Claire M. Ménard

Research

 

From its inception, my research has focused on the concept of network, as illustrated by contemporary society; my ambition is to develop this concept from a multidisciplinary perspective.

 

A long-term goal is to develop a “network theory,” expanding in theory written in the 1980s that started to formulate the nature of networks, but has been rendered obsolete by the fast-paced progression of not only technology but also late-stage capitalism. 

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My dissertation studied the representations – in contemporary French and Francophone literary fiction and feature films – of the developing condition associated with global markets and networking technology; a condition that the word “flexibility” aptly summarizes.

 

My approach to this issue draws on the “rhizome” concept proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – that is, on the idea of a discursive space in which everything is connected and which therefore functions like a network. In their work, Deleuze and Guattari also dress the non-linear and non-centrifuge aspect of the network, which according to them gives more room to creativity and innovation.

 

Deleuze and Guattari had not envisioned, I would posit, a world in which the network is not only central to late-stage capitalism, it acts as a disturbance of all traditional human categories, in good or in bad. In fact, I would argue that, in the 21st century, capitalism itself behaves more and more like a “rhizome,” that is to say an ever-changing and polymorphic structure, forcing us to constantly adapt in order to fit into this world, thereby requiring of us ever more flexibility--a quality which can be positive, like gender studies have shown when flexibility is used to oppose a normative binary system that punishes difference. But it can also be negative, like when blue collar workers are required to be increasingly flexible, producing more with degrading paychecks. 

 

We have only begun to take stock of this ongoing process of enforced flexibility, and of the suffering that may result from it for the ever-adapting humanity that we have become. The films of Laurent Cantet, Nicolas Klotz or Jacques Audiard explore a form of this suffering, and the effect and expression of a business culture based on competition and adaptability – in this case by portraying white- and blue-collar French men in search of economic and social success.

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Laurent Cantet's Ressources Humaines (Human Resources), depicts Frank, a business school student, interns in hi dad factory, while his father is loosing his job to downsizing. Cantet follows father and son as they are confronted with the catastrophic prospect of job loss, while coming at this from two different points of view: the future white-collar Frank, and his blue-collar dad. 

 

This issue found another expression in the literary works of Jean Echenoz and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, where flexibility becomes a site of “in-betweenness,” triggering the pleasure and confusion that their protagonists experience from switching identities as they change locations and geographical areas at an ever faster pace. Other works of fiction remind us, however, that such opportunistic pleasures remain out of reach for the working-class population and immigrants depicted, for example, in François Bon’s novels Sortie d’usine and Daewoo, or in the movie Rosetta, where Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne follow a young woman who is constantly in motion, but whose attempts at joining the reigning social networks consistently fail.

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In the movie La blessure, Nicolas Klotz depicts African immigrants forced to relocate around various spaces of transit - called non-places by Marc Augé - such as airports’ international areas, means of transportation or disaffected buildings, and who have no hope of settling anywhere. Refugees and working-class population are the first to suffer from this impossibility: for them flexibility is more a survival imperative than a lifestyle.

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In my scholarship I show that there are two sides of flexibility: one side favors those who can control their flexibility, and in this way a form of imperialism is maintained between the Global South and Europe/North America since flexibility favors travel, tele-commute, and forms of economy that rely on increasingly expensive educations. But this is not only limited to a North -South axis in the traditional sense of the term: flexibility also favors the wealthier and the more educated (classes that have been able to move into the .com economy versus blue-collar workers from the Rust Belt who have lost their jobs to free trade). Flexibility can be used positively, to portray new gender representations, or to empower--but it can also marginalize further. 

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It also seems that the increasingly global space depicted in contemporary literature and films gives birth to new modes of representation, in which first-person narratives, for example, open themselves to a pluralistic notion of (and approach to) human subjectivity, thereby challenging the very idea of individualization. Indeed, as global networks have the effect of blurring the lines of space and time, they also blur the separation between reality and fiction; as they transform our experience of movement and immobility, they also multiply contacts and exchanges between moving images and literary works.

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I am very interested in analyzing the dialogue that is created in this way between film and literature: one of the main characteristics of contemporary fictions is their tendency to rely on readers’ ability to envision the movement of time and space in a non-linear manner, inherited from cinematic experience and from the ubiquitous use of new media and video cameras. In Toussaint’s L’appareil photo, for example, we witness the protagonist’s attempt to capture the present through the means of photography: the lenses of the fictional camera become the prism through which literary and film space meet to capture the elusive reality of a world that is becoming (or seems to become) ever more global and virtual. This is just one figure of the unease or anguish my dissertation calls – courtesy of Milan Kundera – “the unbearable flexibility of being.”