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.

I hear this turn of phrase so often. It’s what academics often say when they mean “the way that x.” There is often, as far as I can tell, not much difference in meaning between saying “the way that x” and “the way in which x,” except that the latter is a much more academic usage. The way that(in which) academics use this expression bothers me. It seems gratuitous. It seems wordy. It creates barriers to communication with non-academics that don’t have to be there.

In case anyone’s not sure that “the way in which” is a specifically academic usage, I’ve compiled some handy evidence from Google that clearly shows “the way in which” to be more scholarly than popular. On regular Google, “the way in which” returns 180 million results, versus 839 million for “the way that.” In other words, in the general Google corpus, “the way that” is about 4.66 times more frequent than “the way in which.” On Google Scholar, on the other hand, there are about 2,420,000 hits for “the way in which,” versus 1,080,000 for “the way that.” So among scholars, on the contrary, “the way in which” is 2.24 times more frequent than “the way that.” Or put otherwise, scholars use “the way in which” about 69% of the time, versus only about 17% of the time for the general population.*

Let’s take some examples of this usage, drawing at random from the academic articles on my computer.

From Merle Curti’s 1955 “Intellectuals and Other People,” an interesting analysis of American anti-intellectualism: “Some intellectuals, however, have continued to invite resentment by the way in which they hold their learning.” Curti could have said the same thing, as far as I can tell, by writing “… continued to invite resentment by the way that they hold their learning,” or even “continued to invite resentment by the way they hold their learning.” Admittedly, it’s less formal if we omit the relative pronoun, but then, questioning formal language is precisely what we’re here to do.

From Gregory Price’s interesting-looking “The Idea of a Black University,” on my list of stuff to read: “The reduced likelihood of a typical HBCU [historically black college or university] producing a cultivated intellect that Martin Luther King, Jr. represented underscores the way in which the typical HBCU, with its nonliberal emphasis, catalyzes the decline of black America.” Here he really could have written “the way that” without any change in meaning.

From Jeffrey Williams’ 2008 “Teach the University“: “While Graff prescribed a plan for education overall, he was responding to the particular development of literary studies and the way in which the literary curriculum had morphed over the past thirty years, split into the fiefdoms of theory, such as structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and so on.” Williams is a known advocate of plain, clear scholarly writing, and one can only conclude from his use of this deeply scholarly phrasing that it has seeped into our collective unconscious, becoming something we scholars can say without thinking about. Here too, I think Williams could just as well have omitted the “in which” altogether, writing “the way the literary curriculum had morphed,” without doing much harm to the sense of his sentence.

It’s striking that even scholars like Williams or Curti, who are trying to write against spurious divides between scholars and everyone else, use this phrasing. So we have to ask: what are we doing, we scholars, when we say “the way in which”? A number of hypotheses come to my mind. We may be:

• Creating a spurious sense of precision. In some ironically vague way, “the way in which x” just sounds a lot more precise than “the way that x,” at least according to my scholarly intuition. (My scholarly intuition is itself a social product.)
• Establishing that we scholars are different and better than ordinary people.
• Establishing that we speakers (or writers) are members of the in-group. By implication, by using this phrasing, we are also blessing our audiences as group insiders, people worthy enough to dignify with good prose. (Would you say “the way in which” if you were talking to your bartender?)
• Taking longer to say, thus showing that we scholars possess leisure time to waste on communicative niceties. (See Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of scholarly language as a form of conspicuous waste.)
• Showing that we value decorum and formality for their own sake.
• Inserting a normally written register into the realm of spoken language (at least, when we are speaking and not writing). This kind of transposition of the most formal written register into less formal or oral discourse is, I think, characteristic of many scholarly circles.

Needless to say, every professional milieu has its own professional jargon, its own professional vocabulary, its own professional lexicon. I’m wondering, though, if all professions have their own syntax? Or is that the special province of academics? Maybe other professions use specialized vocabulary without trying to distinguish themselves in terms of gratuitously elaborate grammar…

It’s hard not to be struck by the way (that/in which) academics inflate their language into something more than language, into a realm of self-congratulation that ultimately obscures, that ultimately divides them from any non-academic group that might have been their public. Is “in which” an expression that, by itself, does anything so terrible? No; it merely contributes to a larger linguistic world that academics inhabit and which separates them from others. Williams writes at one point: “we should have a better ear for the freight of the words we wield and estrange them from their commonplace usage.” To which one can only add: it’s not only the words we use, but also the way we connect them to each other, that estranges us from the laity.

