One is reminded in flying to Europe of the class indistinction of anthropologists as professionals, of their dreadful similarity to tourists, study abroad students, bourgeois American adventurers and the like; one wonders whether anything is either valuable or particular to anthropological knowledge-making; one is irritated by the ideologically ritualistic nature of fieldwork (the sense that it is expected, even forced, to be a rite de passage). One has an uneasy sense of oneself as a phenomenological instrument, the trembling urge to record everything, everything, the peach of sky or scrape, the rustle of signs, the footfalls of quarrel and procedure, the texture of an ordinary life — one wonders whether ethnography is in fact the verification of a hypothesis or the interpretation of a social world (for the benefit of its inhabitants? for the benefit of foreigners? for one’s own amusement?), or the aestheticization of a set of flittering scenes that only cut skin deep, an artful display of surfaces; the freeing or subjugating or an ethnographic object, or the effort to induce a greater state of consciousness in an object; a form of collaboration intellectual exchange between actors taken or mistaken for intellectual subjects, or simply an exercise in concocting a misplaced authenticity of a culture that one falsely imagines one can experience immediately, done for the benefit of a disciplinary system of reproduction?…

What’s interesting about this to me in hindsight, I suppose, is that none of these questions really get resolved by doing fieldwork or by writing up your results. It’s just that you just learn to not worry about them after a while. I note that I posted a version of these comments — a cleaned up version! — early on in my fieldwork. I think I thought then that these sorts of questions would receive positive answers.

Est-ce qu’on va l’année prochaine, est-ce qu’on va pas l’année prochaine, à mon avis c’est vraiment une fausse question, et l’argumentation pour nous expliquer qu’elle était la bonne est surréaliste. C’est-à-dire ou alors on nous dit que la loi n’existe pas, c’est-à-dire que si effectivement le prochain président est un navré zozo, qui va appliquer la LRU dans toute son horreur, il aura la loi avec lui, donc, ça ne sera pas très compliqué de défaire les trois motions qui ont été voté par le CA, il aura assez de majorité, et pour ailleurs le CA qui votera trois motions contradictoires différentes, et basta. Donc l’argumentation de pourquoi il faut y aller maintenant me semble extrêmement étrange ou alors il me manque quelque chose que je n’ai pas compris. Par contre, le vrai débat est, puisque nous sommes tous d’accord que cette loi est une catastrophe, ils ont dit ça au tribune ce que le gens se sont dits (???), la question c’est, comment on résiste à une catastrophe et comment même, si on sait que la loi c’est la loi et que Paris-8 n’est pas dans la stratosphère en dehors de la loi, en dehors de la réalité, de comment on se met en position de pouvoir résister le mieux et avoir les meilleurs gardes-feu qu’on peut se ???. Peut-être que c’est effectivement de réfléchir à la question, est-ce qu’il n’y a pas une solution pour sortir de la logique de la loi LRU, est-ce qu’il y a pas une solution pour réinventer le statut expérimental ? Je dis pas que c’est possible, je dis que la réfléxion de la porte est là-dessus. Et je dis le même en ?? de l’argument en disant, mais, attention, la LRU n’est que la prémière étape de la ?, dont la deuxième, là on est ??. Donc la vraie question c’est quelle stratégie prend l’université ? Quel contenu elle défend ? Quelle spécificité elle défend pour que, malgré l’offensive de restauration qu’il y avait avec la LRU, premier état de refuser, nous ? pas toute la trame ? C’est ça, le débat. Et je ne sais pas la stratégie qu’on prend l’année prochaine si on prend cette alternative c’est quoi la différence ? Il y a une différence politique pas [??] Tout le monde sait que c’est différent de dire et ben oui et hélas la stratégie [cherchait la dissolution??] et comme je suis dans un état de droit m’oblige d’appliquer la loi, ah, bon, y a une loi, nous allons l’appliquer, ah bon, que nous soyons contre. Si personne ne voit la différence, c’était trop.

