For example, consider the metro station that I was talking about in my previous post.

As the train approaches on the far track, a decent thicket of people accumulate on the facing platform. They face every which way. They form a long line with denser and emptier patches. They jockey for position on the platform or traverse it aimlessly.

The train inevitably pulls into the station.

After which it inevitably leaves.

And after it departs, the crowd is erased as if a rolling eraser had been wiped along the platform leaving nothing but a few stray bodies where formerly there was a horde.

Needless to say, my point here isn’t to be naive and pretend that something magical happens when a bunch of people get on a train. My point, however, is that at a sheerly visual level it’s quite a strange phenomenon. Visually, the people just vanish. Are effaced with the roar of the clattering wheels.

Not to mention that the social situation in the station is transformed in a matter of moments. Suddenly there’s solitude. The initial sense of getting scratched up by the thorns of a thicket of a crowd’s anonymous gazes gets replaced by an almost peaceful loneliness. One feels the absence of that curious mass expectation that always mounts up as a train approaches; all there is, instead, is a handful of plaintive souls hastening to climb back up the stairs to the street level. The large group that formerly waited together for the train in a mass demonstration of collective purpose gets replaced by a cluttered mass of individuals who immediately go off in separate directions.

This phenomenon occurs, repeats, repeats, repeats again. The light shifts on the arched roof of the station and shifts again, as the crowd casts shadows and the train catches the light. But you don’t see that, because your own train has probably arrived before you can observe many trains pass on the opposite track.

On the metro, there are further surrealisms that everyone ignores for the greater glory of the cause of minding their own business. Lights and lost spaces streak by in the tunnel. Hisses and roars and sometimes the smell of anomalous chemicals, like the intense smell of sulphur just north of Carrefour Pleyel in St-Ouen, come and go without comment.

It’s enough to make me feel that there needs to be some sort of theory of mass inattention to the mysterious. A theory of the regimentation and sterilization of urban perception. A theory of the way things become mundane.

Except that the first time I try to take this picture, the camera focuses on the lines in the the bench where I propped my camera. When we correct for this oversight, we see the long view along the street, creeping up to the horizon and out of sight.

This walk home, which extends just past the horizon of this photograph, always seems like a terribly long distance, even though it only takes a few minutes. Someone suggested that my apartment is about as far from a metro stop as you can get within the city limits, even though it’s probably only 600m.

If we turn around, we get a glimpse of the intersection and the other avenues disappearing and the hint in the streetlights of spring leaves on the trees on the left-hand street. You wouldn’t have seen that four weeks ago.

Until recently I wouldn’t have been inclined to count this scene as “part of my fieldsite,” which is normally fairly institutionally limited by the boundaries of the university. But I’ve started to notice people I recognize from the campus getting on and off the metro here. Last night as I got off the metro, I saw a group of people whose faces I recognized from the campus squat I’d just visited. I hadn’t spoken to them before, but as we passed on the platform they looked at me carefully, and I realized I vaguely recognized them and tried to emerge for a second from my usual not-looking-at-every-passing-person-on-the-metro face, and then we had walked by each other towards opposite exits.

There’s a bit of an ethnographic point here. At first my neighborhood (near metro Guy Moquet, if anyone cares) just seemed to me a random place where I’d happened to find an apartment. But as time passes I’m discovering that it’s not as disconnected from campus as I thought, since it’s also the residence of Paris-8 students and faculty. Not that I feel remotely integrated into off-campus social life. But it’s good to at least recognize little pieces of its existence in the anonymity of the urban crowds.

(Diagram generated with lovely charts. Click through for a larger image.)

The point of this diagram is to show how university politics is connected to everyday life in French universities. You could say that it is a diagram of how students and teachers become or don’t become activists in the university system, and how their activism feeds back into the general political and organizational life of this system. So you have here a diagram of a giant feedback loop. It attempts to capture some of the paths of practical entanglement, influence, action, and organizational interconnection that jointly determine how universities are reformed and how academic lives are lived.

On the left, we have the top-down system of policy-making and distribution of resources by the Ministry of Higher Education (and Research). It starts at the top in the Ministry; this Ministry has a guiding policy direction, with which it puts together a regulatory regime and distributes resources; these regulations and resources then constrain local university administrations and other kinds of scholarly organizations (journals, professional associations, and the like); and in turn these more proximate organizations reshape the everyday worlds of ordinary teaching and research. You have here the classical mode of top-down national university governance — which, in spite of the controversial current efforts to decentralize university administration, remains a marvelously Napoleonic institution in comparison to U.S. higher education.