* A few additional points of data: Interestingly, if we strike the definite article “the” from my search queries on Google Scholar, we find 3.25 million results for “way in which,” as opposed to 3.68 million for “way that.” So while “the way that” is much less common than “the way in which” in the scholarship searched by Google, “way that” is actually slightly more common than “way in which.” When we add the definite object, in other words, we get much more differentiated results. I surmise that “the way in which” is the full form of the specifically scholarly expression.

As a second point of data, I find that in my personal cache of academic articles (about 2800 PDFs), “way in which” produces 589 results, vs “way that,” which produces 755. “The way in which” produces 454, vs. 255 for “the way that.” This roughly corroborates the findings from Google Scholar.

Of the same stripe [i.e., belonging to the party of Folly] are those who strive to win eternal fame by publishing books. All of them owe a great deal to me, but especially those who scribble pages of sheer nonsense. As for those who write learnedly for the judgment of a few scholars and would not hesitate to have their books reviewed by such true judges as Persius or Laelius, they seem to me more pitiable than happy because their work is a perpetual torment to them. They add, they alter; they blot something out, they put it back in. They do the work over, they recast it, they show it to friends, they keep it for nine years, and still they are never satisfied. At such a price they buy an empty reward, namely praise, and that only from a handful. They buy it with such an expense of long hours, so much loss of that sweetest of all things, sleep, so much sweat, so much agony. Reckon up also the loss of health, the spoiling of their good looks, weak eyesight (or even blindness), poverty, envy, the denial of pleasures, early death, and other things just as bad, if there are any. Such great suffering your wiseman thinks is fully repaid by the approval of one or two blear-eyed readers.

This book was first published in 1511, which means that the 500th anniversary of its publication was last year. It’s safe to say that European universities in 1511 looked quite different from today’s incarnations thereof. The printing press had only recently been invented; everything was taught in Latin; education was not for the masses, and had not been yoked to post-Enlightenment nation and workforce-building projects. One could go on in this vein, if one were a historian. (I’m not.) But what’s so fascinating about this little bit of Erasmus is that, in spite of the enormous institutional, political, cultural, and intellectual gulfs that separate us from these early universities, something about the experience of academic work seems to have remained constant, along with certain of the work’s basic instruments.

For even today, scholarly work in the humanities is deeply text-centered, just as it was for Erasmus. And the psychological follies that Erasmus describes are quite familiar, for me and I suspect for many grad students in the humanities. Do we not all have friends whose scholarly work is a perpetual torment? Whose work—to use language Erasmus would not have used—is an immense locus of neurosis and barely sublimated anxiety? And is it not obvious to everyone that the coin of scholarly approval remains, precisely, praise, and that praise is still and always, existentially speaking, an empty, ephemeral reward? Do we not all know people—though not ourselves, of course!—or so we say in our better moments—who have slaved for weeks—if not months—or indeed years—striving for infinitesimal dribblings of warm feelings for our work—such warmth being of course craved but always inevitably despised for its inability to entirely satisfy our desire…

And then again, one notes Erasmus’s pithy diagnosis of the material circumstances of the scholar, which one would hope (in vain) to have improved in the interim. Said circumstances have improved for some, to be sure, but hardly for all of us. Poverty, envy, the denial of pleasures, weak eyesight—who has not encountered colleagues in such states? My eyes, to descend for a moment into the lowlands of biographical detail, were in decidedly better shape before I started my ph.d., and I venture to predict that similar things may have afflicted my peers, what with all the reading…

But I digress. Erasmus has more in store for us:

“Among the learned, the lawyers [but surely the following passage applies to others as well] claim the highest rank, nor could anyone be more self-satisfied than they are as they endlessly roll the stone of Sisyphus… piling gloss on gloss and opinion on opinion to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. For they imagine that whatever is most laborious is automatically also preeminent.

