Associate and Doctor of Philosophy Bertrand Cochard teaches Aesthetic Philosophy at the Municipal School of Fine Arts in Nice (Villa Thiole). Just published Blank on requestpublished by L’Échappée, in which he examines the harmful effects of serials on our lives.
Reporter – “ Because we work too much, we watch too many series », you write on the first pages of your book. Why ?
Bertrand Cochard — The first reason is almost attention. The essence of the series, in my opinion, is that it is an activity readily available at the end of the day, precisely when our working hours are sapping our energy, our attention and our availability.
The second is that there was an extremely important revolution in modern societies between the end of the 20th century XVIIIE and the beginning XIXE century. This revolution is the introduction of the market system and wage labor. This led us to consider that our free time is the time freed from work. On the website of the Ministry of Economy, for example, we can read that an employee must work for a month to produce 2.5 days of vacation.
Understanding the series is important because viewing leisure as free time from work affects how we experience it. If you bothered to produce this free time, to separate it from work, you obviously can’t do anything about it. It is as if the very impossibility of boredom is written into our concept of free time. The series filled that time.
You develop the idea that the series “ sequence » our time, what do you mean by that? ?
With this text, I tried to introduce the thesis of (writer and theoretician) Guy Debord. How he calls “ entertainment company », it is a society in which social groups live according to different temporalities. Leaders live in historical, linear, oriented and irreversible time. On the contrary, the everyday life of individuals is interrupted in a certain way “ pseudocyclic » for the goods we consume: the Black Friday event, the next version of the iPhone… This time has no attributes of history at all. It is punctuated by the repetition and return of the same.
Another very important author is (philosopher) Günther Anders. In his book The obsolescence of man (released in 1956), at one point evokes the play Waiting for Godot, by Beckett, and explains that his characters struggle with a completely unstructured time. To move it forward, some characters are reduced to taking off their socks and putting them back on.
I wondered if there was something similar in the series. On an individual and collective level, I feel like we are stuck in a mess of time. Time no longer moves forward. It only brings with it a return of the same, disaster. Serials don’t just move time forward for us. Thanks to the power of storytelling, they give it an order, the continuity of which we are deprived of in our real life.
You also implicitly describe the way the series feeds our addiction to screens and locks us into “ techno-cocoon » digital…
This is an absolutely crucial point that philosophers who talk about soap operas never address: to watch them, you have to be in front of a screen, the consequences of which for attention, sedentary lifestyles and well-being are known. be.
“ Serials commodify our free time and monetize our attention »
We often hear that series create social bonds because we interact around them. Rather, I have the impression that they contribute to the individualization of our consumption patterns. You are alone at home most of the time while watching the series. I believe they contribute to the deepening relegation to the private sphere and the fragmentation of society shaped by digital technologies.
The addictive dimension of the series is also taken over by some of its creators: one of the screenwriters “ Lost » (a series following the survivors of a plane crash lost in the Pacific Ocean) compared his writing techniques to adding additives to a potato chip manufacturer…
We must not forget that series are products of powerful culture industries that aim to create value by commodifying our leisure time and monetizing our attention.
We can compare their observation to a highway. We believe that we can stop at the end of an episode, that there are more escape routes than a two-hour movie. It’s an illusion: everything—whether in the narrative or the ergonomics of the observation deck—happens by saying “ I’ll come out next time ».
You admit to being yourself” unrepentant serial fan »: in total, you devoted the equivalent of 159 days of your life to watching series. What about the rest of the French population ?
A survey conducted in 2019 by the YouGov Institute on behalf of Amazon Prime Video shows that 66 % of French watch the series at least once a week and 30 % daily. Netflix is also proud to say that more than 2.1 billion hours have been watched worldwide Squid game (a series airing in 2021 in which destroyed humans participate in a deadly game of survival).
Link this series addiction and environmental disaster ?
Absolutely. The nature of digital technology is to create the illusion that it is all dematerialized, that it has no consequences. But watching a series in 4K on your TV consumes a lot of energy: about 1 gigabyte per episode. From an ecological point of view, this is not trivial. In my opinion, we should defend activities that help reduce our carbon footprint, stimulate our brains, and give us a sense of accomplishment.
Your work goes against the work of other philosophers (such as Sandra Laugier) who show that series can convey emancipatory and progressive values. What do you think of this analysis? ?
I want to add nuance to this. I’m not entirely convinced that series are that emancipatory and that just because they talk about a social issue or better represent minorities, they really have an impact on society. Rigorous tools are needed to evaluate it.
We must also never forget that if the show tackles social issues, it’s also because those issues are in the spirit of the times (and all the better !). But the priority remains sales. Series Sense 8 (which tells the story of eight people suddenly connected on an intellectual, emotional and sensory level) for example, from the Wachowski sisters is a progressive series in many ways. But when it became too risky for Netflix to finance it, its production stopped.
The question of material inequalities, the commodification of the world, the critique of capitalism, I believe, is also completely absent from the series.
There really is nothing to save ? We can think of certain episodes Black mirror on technological deviations, About money and blooddedicated to the carbon fraud scandal… There are many examples of critical series in our model !
Some series are extremely successful, I absolutely do not deny that. But I would add nuance to the specific effects they may have on what we need, that is, a radical and profound transformation of our ways of production.
When I talk to people who have seen Black mirror, I don’t get the impression that it would allow them to understand the technology system in such depth. Most say “ It shows that we are on our phones too much, that it creates social hierarchies ». Good good. But you only have to look around to see it.
I would qualify the subversive potential of these series. Sometimes yes, they give good criticism, but it’s not really self-sustaining. The problem is that when we finish watching them, instead of engaging in the action and trying to delve deeper into the topics discussed, very often we instead start the next series and are outraged by the next scandal.