On the right side of the diagram, I’m trying to represent the processes of politicization (and depoliticization) which flow from everyday life in the universities out into a broader world of political debate. This begins with faculty and students who become politicized; they join scholarly associations or unions, organize events or write texts. Sometimes their organization is local on the scale of the campus and sometimes it’s more centered on translocal or national organizations; at any rate they eventually constitute a sort of political sphere of debate over the universities. At the same time, a few teachers and students decide to do research on the university itself, making their institutional context into their research object; I’m particularly interested in the way this plays out among philosophers (e.g. Alain Renaut or Plinio Prado). Finally, of course, there are lots of ordinary academics who aren’t politicized, who just go about their academic business, who have no use for activism or who have withdrawn from it; these people fall off of this diagram, not playing any direct role in the politics of the university system.

Now, the world of political debate over the universities does feed back into the policy process, but it’s only one influence on the policy-making at the Ministry, and not a particularly dominant influence either. It seems to me that French educational policy is probably more influenced by the Sarkozy government’s overall political priorities, or by general trends in European higher education, than by the clamoring of French editorialists and activists outside the official channels. Which is why the diagram has a node to designate “political influence or noninfluence.”

At the same time, I should note an additional channel of feedback that I’ve left off my diagram: there’s also a channel of official consultation and a system of shared governance that connects everyday academic life back up to the policymakers. There are consulting committees and official reports, there’s the Conseil National des Universités which is involved in disciplinary governance and credentialing, there are in short a lot of ways for mundane university actors to be involved in the governance process without resorting to outright political advocacy. But these official channels play little role in my research, for the time being. Perhaps next year I can add them to my agenda.

I’ve been meaning to give a kind of structural overview of the French university situation. The broader picture of demographics, national university distribution, money, and so on remains to be presented here; but for now, perhaps this image can give a sense of the highly interconnected political system that controls universities in this country.

I am waiting for my flight which will bring me back to France and hence to my fieldsite. It leaves in an hour. It seems a bit strange, flying on new year’s eve, but it was, of course, the cheapest flight and I want to be back on monday for classes. I find it hard to say why it’s a little sad to spend a holiday in the nonplace of the airport and the airplane, but that inarticulate sense of missing out maybe owes its inarticulateness to the fact that the sacred is social and comes to us outside like a norm, a norm which one can feel without being able to explain. In one of my first anthropology classes we read about the Sun Dance, a native american ritual for renewing the world (I think; it was a long time ago), and I remember saying to my professor that I couldn’t relate to that, that it seemed weird to endow a dance with any kind of cosmological significance. But my teacher said, We have New Year’s, it’s sort of the same thing, a ritual of renewing the social world (even if not necessarily the physical world, I probably quibbled to myself).

The sense of returning to the field is different from going the first time; the anxieties of beginnings are presumably over, but I have a sense of having far too much to read, far too much to do, to figure out; there’s a (predictable) sense of not having a satisfying order to impose on my data and field experience; there are 1936 items just in my RSS feed of French research-related blogs that I haven’t read; there are 1790 PDFs in my folder of scholarly articles, mostly waiting to be read; the digital moment makes it too easy to acquire too much; it could be called a state of perpetual epistemological excess. The emerging orders of the situation still feel tenuous.

But the flight is boarding soon and the limits of this post are not going to be set by the internal limits of what I could say about going back to my work but rather by the grumpy clock of the airline gate agents. For the time being, I will just post a wordle of the pdfs I haven’t read. The field of article titles I read gives a pretty good sense of my research interests:

But also seems a little predictable really.

But I didn’t follow up on that at all until I recently started reading the “socio-demographic” work of Charles Soulié, a Bourdieuian French sociologist of universities whose research interests are fairly close to mine. The premise of this research is something like this: by examining the comparative history of enrollments and teaching jobs across disciplines, one can examine what Soulié calls the “evolution of the morphology” of academic fields. This isn’t very hard-core quantitative research by statisticians’ standards, I note — he doesn’t exhibit tedious anxieties about the uncertainties in his sources, nor does he propose mathematical models or major statistical analysis of his data. The methodology seems to be, in essence, visual inspection of the evolving demographics of disciplinary enrollments. He takes these as indicators of things like the “relative position of sociology in the space of disciplines,” and comes up with findings that are like:

• Sociology produced half as many graduates in philosophy in 1973, but now things are reversed, and in 2004 sociology produced 2.6 as many graduates as philosophy. This is an indicator, for Soulié, of sociology’s rising comparative importance in the university system (and philosophy’s stability, which in context was a relative decline).
• In 1998/99, “the fraction of children of professionals and upper management rose to 28.4% in letters and human sciences, against 23.1% in sociology and 38.1% in philosophy” — which tells us something important about the comparative class basis of sociology vs. philosophy at that point in time [updated to clarify: these examples refer to French academia].