Let us join to them the dialecticians and disputants… fighting to the bitter end over some hair-splitting quibble, and, often enough, missing the truth entirely by fighting too much about it.

[As for the philosophers:] That they have discovered nothing at all is clear enough from this fact alone: on every single point they disagree violently and irreconcilably among themselves. Though they know nothing at all, they profess to know everything; and though they do not know themselves, and sometimes can’t see a ditch or a stone in their path… nevertheless they claim that they can see ideas, universals, separate forms, prime matter, quiddities, ecceities—things so fine-spun that no one, however ‘eagle-eyed,’ would be able, I think, to perceive them.

Contemporary philosophy has changed terminology in the meantime, now calling them “essences” rather than “quiddities,” but it seems to me that even today we can find philosophers who lay claim to intellectual superiority over what Erasmus termed the “unwashed multitude” while simultaneously having irreconcilable, or anyway irreconciled, disagreements about practically “every single point.” And the tendency to overvalorize “difficulty” in scholarship is, notoriously, still present. Just think of how saying “it’s more complicated” is a debating tactic, or look at the defenses of Judith Butler’s prose style that emerged last decade. That book about Butler is also a good illustration of what Erasmus terms “missing the truth entirely by fighting too much about it.” As is a well-known book by Marshall Sahlins which, in my view, is quite aggravating reading on account of its extreme passion for attacking its adversary (Ganath Obeyesekere) in painstaking detail.

No doubt there would be more that could be said about Erasmus and the phenomenology of humanistic research, if one were in the mood for a serious study on the topic. But seriousness would hardly be appropriate in this context, for Erasmus himself is not exactly serious; the text is, obviously, irony and hyperbole incarnate. William Clark, in his charming and ironic book about the origins of research universities, comments that scholarly irony is, precisely, not accidental. Irony “expresses and conceals a love-hate relationship,” he says, going on so far as to claim that irony is “an essential academic attitude about academia, that is, the essence of reflexivity” (20). The essence of academic reflexivity, he should have said, since academics are not the only ones who are reflexive. But it is historically interesting to reflect on the fact that, not only are the existential absurdities of humanistic scholarship still in some ways quite similar to what they were in 1511, so too is the ironic attitude that we use to fend off this absurdity. Irony is what allows us to detach from our milieu in order then to better attach to it. What luck for academia that it has writers like Erasmus to help strengthen our collective resolve!

It’s ok, of course, to not blog. Blogging has a rhythm and a lifecourse. Sometimes it fits in with one’s other obligations, and sometimes it doesn’t. But at the same time, I think there are reasons why more scholars should blog that go beyond the personal. On a personal level, it is certainly good for academics to de-dramatize the act of writing, to get in the habit of writing things that are short, that are concise, that are clear. But on a political level, it seems to me that blogging is a good way to remind ourselves that research (especially in social sciences) should have some public import. If not public benefit. A blog is a way of reminding oneself that scholars at least might speak to the public. A blog is a way of acknowledging that unread scholarship doesn’t have much value. A blog is a way of proclaiming that research can be translated into words that a non-academic could read.

That’s not to say that I am blind to the obvious fact that most academic blogs, including this one, mostly speak to a small audience of fellow academics. But I think we have to distinguish between the sociological reality that blogs tend to be in-group, and the fact that blogs do also encode aspirations to be less in-group. And at a sheer level of institutional access, a blog is accessible to the public around the world: anyone can type in a URL.

I guess, to be a little more precise, there is no essence of what blogs do or don’t do. But this one, at least, is the product of an aspiration to do more than write to a tiny audience of the fellow-minded.

I’m hoping that maybe if I find a better rhythm for blogging — once weekly, maybe — that I can get back to it. There are stories I still want to tell. Coming soon: more on precarious labor, more on international university politics, more on the details of French reform movements, and more photos of little campuses in small-town America…

But if it turns out that I don’t get a chance to write more often in the near future, I will reiterate: that is not a choice, it is a matter of institutional time pressures. And this blog is not going away, no matter how patchy it gets.

