This paper presents and illustrates a new theorisation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’. Three different types of chronotope or ‘time-space’ (created, creating and creative) are proposed to exist in dynamic relations of mutual presupposition. This new theorisation was used by Tania Zittoun and myself to guide a thematic decomposition of five films directed by Christopher Nolan (Tenet, Inception, Memento, The Prestige and Oppenheimer). Nolan’s films offer their appreciators a set of distinctive meditations on the varied ‘shapes’ time can take, including the ways time and space can become problematic in people’s lives during ‘dark’ political times and chronotopes of crisis. In outlining this approach, I will try to show how our theorisation opens new perspectives on the psychological value of aesthetic experiences, showing how art and life weave into one another thanks to being woven out of one another. Films, and aesthetic objects in general, do not merely entertain us, but allow us to entertain the cultural complexity proper to processes of real political and psychosocial transition.

This paper extends Stenner and Zittoun’s (2025) chronotopic analysis of Nolan’s films to psychological experiments, and it does so by drawing on Milgram's (1963, 1965, 1974) obedience studies as an illustrative example. By recognising experiments as chronotopic dramas, I will first discuss how experiments in psychology – like aesthetic objects – unfold within specific time-space configurations: created, creating, and creative chronotopes. For instance, Milgram’s studies emerged in the aftermath of World War II’s ‘dark times’ whilst simultaneously reproducing them within the peculiar time-space of the laboratory. Second, I will argue that experiments can function as liminal affective technologies, holding potential for psycho-social transformation. Milgram’s experiments achieved that by setting a double transformative experience – that of the participant in the experiment and that of the appreciator(s) engaging with the subsequent study’s dissemination. As in Hamlet, Milgram devised a cathartic, second-order reflection on obedience and, unexpectedly, on ethics in psychology. I will then conclude with two reflections for research practices in socio-cultural psychology: (1) rather than producing timeless truths, psychological knowledge and phenomena are inherently situated and reproduced in specific time-space configurations; (2) research should creatively embrace, rather than deny, the dramaturgical and aesthetic dimensions of experimental work. In this way, psychologists should aim for psychological transformations – if they stick to ethical practices, of course! – and generate a tangible impact on the real world to avoid the repetition of dark times.

The ISTP 2026 invitation seems to suggest that aesthetic practices or experiences are inherently progressive, transformative, or generally edifying. Witnesses to that idea can be found everywhere, since we live in the times of an “aesthetic turn” (Raffnsøe). In my recent book, I traced the hopes of aesthetic practices to rearticulate the perpetually conflicting and self-defeating motives of drug counseling, thus to mobilize and reposition clients as participants in a post-therapeutic practice of care, much helped by art theorists such as Rancière, Adorno, and Stenner. But since those theories all in different ways emphasize the indeterminacy (dissense, dissonance, liminality) of the aesthetic re-configurations of the sensuous with the semantic, and of community, they may also help us understand what we might call the ‘dark side of aesthetics’. That is, how the aesthetic can also facilitate submission, repression, and authoritarian power. This understanding can integrate reflections by early critical theorists (Brecht, Adorno, Bloch) on the aesthetics of fascism, which have regained a chilling relevance in the dark times of current politics. These point to how different kinds and laminations of mimesis and of temporality can manipulate a ‘longing to belong’ and work to constitute (imagined – but as such real) community. My humble aim is to warn against pitfalls of aesthetics in the care for and with young drug users. But a wider concern is implied, which is about developing a dynamic ontology of subjectivity that does not leave us stuck in abstract negations that inadvertently confirm the disruptions of capitalism.

Art is a social technique of emotions, according to Lev Vygotsky – an idea that he matured observing revolutionary theatre in the young USSR. However, it may not be enough to be moved by a play to be changed by it; one may need to be in a dialogical situation which affords reflecting one’s cultural experiences to be able to learn and develop through them. In October 25, we organised a one-week series of events named AssemblÂge, aimed at generating social dialogue around ageing, one of the many current societal challenges . Assemblâge was organised around a theatre play, written by Nicolas Yazgi in dialogue with our scientific work, to illustrate the variety and complexity of ageing. In addition, various dance, yoga and movement workshops and a round table were proposed. Participants were thus going through affective, imaginary, and embodied experiences. This took place in an art centre also proposing an art exhibition and a film program on ageing and containing a popular restaurant.

Our argument is that, if the theatre play was, as proposed by Vygotsky, a social technique of emotion, the whole dispositive offered a setting affording personal and social change. Indeed, the venue, offering an open and safe space, the artists, the various professionals leading the workshops, the scientific team and students engaging conversations with participants, generated various occasions of dialogue in safe spaces. It is through such dialogical dynamics that art can potentially act as a catalyst for personal and social change: not only experiencing a cultural form guides imagination, but also, a multiplication of dialogical spaces allow sharing these with others, reflecting and taking distance from them, so as to develop new alternatives.