I find this kind of thing quite interesting and revealing – hence this series of posts on the demographics of my own discipline – but I wonder about its epistemological basis. What does it mean, actually, that one discipline has more students enrolled than another? Is it right to speak of a competition between disciplines for students? What makes one discipline more “attractive” or “desirable” than another at a given moment? It’s not like students pick their courses based on a completely rational response to a job market, or even an idea market. In fact, it’s not clear that “market” is a good description for these kinds of systems; as Marc Bousquet has often argued, talk about the academic “job market” (for instance) disguises the fact that university administrators actually dictate the academic job system, by deciding to opt for hiring adjuncts, grad students, etc. Likewise, shifts in degrees issued, in enrollments, etc, may not necessarily be the result of “competition” or market forces (whatever one’s stance on the empirical existence of said market forces). There can be other kinds of systematic processes at work; the “morphology” of the disciplines as revealed in their enrollments doesn’t tell you everything about processes of interdisciplinary conflict and coexistence.

But the brute fact remains that there have been major historical shifts in how many students anthropologists educate, and major shifts in how large our discipline is vis-a-vis other disciplines. And these aren’t just arbitrary. They need to be explained, if we’re to understand where our discipline actually exists in the world. When American anthropology is educating a small fraction of a percent of college students, that’s not something that just happens by chance.

I feel here the strong sense of a bias in my own discipline against quantitative analysis. It’s somewhat jarring, from the narrow confines of an anthropologist’s culturalist background, to look at these comparative figures. In cultural anthropology, I think there is a widely shared consensus view today that goes something like this: culture is inherently qualitative, folded over on itself in swathes and patches and wrinkles of rich, dense symbolic significance; it would necessarily be deformed, or at best severely limited, by any effort to reduce it to a general and/or quantitative analysis. Among cultural anthropologists, numbers and quantitative facts are apt to be taken not as means of analysis, but as objects of cultural analysis and symbolic forms in their own right. So we get studies of the cultural effects of perniciously quantifying, rationalizing, neoliberal projects; and we see arguments about how the obsession with the quantitative is itself merely another local cultural phenomenon, and not a privileged, master form of knowing about the world. Often these kinds of arguments are made casually, in passing, or are simply taken for granted, inscribed in our disciplinary habits.

In fact, in cultural anthropology as I know it today, it’s seldom necessary to argue explicitly against quantitative work; its rejection is already inscribed within the positioning of our discipline against its others, like sociology and above all economics. Our primary research method, field ethnography, is almost constitutively anti-quantitative, being oriented overwhelmingly towards the experiential dimension of social life, toward the fine detail of the symbolic, the affective, the discursive. I note that earlier ethnography sometimes involved more quantitative work – Marilyn Strathern’s first book had a lot of figures about pigs in local economies, for instance – and one might speculate that, as post-colonial anthropology lost its identity as the discipline that studied exotic “primitive” cultures, it seized in part on qualitative methods as a new basis for differentiating itself from the other social sciences. And, coming back in the present, I note that even after the fieldwork, later as we ethnographers write our analyses, when we do venture to generalize, we generally make qualitative generalizations (I’m making one right now); and when we do incorporate quantitative information, it often figures as mere background data for our more specific ethnographic arguments. There do appear to be sophisticated studies of mathematical practice, like Helen Verran’s Science and an African Logic which I’d like to read. I note, however, that I’ve seen a number of ethnographic studies of, for example, financial markets, which for all their strengths, still take for granted that their qualitative mode of knowing is drastically epistemologically superior to (and allows privileged ideological diagnosis of) their informants’ quantitative modes of knowing. My sense, in short, is that our rejection of the quantitative can go without saying because a rejection of numbers structures much of our research practice and disciplinary identity. There are, of course, plenty of books about quantitative methods in anthropology, and there are people who polemicize against cultural anthropology’s “rejection of science” and numbers — here’s a pretty loquacious example — but, in relation to the literature I read and the cultural anthropologists I know, these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Now, the anthropological objection to quantitative research is correct and good up to a point. Numbers certainly are cultural forms, a fact which I have yet to see acknowledged by a quantitative researcher. Quantitative data is of course not always useful or accurate, and can be grossly misleading, can even be a vehicle for various other political and ideological projects. And any social science that effaces the lived experience of cultural life is bound to give a rather reductive analysis of the world.

