Rethinking the crisis in historicity: Precarity and postmodernism in French science fiction and film after May ’68

Abstract

This article re-examines the crisis in historicity, an aesthetic hallmark of postmodernism, in light of unemployment and economic precarity in France during the 1970s. Whereas influential critics like Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed an inability to represent historical movement, I argue that the decade’s literature and film represent changes to the organisation of working time. The article first discusses how time in post-war France was mediated through practices like national economic planning, industrial chronométrage, and staggered shifts, a temporal structure dramatically disrupted in the 1970s. The article then examines the aesthetic response to such economic disruption, drawing on examples like Michel Jeury’s science fiction novel, the cinétracts of May 1968, and the protest film, Rhodia 4/8. The crisis in historicity, I suggest, should be understood not as general disorientation, but rather as a specific solution to the problem of representing precarious employment in France.