Paris
April 28, 2011

Mr. President,
The honor I feel in writing to you is coupled to the hope that you will be able to spare a few moments.

In terms of the facts, all resemblance to the life of Christine Coënon is not accidental; in the form of the writing, all resemblance to John Cage’s Communication (Silence, Denoël Press, 2004) is not accidental (in italics).

I am a visual artist, an adjunct [chargé de cours] in Visual Arts [Arts Plastiques] at the University of Paris-8 since 1995.
I am 48 years old. High school diploma in 1980, two years of college (Caen, 1980-82), five years in art school (Caen, 1982-87) and then the Institute of Higher Studies in Visual Arts (Paris, 1988-98).
Holding a degree in art (DNSEP, 1987), more than twenty years of research and artistic production, fifteen years of teaching at the University of Paris-8… my pay as an adjunct in visual arts is rising to 358€ per month.
EVERY DAY IS BEAUTIFUL.
What if I ask 32 questions?
Will that make things clear?

Every week I teach two classes, a practical and a theoretical class, which comes to 128 hours of teaching per year.
All my classes are paid at the “discussion section adjunct rate [chargé de TD].”
Do you think my pay is fair, compared to the pay of a tenured professor whose hourly quota is less at 200 hours?

The adjunct is paid for the time spent in class: two and a half hours, although the time slots are currently three hours long. Should I refuse to answer questions after class? And course preparation? And correcting people’s work? And grading? And tutoring the seniors?
What is the difference between an adjunct and a baby-sitter?

In 2005, the semesters were changed from 15 weeks to 13 weeks; after which adjuncts were paid for 32 hours instead of 37.5.
32 = 13 x 2.5?
Why didn’t someone teach me to count?
Would I have to know how to count to ask questions?

Why, when a visiting lecturer [vacataire] gets a gross hourly wage of 61.35€, am I getting 40.91€ (compare to the rate of a visiting foreign lecturer)?
I was told that the hourly rate of 61.35€ corresponded to what an adjunct costs the university.
So if I just add the bosses’ overhead to my own salary, everything adds up.
Do I understand that adjuncts are supposed to be paying the bosses’ overhead?
These things that are not clear to me, are they clear to you?
Do you think it’s fair, this special system?

Why don’t adjuncts, who agree to work for a trimester or a year, get contracts?
They do, however, sign an agreement to work, and after that it’s a “maybe.”
If I start a semester, am I just supposed to imagine that I’ll be there at the end? The same thing for a year?

The adjunct is paid hourly, and thus doesn’t have the right to paid vacation or to an end-of-contract bonus. [NB: The French have something called an indemnité de précarité, which is supposed to be paid at the end of short-term contracts to "compensate for the precarity of the situation."]
Is there any point in asking why?

Why is it that an artist must have money to make money?
Why does the university refuse the House of Artists’ regulatory framework? I pay them fees as a good taxpayer. [NB: The House of Artists is the professional association chosen by the French state to handle artists' social security.]
Why does Visual Arts at the University misrecognize the artist’s situation, characterized by precarity?
(The median earnings of affiliated artists are 8300 euros per year, which is below the poverty line, and 50% of artists earn less than that…)

Is an artist who has “insufficient earnings” insufficient?
Why do I have the feeling of only being a chit for the accountants?
Why is the teaching artist considered “lucky” to get underpaid for teaching only if her research is profitable?
Why, paradoxically, does the University only recognize artists’ sales, and under no circumstances their research and teaching?
(I’ll permit myself to mention that in 2008 I got a research fellowship from the National Center of Visual Arts [CNAP]).

Is this the 28th question?
Have we got a way to make money?
Money, what does it communicate?
Which is more communicative, an artist who makes money or an artist who doesn’t?
Are people artists within the market, non-artists outside the market?
And if people on the inside don’t really understand, does that change the question?

Why do I teach at the University? (Some say there are Art Schools for artists!)
Why? Because I was invited there and, naturally, I found myself a place there.
I say “naturally” because, whether at an Art School or at the Institute for Higher Studies in Visual Arts, I have always felt a complementarity between the historian and/or theorist and the artist.
Too naturally, no doubt, I got invested and, too passionately, I have continued in the conditions that you know.