But it still feels wrong and simplistic to reject and avoid numbers in cultural anthropology in the ways that we often do. Yes, numbers are potentially oversimplifying abstractions, and are sometimes used in ideologically pernicious and theoretically problematic ways. But I wonder what ways of knowing we numb ourselves to, in shrouding ourselves in qualitative, sensuous, tactile accounts of the world. Ethnographic tactility and sensitivity can become its own form of anaesthesia, can’t it?

It makes sense to think about how ethnographers are re-disciplined in a world where their backstage (back “home”) continues to shrink. That might just be another leveling of the ethnographic playing field, maybe even a welcome one, but it does demand that we reconfigure the ethnographic context to include the kinds of feedback loops and post-fieldwork exchanges that the Internet and other new (increasingly inexpensive) technological outlets facilitate.

Needless to say, such a problem is thought-provoking when it comes to this blog, which obviously serves to make my analysis of French universities immediately accessible to any French universitaire who cares to search for my name.

I do want to register just one small reservation about Jackson’s analysis, which is that he relies on the front-stage/back-stage distinction in a way that I think gives a slightly strange representation of academic life. Basically, in his description of anthropological fieldwork, the ethnographer is trying to enter the back-stage/intimate/ordinary world of the locals, trying to build rapport; and at the same time, this same ethnographer is probably highly managing their own presentation of self, and may be trying to conceal their own back-stage world in the academy from the locals, since a full rendering of this academic world might inhibit local relationships from forming.

Now, I take it as axiomatic that one can never have totally transparent communication or representation, that perfect intersubjectivity is impossible, that something always remains unsaid or concealed or repressed; and of course it’s true that different spheres of social life have different conditions of intimacy and exclusion. But, and this is my small objection to the use of the “backstage” image, I think it’s important to note that the way one presents oneself “back home” in the academy is no less scripted and regimented than the way one presents oneself in the field. Public academic performances, of the type that someone might find on youtube or read on a blog, are not really backstage; they’re just a different stage. Or to put this differently: for anyone who’s ever actually worked backstage in a professional theatre, like I did for a few summers, a backstage is a deeply professional space, full of rules about who should be where doing what when, thoroughly organized by organizational hierarchy. In some ways, professional theatre is more tightly regimented than academic presentation – after all, every detail is supposed to be scripted and identically executed every time.

Jackson is certainly right that there can be tensions between ethnographers’ self-presentations at home and in the field. But I would rather characterize this as a precarious balance between competing stages and forms of intimacy, rather than a matter of trying to penetrate other people’s intimacies while preserving one’s own. My own project is a little complicated this way, of course, because it’s an ethnographic engagement with something very much like my own institutional “home,” and the differences between contexts are always uncertain, if never absent. Still, I’ve long been a fan of participatory action research (which, by the way, is so unpopular as to be unheard of in my current department), and I think of my project not mainly as an effort at sociological objectification but as an effort at intellectual exchange with fellow French university denizens.

I ought to say, along those lines, that this blog has so far proved to be a minor blessing for my project, a facilitator rather than an inhibitor of research. It can, for a project like mine, actually be a way of meeting collaborators from one’s research context; I met Baptiste through it, which is a pleasure and has been analytically really helpful (thanks B for correcting my mistranslations!). That said, I do envision it having mainly an anglophone audience, and I think a number of my contacts in France wouldn’t want to suffer through its academic english prose. That is, intellectual exchange here is limited by language barriers. But it bears thinking more about how online work can catalyze and enable our research, not just how it can inhibit it.

