560701701288

Allouche Sylvie, Hélène Machinal, Monica Michlin, and Arnaud Regnauld (eds). Forms of (the) apocalypse. Paris: Octaviana, Dec. 2017, e-book, 402 p. URL : https://octaviana.fr/document/COLN20_1#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0

Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Bourdieu, Pierre. On Television (1996). Transl. Priscilla Parkhust Ferguson. New York: The New Press, 1998.

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Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2002.

Edelstein, Dan, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley. Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

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Machinal, Hélène, Monica Michlin, and Arnaud Regnauld (eds). Apocalyptic Forms of Power and Apocalyptic Programs, ebook, Nov. 2021, 502p. URL: https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/file/62926/download?token=oJTEl7D0

Machinal, Hélène, Monica Michlin and Arnaud Regnauld (eds). Apocalypses, Otrante n°47-48, Kimé, Nov. 2020.

Machinal, Hélène, Monica Michlin, Elizabeth Mullen, Arnaud Regnauld, and Joanna Thornborrow (eds). Imag(in)ing the Apocalypse, ebook, UBO Brest, 2018, 300 p. URL : https://www.univ-brest.fr/digitalAssets/76/76064_PDF_M--diations-Apocalyptiques.pdf

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