Is there always something to wonder about, never peace or calm?
If my head is full of uncertainty, what’s happening to my peace and to my calm?
Are these questions getting us somewhere?
And if there are rules, who made them, I ask you?
In other words — is there a possible end to these uncertainties and, if so, where does it begin?

Are there any important questions?
The semesters are getting shorter, the quota of students per class is rising…
60% of teachers in visual arts are precarious, their pay rising a few hundredths of a euro each year.
I ask you, given that experience emerges over time, what will happen if experience is sacrificed for momentary profit?
Are these questions getting us somewhere?
Where are we going?

Mr. President, I hope that you will be able to understand these questions, and able to answer them too.

I inform you that in spite of the recognized interest in my classes, they are going to be canceled because I am subject to the House of Artists system (which is not even a professional obligation for me), and my earnings are below the threshold for being a full member.
“Fired for insufficient earnings”: my courses are being canceled because my earnings are too low.
Faced with the aberration of this situation, and without a response on your part, I will choose to make this letter public on May 19, 2011.

Please accept, Mr. President, this assurance of my best regards,

Christine Coënon

Commentary
Just a few quick notes here:

• The basic economic problems of adjunct work are recited here with perfect clarity: you’re underpaid with respect to the cost of living, underpaid in relation to permanent staff, have no certainty of keeping your job, no benefits, and no employment contract (which seems to mean, in this case, that you promise your employer that you’ll work while they don’t promise you anything).
• The bad pedagogical consequences of paying teachers by the hour also emerge: notably in the thorny question of whether one should still interact with students “off the clock.” It’s not clear that that is part of one’s job… Is one getting paid nothing for grading students? For mentoring them? And, as Coënon notes, the teaching conditions deteriorate as class sizes rise.
• The bad relationship with the administration is also quite apparent: the administration seems to set an arbitrary and unequal pay scale, and to justify it, when asked, with fairly irrational explanations (e.g. “your pay is less than X’s because we’re taking the administrative overhead out of yours and not theirs…”).
• There’s a whole subtext here about the relationship between money and respect, and an equally important reminder that, as the 2010 national study on precarity showed, many precarious people hate their precarity but — paradoxically — really want to stay in higher education. In case anyone needed a reminder, there are reasons other than strictly economic rationality driving people to work at universities. A pity that this attitude seems to make them all the easier to exploit.
• It would be good to say something here too about what’s signified by the use of art, and in particular the re-use of that poetic text by John Cage, but I don’t have time today to really think this through… It’s a rather poetic form of public desperation that we have here. Is the aestheticization of this text supposed to help make its hostility and resentment seem less blunt? Is it supposed to be a way of reminding the reader that the author is a cultivated person? Is it a claim that the artist can make art even out of the worst situations? Is art a way of making a more powerful political claim on, say, your job? Or is it that things get aestheticized as a way of compensating symbolically for an impending defeat?

Here I just want to show you a little of what the house looked like.

Seen from the quiet back street where it sat, the house looked conventional enough, with a solid stone façade, high windows with the obligatory shutters, a witch’s hat of a gable.

If we look in through the garden gate, though, we can see that the garden is decidedly non-Cartesian, the path is narrow, the entrance bowed over with branches. The garden is a protected space, walled off, the plants preserving the boundaries of private life.

If we go farther into the garden (these next few pictures were from the next day, which was cloudy) we see that the space doesn’t open up into a large open lawn, but rather is divided into little areas with different things, the bush that shelters the bicycle trailer, the path that’s edged by a long clothesline, a brushpile higher than your head.

At the very back of the yard, a workshop was under construction. Building materials and tools piled everywhere. On the windowsill of the unfinished building was a curious row of wooden shoes, and inside there was a bass drum waiting to be played.

The yard was patrolled by a cat.

If we go back towards the street, we can see the dramatic difference between the front and back sides of the house. The front was decorated with a façade and full of windows. The back side was largely windowless and bare, the staircase being set against the blank wall at left. The main entrance to the house was unused, and the kitchen entrance through that glass porch became the main entry.