I agree with Jackson that there are pitfalls in our digital presentations of self: this blog may yet cause troubles I haven’t thought of. But I would argue – against many of my shy and paranoid colleagues and classmates – that anthropologists have a major moral and logical obligation to make their profession and their academic praxis accessible to public scrutiny and engagement. I’ve met too many American academics who are afraid of being analyzed, who dismiss themselves as being “too boring” to study, who are happy to sweep all the dust and cruelty of the academy under the rug of a few highly stylized public presentations of their work. Any anthropologist who is a priori against an ethnographer studying their department has, in my view, no moral ground asking anyone to participate in ethnographic research. That would be the sheerest form of hypocrisy and one-way objectification. Again, this isn’t to say that everything can ever be completely public – see above – but just that ethnographers’ general obligation has to be towards openness and against a habitual retreat into the fantasy of a private academic world. Academic spaces are never as private as they seem, nor as pristine.

I went to Kat’s room to ask her something and found her on the phone and her friend Laura sitting on her couch bed. It appeared from Kat’s tone that something was wrong. I talked to Laura for a minute, and when Kat got off the phone I asked her what was the matter. She told me to sit down. Then she said, “Are you just going to use this for your study?” I asked her what she meant. She said, “You like me, right? You’re my friend, right?”

Portia, who seems to have since quit academia to become the president of a small record company, goes on to talk about how colleges are places where one is “caught,” involuntarily, in relations of sentiment with others. And not just sentiment, but sentimental education: taught how to feel. And taught how to appropriately display one’s feelings. It’s a great essay about the normativity of love and its far from voluntary imposition by “friends.”

But being “friends,” Portia points out, is equally a normative category, supposed, at least by Kat in the above example, to entail liking and affection beyond merely instrumental desires (such as the desire to acquire field data). Certainly this tension between sociality and instrumentality is something that makes me anxious periodically, when I meet people who are, for lack of better words, both awesome and ethnographically interesting. Not because I envision myself, as Portia did, as someone who might manage to stay clear of local friendships and just do the work, but for the opposite reason: because I am happy to make friends with other French academics, but as a result it then feels nonnormative to still be an ethnographer.

I’m not the only to have these anxieties, of course; people I meet are also worried at times about their unclear sense of being ethnographically “watched.” For instance, I do get jokes about being a “spy” with some frequency, but usually it doesn’t greatly interrupt normal social life, as far as I can tell. And unlike Portia, I haven’t encountered the normative discourse about being “friends” here so much. In informal social interaction, in public places where people come and go, it’s possible to pass more or less as a new and somewhat unmarked participant. Not that anything is therefore unproblematic, and I’m definitely not trying to go undercover, but so far, anxieties about instrumentalism haven’t become a major topic of conversation. We’ll see later about what kinds of friendship become normative… of course, it’s not only friendship and informality that are normative; people also have normative ideas about what it means to be an ethnographer or a “research subject,” and it’s interesting too to see what kinds of norms are applied to my presence as ethnographer. Ethnography of academic life, it seems, involves inevitable tensions between contradictory norms and expectations, between normative sociable informality and normative anxiety about being observed, between wanting to pass under the radar and wanting to get outside attention.

Instrumentalism isn’t a risk particular to ethnographers, of course. It can crop up even in regular academic relationships. That’s certainly my experience in American academia – there’s always the threat of having, or not having, careerist relationships. And such risks appear to exist here too, to judge by their dramatization in a quip I heard here, something like this:

Person A (seriously): Person C has a huge network, he keeps in touch with everyone, it’s admirable.
Person B (joking): So you’re saying that he keeps in touch even with people who aren’t professionally useful?
Person A laughs.

The joke being, I take it, that it’s admirable to rise above the bounds of narrow self-interest in one’s social relations…

A sudden piece of English text inserted in the middle of an exhibition of political photographs at my field site. Paris-8. A charming metacommentary on global reality. Merry crisis!

If you wanted to describe this image in the most basic descriptive language you could say: this is a photo of a photo of a graffiti tag set among other photos, photos of people bloody in protests, of police in riot gear lines, of people running and throwing things, of people invisible in showers of light. See that flood of white in the photo immediately beneath Merry Crisis? With the figure askew and silhouetted? I have no idea what that is. But I do comprehend that this is a collage of leftist protest culture, aestheticized in the genre of an art photo exhibition, and further recontextualized in the form of political statement attached on the outside of Paris-8′s Bâtiment B2. Paris-8 is a university with an enormous visual text taped and sprayed across its walls. Campus buildings frequently have deteriorated walls, just from the sheer number of signs (affiches) that have been put up and torn up and torn down. It’s the kind of place where images, like this one, are not only compound visual objects (referencing other visual objects and visual genres), but are units in an overwhelming student reappropriation of academic space, a culture of defacement of the corridors that someone jealous of property rights might call vandalism with a political alibi.