Or in English:

Do we go [to expanded competences] next year, do we not go next year, in my view it’s really the wrong question, and the argument in favor of it is surreal. In other words, either we’re told that the law doesn’t exist, which really means that if the university’s next president turn out to be a sorry idiot [un navré zozo], one who wants to apply the LRU in all its horrors, then he’ll have the law on his side, and it won’t be very complicated to undo the three motions passed by the CA (Administration Council). He’ll have enough of a majority to do that, and moreover the CA will pass three different contradictory motions, and it’ll all be over. So the argument for moving Enlarged Competences strikes me as extremely strange — or else I’m missing something that I didn’t get.

But on the other hand, the real debate is — since we all agree that this law is a catastrophe, on the podium as among all of us [?] — the question is, how do we resist a catastrophe? And how, even, since we know that the law’s the law, and that Paris-8 isn’t in the stratosphere outside the law, outside reality—how do we get ourselves into position to best be able to resist and to have the best flame guards we can (?) get? Maybe we need to reflect on this question: isn’t there a solution for getting ourselves out of the logic of the LRU, isn’t there a way of reinventing our university’s [post-1968] experimental status? I’m not saying it’s possible, I’m just saying that reflections lie that way. And I would even say that ?? about the argument in pointing out that, but, remember, the LRU is only the first step of the ?, and the second step, where we are ?. So the real question is: what strategy is the university taking? What kind of content is it defending? What kind of specificity is it defending in the face of the offensive of the [reactionary] Restoration that goes with the LRU, the first step of refusal, so that we don’t end up with ?? the whole trame. That’s where the debate is. And I don’t know what strategy we’ll have next year if we accept this alternative [to go to "enlarged competences" or not], what’s the difference? There’s a political difference but not ??. Everyone knows that it’s different to say, sure, alas, the strategy [came to an end?] and since I’m subject to the law I have to apply the law, yes, well, there’s a law, so we’re going to apply it, but, still, we’re against it. If no one can see the difference, it’s just too much.

There’s a bunch of analytically interesting stuff here, I think, having to do with how the speaker is trying to contest the terms of debate, and about how he’s groping for some alternative, “experimental,” almost counter-cultural project for the university, tacitly invoking the radical heritage of 1968, and about the rhetoric he uses to openly c0ndemn the Sarkozy government (“this law is a castastrophe”), and about the way he forecasts what a future campus president might do if he were “a sorry idiot”…

But I don’t want to get into the details of my analysis here, which isn’t half done in any case. Rather, I’m presenting this to show readers what it looks like to work with a rough transcription from French, with a rough translation, with only a rough, vague sort of meaning in English, with only a partial understanding of the discourse one is studying. I’m presenting this partially put-together text because I think it’s only fair to be honest with the world that, frankly, fieldwork in a foreign language and a foreign institution is not only practically hard but also incredibly epistemologically fraught. There’s a lot that I just can’t make out in the recording, that I can’t transcribe, that I therefore can’t really translate. It would help if I had a French native speaker handy to help with the transcriptions, but I don’t have one in Chicago, I can’t afford a professional, and I can’t really beg my friends for assistance at every turn. And so the reality is that my understanding of my fieldsite remains littered with question marks. Not all of which will ever get resolved.

When you have more recordings than you can ever fully analyze, transcription is an investment, and it’s hard to know when it’s worth the effort. I just don’t have the time or energy to transcribe everything, and the reality is that there’s no exact formula for figuring out how to allocate your resources as an analyst. It would be helpful, I think, for ethnographers to talk more about how they decide what data to work through and what data they decide to leave aside. My suspicion is that this is almost always a matter of guesswork, intuition, or sheer whim, and that the shinier the finished analysis ends up looking, the more it conceals the arbitrariness of its relationship to the data.