This defacement has limits, though, being essentially restrained to surfaces within arm’s reach of the ground. The buildings themselves tell a different story.

Two French universities. At left, the Sorbonne. At right, Paris-8. It doesn’t look like a den of graffiti in this picture, does it? From certain angles it looks slick. White. Steel. Futuristic, even, like a university garden city. With newly planted trees. The low orange fence, dimly visible here, shows that campus is still under construction. The Sorbonne, on the other hand, is a visual object that displays its prestige and institutional centrality through a long parade of arches and stone finery and towers, through the conspicuous display of functionless decoration, through pillars and chimneys and wrought iron that connote its age and full integration into the architectural code of state power in central Paris. (In other words: the Sorbonne is made of the same color stone and with the same bombastic architectural flourishes that characterize important public buildings in its part of town. Though I’m not an architect so I lack the vocabulary to really describe this homogeneity.)

The Sorbonne does a pretty good job of integrating its traditional stone architecture with its pristine self-presentation as a simultaneous icon of wealth, prestige, and the French establishment. On the other hand, at Paris-8, I sense a certain dissonance between the architectural invocations of futuristic architecture and the decrepit graffiti-laden floors and walls.

No future?! No peace! says a lone piece of militant graffiti in the Sorbonne, again at left. The staircase in Paris-8 at right, by contrast, is tagged twelve different places in red and yellow, its aestheticizing decorations patching the decrepit stairwell walls. The Sorbonne staircase has varnished wood paneling; Paris-8 has stained cement block and bare pipes. The texture of the two places differ, radically: sheen vs dirt.

A particularly good place to see the symbolic differences between campuses is in their doors. Their textures differ radically, again. At the Sorbonne: blue wood with many-paned windows divided up by metal bars, the university’s name carved in stone, a large S in wrought metal in the middle of each doors (just visible here), a wrought-iron fence with tulip tips, stone pillars emphasizing the doorway. Paris-8 by contrast: modern doors, metal, one pane of glass each, by design unadorned, in practice festooned with posters, with abandoned posters, with scraps of torn-down posters, part of one of the doors cracked (invisible here, alas) where someone must have kicked it, set on a low threshold. “Université Paris 8 Vincennes -> Saint-Denis” is set like a billboard above the doors in white and red on black (it runs the length of the doors here, just above).

There is a major difference between universities, too, at the level of security just inside the doors. When you go inside Paris-8, you don’t have to show ID but the place is visibly full of security cameras. The security personnel, apparently contractors from a private company, are in casual clothes and tend to lurk inside their security posts; the security post near the door is visibly full of surveillance monitoring equipment. When you enter the Sorbonne, on the other hand, you have to show the uniformed guard your ID and maybe state your business, but once inside, you are essentially unattended. One might schematize this thus: Paris-8 doesn’t care who comes in but doesn’t trust anyone on the premises; the Sorbonne is selective about who can enter but is happy to let its trusted visitors do what they will. (This, to be fair, is not purely a difference of class-laden institutional attitude. The Sorbonne is in a major tourist district, and it seems to be primarily tourists who are turned away at its gates. I have always been let in with my Chicago student ID.)

By now the symbolic differences between the two universities should be becoming second nature… Sorbonne at left, Paris-8 at right. A small amphithéâtre vs. a large classroom. Decorative paintings vs bare white walls. Wooden decorations vs plastic chairs. A bunch of old guys in suits vs a bunch of young kids in casual clothes. This place is ripe for a structural analysis.

Could you tell by looking that this is a vending machine? A vending machine turned into a platform for activist signs and stickers. A vending machine framed by graffiti that reads “Long live armed struggle!” and a crossed out “LRU” (Loi relative aux Libertés et Responsibilités des Universités, the controversial French university reform bill). The stickers, unreadable here, make reference to Palestine and the grêve générale (general strike) in Guadeloupe, and to militant groups (Sud-Etudiant, Union Syndicales Solidaires), and others I can’t make out in my slightly blurry photo… but I adore this as a spontaneous collage of impersonal commodity exchange (it’s a vending machine after all) and militant/graffiti poster art. Are the activists appropriating the vending machines as political advertising opportunities? Or are the activist signs ultimately just drawing attention to a cheap place to buy a cold drink?