march 2 – on returning to france

the sky hazed and prongs of sun forked into the railroad cars and the gravel ballast of the tracks. in the tunnel the buckles of the woman across the aisle shine and her hair is a vast mound. near me a man in gray types up his notes on a laptop, palefaced and bespectacled, and i stepped on his toe as i sat down. little whistles of mechanized high hats come from what i hypothesize is someone beside me with headphones; there’s a smell of shit replaced before long with a smell of vinyl seating; the guy across from me, his notebook falls from the seat on my toe, and he picks up his notebook before i can, but he sees my readiness to pick it up for him and says merci. the border guards barely looked at me as i entered. the guard looked african — always contradictory when social norms are enforced by the non-normative social type, though of course this formulation doesn’t do justice to the case at hand. we’re passing sevran, aulnay-sous-bois. it’s noticeably different light and heat from chicago, just as the meteorologists would have led us to expect. my thoughts feel unfocused as i write this. the country is not terribly unfamiliar so far. little houses, signs in french. red-tiled roofs. torn-up hair of the weeds and brush trackside that’s dead brown & unkempt. at least i observe that i have a will to write. as we get closer the tumbleweeds of white buildings rise up into landscape.

If I look at the physical form of what I’ve brought home, I find a reassuring but also daunting quantity of material: three suitcases of books and print matter, several thousand photographs, approximately 300 hours of recorded audio, 1750-odd digital documents in an archive I’ve been maintaining, and some nine field notebooks. Although I plan to make a more thorough inventory of my materials in the near future, my sense is that the data falls into five major categories:

1. The discourses and organizational practices of French university politics: how people have debates, analyze their situations, produce slogans, march or blockade, express political feelings like anger or hope;
2. the public practices of philosophy departments: what happens in classrooms and conferences;
3. the intellectual world of French philosophy: the lexicon of its ‘cosmos,’ the characteristic forms and contents of its texts, the ways people enroll themselves in philosophical genealogies, and a more limited amount of data on local reading and writing practices;
4. the organization and bureaucracy of French universities (which differ considerably from their American counterparts);
5. local social relations: friendships, collegiality, social networks, status and difference marking;
6. local historicities and futurities: how people conceptualize their history, future, and present conjuncture (which varies enormously with social position);
7. finally, and hardest to articulate, a mass of unsystematic data on everyday life, the shapes and smells that serve as half-ignored backdrop to local action.

Looking over this material makes me realize that I have too much material to ever fully analyze, but also, paradoxically, too little material (or the wrong kind) to give an entirely satisfactory description of the days and lives of my informants. Ultimately, my material is based on many fleeting acquaintances and relatively few close field friendships. But when I said as much to one philosopher, he observed that in fact many French academics don’t know each other well, and that superficial, partial relationships are preponderant, which suggests that perhaps having many “superficial” relationships was, in a paradoxical sense, a form of full and typical participation in the world in question, and hence itself more a form of data than an ethnographic weakness.

Leaving aside, at any rate, this unrealizable quasi-novelistic ambition to represent people’s lives, the impossible dream of showing the totality of a cultural space, and descending to the more humble level of what I was surprised by and what I wasn’t surprised by, I suppose we might also divide my material into three main epistemological categories, which we could call confirming or illustrative data, unexpected findings, and theoretically problematic data.

To begin with the most comforting case: it seems to me that I do have a mass of illustrative data that tends to substantiate my own initial methodological expectations, which essentially suggested that we should analyze French philosophical knowledge in terms of its institutional-political context, in terms of its political engagements, in terms of its ideologies of the future. While I think that this initial methodology turned out to be on the right track, I now have materials that are suitable for describing a number of concrete cases, for giving ethnographic “flesh” to the analytical schema, for better narrating institutional history, and for improving on the initial formulations in a number of respects (see below).