Not that I have any quick answers. But I’m growing to like commenting on images. It’s a means of making spaces and atmospheres accessible at a distance, of capturing social dynamics as they become visible. Images have a tactility that can only be approached in prose by resorting to novelistic or surreal styles of description. And it takes time to produce that description… while a photo is taken in a sixtieth of a second. Though, actually, that’s a lie. It’s irritatingly time-consuming to take photos, download them from the camera, sort them, archive them, compare them, interpret them. Visual texts are laborious. (Note to self: find the people who design and put up these activist signs, inquire about how it works.)

I rather hate this phrase, a “visual text.” Images are not intrinsically texts, and though they can certainly be approached as such (examining their formal structure, their intertextualities, their meanings), it’s the height of scholasticism to blindly assimilate images to the realm of texts, to textualize the visual, thus rendering it all the more vulnerable to academic appropriation. I rather prefer the notion of “visual cultures,” which suggests that the visual can become a cultural value, an object of collective work and concern, as in the hallway graffiti of Paris-8 or the towers of the Sorbonne. It’s interesting that the visual environments of universities can articulate commentaries on the university, relations to the university, so that the visual culture constitutes a reflexive social space of its own rather than a mere background on which other kinds of social action occur.

With the onset of summer, I’m faced with the end of the academic year, the end of class meetings and conferences, the end of departmental meetings and protests, and hence the temporary loss of most of the usual opportunities for face-to-face ethnographic observation in the traditional sense. My field site is shutting down. But I’m trying to ask myself: what do I make of the fact that I still possess an wonderful, unmanageable number of printed pages, of written things, of texts, that I need to read? And that this reading is simultaneously a chance to do textual analysis but also, and this is what seems to deserve more attention, a form of participant-observation in the world in question. Academia is nothing if not a community of readers. What then are the tactical or theoretical implications of a summer spent reading in a project on academia?

It strikes me that my point of departure has to be this: that reading isn’t something I can approach as a form of background knowledge, as a source of pure context. Nor for that matter can reading be a form of pure textual decoding that serves only as an instrumentally necessary prelude to some type of textual analysis. Nor, for that matter, is this necessarily a matter of doing “ethnography of reading,” which is essentially a traditional ethnographic investigation of a given set of readers. Of course it’s important to examine local means of reading, interpretation and textual reception, as Jonathan Boyarin or Janice Radway or Charles Bazerman have done in various contexts from physics labs to Book of the Month Club editors. But still, what I’m interested in isn’t ethnography of reading but ethnography as reading. Sitting on a bench reading a book as a way of being-there in an academic world. Reading as a form of participation, not just of observation. After all, the locals are constantly trying to get me to partake in their common means of textual exchange, by constantly suggesting books for me to read. These book suggestions are of course themselves invaluable ethnographic data. But reading itself is a way of learning one’s way around a space, a way of retracing a set of thoughts or “problématiques,” a way of developing competences of comprehension and belonging for later use, a way of assimilating some of the aesthetic parameters of a social world, its characteristic framing devices, its cast of characters, its rhythm. There’s a reason why half of my conversations here revolve around who has read what: having read a text provides a source of social solidarity and a ground for further exchange.

On a more theoretical level, in conceptualizing reading as a means of participation in an academic world, I think we must make a real effort to resist the temptation, always common, to theorize a social world as, above all, a world of physically co-present human beings in real-time social interaction. Rather we have to think of academic texts as moments in a complexly mediated and disaggregated social world, one where perhaps you can learn more about someone by reading their book than by having an hour-long interview. Ursula K. Le Guin has beautifully asserted that authors are, always, already there in their texts: “We write stories about imaginary people in imaginary situations. Then we publish them (because they are, in their strange way, acts of communication—addressed to others). And then people read them and call up and say But who are you? tell us about yourself! And we say, But I have. It’s all there, in the book. All that matters.”

I don’t know many true post-structuralists, but this blunt assertion of authorial presence should give them chest pains, if they happen to be reading this blog. Le Guin, incidentally, never claims that authors are the uniquely privileged interpreters of the texts they produce; but only that their texts, being the products of long labors of writing, provide evidence, acquaintance, knowledge of the author. This seems to me true, particularly for academic texts, which, with their thickets of formal citations and fairly clear displays of intellectual affiliation, are relatively useful guides to systems of professional relations. For example, there were certain sociologists who I already suspected to be quite politically different before I arrived in France, and who turn out, in fact, to be quite politically different. (A euphemism.)

In this sense, one can read social relations out of texts, can read intellectual trajectories and movements out of texts, can read stylistic maneuvers and claims of authority or importance out of texts. To be sure, reading alone produces a rather limited and partial experience of an academic world. But the academic world would be equally inaccessible, maybe even incomprehensible, without reading. Because, again, reading is a form of participation. And one could go farther: reading is one of the constitutive forces of academic worlds, a practice of social and intellectual (re)production, an act of worlding that yields a cosmos where there are landscapes of ideas and concepts, immaterial “schools of thought” and “intellectual trajectories,” clashes of ideology playing out at once in terms of pure theory and in terms of the job hiring process.

Now, to do ethnography through reading as a way of examining textually mediated academic worlds is not, I emphasize, to become the kind of idealist semiotician who believes that there’s nothing outside the text. Is not to believe that everything human is a text. Is not to argue that anthropology is just hermeneutics or that every percept or behavior is a “cultural text.” I oppose those theorists who hold views of this sort. But I also don’t think that academic reality is reducible to its more obviously sociological dynamics (to positions on a disciplinary field, to institutional hierarchy and competition, etc). That kind of sociology tends to elide or minimize the cultural and intellectual content of the world it dissects. A better way of thinking about academic life would perhaps begin neither from the institutional infrastructure nor from the purely intellectual dynamics, but rather from an analysis of the relations of intellectual production, a theoretical placeholder term that I hope to think through before long.

Will try to post more often. Coming up soon: photographic analysis of academic pride parades; preliminary readings of some recent French philosophical work on the university; perhaps notes on my somewhat problematic relationship to the French language…

After not having written much in the blog for a couple of months, I’m hoping to start writing a lot more regularly now that I’m in Paris for my fieldwork. The universities are just in the middle of closing down for the year, having final exams and the like, so it’s a bit unclear what I will really be able to accomplish before the summer doldrums. I’ve gone to a couple of demonstrations against the government university reforms, and will probably blog about that in my next post. And I have some initial contacts and invitations to pursue. No doubt this is pretty much the typical situation for the start of a research project. (If anyone is curious about the details of the research plan, you can read my long research proposal.)

But at any rate I am rapidly acquiring tons of material, enough for decades of anthropological analysis — I just bought a couple of used philosophy textbooks; one could spend a week just examining them. It’s an odd spectacle when philosophy, with all its claims to high intellectual status, is simplified to bullet-point form and turned into a high school subject. Or websites: there are dozens of curious philosophy and political sites out there. Right now I’m just trying to figure out some system to archive and keep track of them all; I suspect that some of them will vanish over the years and I’m wishing I had a simple means for archiving them. (There’s a really complex tool called Web Curator that seems, alas, more trouble technically than it’s worth. I’ve settled for the low-fi wget for the time being.)

Ethnography affords strange sensations, an uneasy sense that one is (or should be) becoming a phenomenological instrument, a kind of human tape recorder that gathers up the social and experiential, with a trembling urge to record everything, the peach of sky or scrape, the rustle of signs, the footfalls of quarrels and procedure, the jitters of ordinary life. Before one can objectify others one has to objectify oneself as a recording and processing apparatus.

Is ethnography in fact the verification of a hypothesis (given in advance)? Or is it the interpretation of a social world (addressed to whom? to said world’s inhabitants? to foreigners? to one’s own curiosity?)? Or the textual aestheticization of a set of scenes that are more perceived than theorized? Is it the liberation or subjection of an ethnographic object, or perhaps the effort to induce a greater state of self-consciousness within that object? Or a form of collaborative intellectual exchange between actors taken (or mistaken) as intellectual subjects? Or maybe ethnography is simply my discipline’s exercise in creating a falsely immediate sense of cultural reality, a retroactive projection of events or cultural orders into a more fluid set of half-understood situations, a falsely concrete thing made for social analysis?

But I guess this set of questions runs together a number of different issues and we should ask more particularly: What is ethnography, epistemologically speaking? Or aesthetically speaking? What is ethnography, taken as a political act or performative gesture? What is ethnography’s function in the anthropological institution? For a few seconds just now on the horizon a low aircraft glowed in the light. Grey clouds curl over grey highways and tapioca sunshine. The view is approximately as follows.