Second, I have data on phenomena which were new empirical discoveries for me, unexpected findings. There are, of course, too many to list here. For instance, I hadn’t been aware of the fixation with direct democracy embodied in a local political form called the assemblée générale (general assembly); nor of another local protest form called the “Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn,” which turned out to be central to the organization of a massive university strike in 2009; nor of the political fixation with the person and personality of Valérie Pécresse, the Minister of Higher Education, which deserves its own analysis. Neither had I foreseen the local significance of the physical degradation of campus spaces; nor had I been aware of the movement toward a precarious labor regime in French academia; and so on and so forth… Like any piece of qualitative research, there’s a lot that wasn’t predicted.

Finally, I would say that I faced a certain number of field situations that forced me to revisit some initial assumptions, moments that involved “theoretical” or analytical (and not merely empirical or ethnographic) discoveries. For instance, I had initially thought about futures through an essentially Sartrean model that viewed futurity as the horizon of agentive action, as a target that animates individual or collective projects; this model turned out to fit my informants very poorly, since they spent as much time resisting unwanted futures or just surviving the present as they did pursuing clearly defined projects of their own. Or for another major example, I hadn’t realized that university politics would involve debates over the very nature of the university; I discovered that actors had local theories of the university and that these theories were themselves contested via what I would term local “epistemologies of university models”; this has prompted me to attribute much more analytical significance to local forms of political reflexivity. And finally, I originally imagined that the French case would serve as a case study in academics’ political agency, of their relatively successful resistance to university reforms that might be termed neoliberal. But the collapse and defeat of the university protest movement of 2009, and the relative weakness of academics’ political organization since then, has forced my analysis towards the forms of political defeat and political failure that have pervaded faculty activist discourse the last year or two.

I guess most of this stuff is pretty obvious. It goes without saying that ethnographers are going to be surprised by some of their findings, unsurprised by others, forced occasionally to revise their guiding conceptual frameworks.* But it seemed to me that if I’m going to be writing about my findings over the next few months, it’s not a bad idea to give a rough sense of the materials I’m working with.

* I would note that one is not usually forced to revise one’s conceptual scheme; in spite of the romantic story about “changing one’s mind about everything in the field” that one so often hears, I don’t think most ethnographers are usually entirely surprised by their findings. People are somewhat predictable.

As I left for the airport we drove over the train tracks. I was in a van driven by an Algerian born in Paris (that was his self-description). His cousin turned out to teach at the University of Paris-8, my fieldsite, which reminded me that even a physically vast metropolis can be a socially small world. Do you want his contact info? he asked me. I don’t know, does he have strong feelings about campus politics? I said. I don’t know, we only talk about technology, said my driver. Formerly he had been a middle school (collège) technology teacher, but having not found work he’d decided to switch to the transportation business.

The sunshine dodged through the clouds in shades and patches. (My photograph was horrendously overexposed, so I had to process it to show the light.) Paris banlieue passing like the silhouette of a gigantic rockpile of chimneys and brickframes. Striking how little you ever need to see the highway if you live in Paris, striking how total the dependence on public transit can be. You realize when you leave that you haven’t seen the inside of a car for months at a stretch.

We passed a car accident as we drove. The driver said he’d seen countless accidents. No longer felt any horror or surprise at the sight. See one every day, if you drive for a living. How has Paris changed in your lifetime, I asked? Well, it used to be socially mixed (mélangé), he said. People from different social classes lived there. Now it’s only the rich. The working class pushed out to the banlieue.

And then the other thing, he said, is that France has gotten worse economically, it used to be really good, France used to give more to the EU than it got [n.b.: I haven't checked this claim], but now it’s not doing well; compare it to England—he said—England was pretty poor in the 50s and 60s, but then they introduced [economically] liberal policies, it was hard but now they’re doing well, they’re rich, and we need to do that here too, libéraliser, he said, it will be hard but we need it, people are out of work…

I’m paraphrasing.

Finally we got to the airport and we shook hands and I told him it was good talking to him. He gave me his card, hoping, no doubt, that I would hire him again on future visits. But here’s a bit of market irony for you: his rate was much higher than his competitors’ (50€ instead of 30€); I only called his company because all the cheaper ones were full; and the very practices of economic rationalization that he advocated, on a national level, will probably preclude me from hiring him again in the future. Anthropologists, too, can practice market logic… at least if by market logic you mean trying to stretch your limited resources as far as possible!

At any rate, I’m hoping to write a lot more here as I work on processing my fieldwork materials. Coming soon: a report on the peculiar events of the Counter-G8 University Summit, and a brief history of the “intellectual proletariat.”

I am not a specialist in the literature on ethnographic methods per se, in spite of being an ethnographer by profession. This, I think, is a common situation for people in cultural anthropology; to judge by the lack of clear methodological discussion in most ethnographic articles, ethnography today doesn’t really demand much explicit methodological reflection. (In contemporary linguistic anthropology, by contrast, research methods are far more clear — though there too, and perhaps this ultimately is true of any empirical science, there is an enormous amount of unspoken choice, often arbitrary, that comes prior to the analysis of any particular object.) There is, of course, an existing literature on qualitative methods, one which in my experience is more often invoked in other social sciences, like sociology, where there is a greater range of possible methods and where method choice may demand more explicit justification. In cultural anthropology, on the other hand, ethnography is the norm and the default, and this literature on qualitative research is seldom invoked. I don’t really know that literature myself; at best I could give you citations of books I haven’t read.

Anyway, here I just wanted to give a little breakdown of ways of using ethnographic data. I won’t try to stipulate what does or doesn’t count as ethnographic data, though I’ll emphasize in passing that, paradigmatically, ethnographic data is what an ethnographer learns by personal observation of some stretch of social life somewhere. It can of course also involve any number of other materials, like photographic images, audio/visual recordings, native texts and artifacts (including genres like journalism that report on other stretches of social life), interviews (which are themselves a form of observed social life), secondary sources like demographic data, and so on.

It seems to me that any particular piece (or form) of ethnographic data can serve one of many epistemological functions, some of which I want here to delineate. Any given piece of ethnographic data can serve as any (or several) of the following:

(1) Historical data: a datum of “what happened” in a particular place and time. Part of the task of ethnography is after all to record events, processes, histories that did take place, and ethnographic data are at one level evidence of what happened. I would emphasize that this kind of “historical” data (for lack of a better word) need not be limited to direct observation, in spite of ethnography’s famous fixation on the concrete. On the contrary, our historical data is frequently quite indirect. My dissertation, for instance, will probably tell a story about French universities that really begins more than ten years ago, which is of course long before my arrival in France, and for which I’m assuming that various secondary sources provide reliable evidence. I will probably end up merging secondary sources and personal observation into one single historical narrative.

(2) Aesthetic data: a datum whose later representation conveys to readers the texture, the feeling, or the sense of a situation. There can, in other words, be ethnographic evidence that helps to create something of the ethnographic “reality-effect,” i.e. the sense of narratively superfluous but aesthetically crucial evidence that, among other things, helps create the impression that the ethnographer “really was there” in their fieldsite. (This is the sort of datum that I take it is central to creating the notorious “ethnographic authority,” but I would note that the employment of aesthetic details does have real epistemological and even emotional or stylistic functions as well as this authority function.)

(3) Exemplary data: a datum that illustrates some larger phenomena, whether an empirical pattern or a more abstract, theoretically defined entity. Here we’re talking about using evidence not to tell a story, nor to give an aesthetic sense of lived reality, but rather to index something else of a different order than the initial piece of data. For instance, earlier today I heard someone at an OECD conference say that it had been “an immense honor to be chair” of the conference. In a historical mode, I could use this tidbit of speech to tell the larger story of the conference. In a more exemplary mode, on the other hand, I might use it to demonstrate certain characteristics of honorific speech genres among academics, as a manifestation of the speaker’s position in a system of status hierarchy, or whatever.

It seems to me we have to distinguish at least two major forms of exemplary evidence: “empirical examples” and “theoretical examples.”

(a) Empirical examples: Data that indicates or reveals some feature of a cultural order, or some other order of empirical generality. I have in mind, for instance, something like using a photograph of a Parisian walking down the sidewalk in black clothes as an example of general norms of bourgeois dress in this city. I know this sounds completely trivial, but I want to emphasize again that we invoke a whole epistemology of “exemplarity” or “indicativeness” whenever we approach some piece of data as illustrative of some larger state of affairs. (Anthropologists, admittedly, are usually quite bad at talking about exactly “how exemplary” their data is.)

(b) Theoretical examples: Data that is made to illustrate, support, disprove, question, etc, some theoretical proposal within the intellectual field of anthropological ideas. So for instance, we could imagine someone using a set of data to question the idea that cultures are unified entities, or to support a semiotic theory of commodity exchange, or whatever. Often, and I think this bears notice, it takes a mental twist, an epistemological leap, to jump from the order of what’s observable to the order of one’s ideas about what one sees. Theoretical examples often have a touch of the arbitrary. because it helps anthropologists to bridge the (usually gigantic) gap between the specificity of their empirical findings and the collective intellectual concerns of the discipline.

(I note in passing that obviously these aren’t all that separable, that any empirical case presupposes some prior theory about the structure of the world, that indeed there is and ought to be lots of interplay between theorization and empirical generalization, and so on.)

(4) Evidence of the possible: data that we read as indicating what had to be the case for it to exist and hence what tacit structure of possibilities must have made it possible. The obvious example is the famous hypothetical scenario (invoked in arguments over God and evolution) where you are on an empty beach, you find a pocketwatch in the sand, and you infer that the necessary condition for the possibility of this watch is the existence of an intelligent designer. Of course, this sort of epistemological move also works with actual data: I have often tried to infer the structure of attitudes towards the future that makes French academic politics possible.

(This is a very abstract point, but I’d note that there’s a contrast here with the logic of “exemplification” that I described previously. Typically, the logic of “exemplification” entails trying to draw a relationship between two actual, existing kinds of things, even if one of them is perhaps more abstract or general than the other. The logic of inferring what had to have been possible for an X to exist, on the other hand, may involve positing more general or abstract phenomena, but more fundamentally involves positing a relationship between an actual X and a larger field (Y) of possible Xs, only some of which will have actually taken place.)

What do you think? What other epistemological relationships to our evidence have I forgotten? This list is avowedly provisional; these categories are basically just drawn from a quick mental inventory of the kinds of knowledge I’ve tried to derive from my own fieldwork experience. I would emphasize that of course these are not mutually exclusive; a little snippet of data can at once convey the texture of a situation, establish “what happened,” show something about a transcontextual empirical pattern, and have ramifications for anthropological theory at large. At the same time, though, these are all quite separable, and probably can’t ever be entirely integrated; it would be impossible to theorize every ethnographic detail that one presents to the reader. Anthropological knowledge, I fear, is unlikely ever to cohere into a nicely bounded whole.

The logistics of being a temporary visitor to a foreign country continue to frustrate, it has to be said. Here’s the view from the new apartment:

Alas, the place is too expensive to hold onto, and, somewhat against my better judgment, I’m moving into a big dorm complex for the rest of the fall. It’s not going to be the most pleasant place to live, but after all, all the famous ethnographers of universities seem to have lived in a dorm at one time or another. Admittedly, my research isn’t mainly about student domestic life, but I think it may be interesting to have some acquaintance with it.

Luckily, I have some work space to escape to, at the University of Chicago’s building in France.

It’s a bit strange having more office space than most tenured faculty at my fieldsite, which is a commentary in itself on the intense inadequacy of financial and material resources in French public universities.

Anyway, I have a lot of things to write about. More coming soon.

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.