The little motorbike used for errands is just visible at left, its round mirrors like insect eyes.

From inside the house, we can look back out through the kitchen door, the long rows of pots and pans barely visible in the reflected daylight.

In our first real look at the kitchen, we immediately see what to me was the most fascinating phenomenon in this house: the incredible density and diversity of physical objects. Every horizontal surface is occupied. There are pots and pans of all types and styles. There are ladles and clothespins over the stove, an intestinal string of dangling garlic, a silver cylinder of an electric kettle. Bottled water in a plastic can with a handle, crowds of orange-tipped spices parading on the shelf, various kinds of pottery that I don’t have the vocabulary to classify. Dishes waiting to be washed, dishes waiting to be used. Beans in a jar, a bottle of Pepsi, a mortar used for grinding up grain. It was a space of managed chaos.

Facing the street was a big room that served for eating, for storing, for collecting objects, for sitting in armchairs. It was a room that had an even more astounding diversity of objects: objects of culture, of art (in unclassifiably many styles), of music (a piano and a radio), of business (on a desk with papers), of children (a toy train). Let me show you some of the things that were to be found in the corners of this room.

The table under the window had metal tools, a bowl full of collected rocks, a small watering can, a small lamp, a roll of twine, a black shovel, a tiny model lighthouse in checkered black and white, a big hollow tube of a black candle melted to a round stone that served as its base.

On the other side of the dining table, an immense sideboard held little art objects, family photos, tiny dolls, animals in plastic, a kid’s drawing, a watch, some empty bottles, a thermometer, a feather, a little clock, a folded bandanna, a silver pail, a toy rooster, beads, an antelope figure, a little green tree, a lavender rock…

I agreed with my host that my glass of juice on the dining table was beautiful in the light.

The other end of the room was equally complicated to look at. Mix of antique furniture with a scattering of mundane things, an ornate mirror beside a child’s blue globe, a carved cabinet beside a cardboard box, a fancy brimmed hat beside a mass-produced red backpack. This scene, like the others, was not particularly arranged to be seen; it was more like the accidental result of a rising tide of inherited and found objects, overflowing in every corner.

There was a huge armoire full of books. All sorts. Plant guides, French-German dictionary, a submarine guide to the Atlantic coast, novels by French writers I’ve never heard of, Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, bird guides, old books whose pages needed to be cut apart with a knife if you were going to read them.

If we climb up the stairs to the landing on the first floor (which Americans would call the second floor; but French floor numbering starts at 0), we come to a pair of mirrors and a table with a new assortment of art objects and a little clock. I decided to leave myself in the picture for once. Wouldn’t want to be one of those ethnographers who effaces themselves from their representations of the field.

Around the corner, we find a bathroom that used to be a bedroom. This wasn’t the kind of house that originally had a shower, I gather, so half of one of the bedrooms had been converted for the purpose. It made for an odd kind of mixed-used space; this half of the room looks like a bathroom, while the other half (off to the right) was a bedroom with fluffy comforter, as if the room were a page from the children’s book Magical Changes where you recombine different images in surreal fashion.

If we climb the stairs to the third floor, the walls get a bit less decorated and it feels a bit more spacious. There was a skylight that seemed more modern than the traditional French windows on the lower floors.

Finally at the top of the house was a long high-ceilinged bedroom where I stayed up under the eaves. A narrow window peeked out under the gable I showed in the first picture above. It looked old, its paint a bit flaked, partly cracked, the shutter trimmed with rust.

Out the window was a view of the town, the pike of the cathedral about to spear the cloud in the distance.

Arabic or Turkish art objects off in the corner, more stored than looked at, but nonetheless making you feel like you had suddenly fallen into a glimpse of a completely non-French world.

Over the low mattress where I slept loomed a little constellation of lamps on the dresser. (I see I hadn’t made the bed.)

I won’t give much of an analysis of this scene for now, since I have other things to write today, but I find it interesting to ponder the domestic history apparent in this thicket of objects. The house was in its third generation in the family, presumably accumulating stuff all the while; probably most of the things there had little histories of their own. I’m not sure that I would even know how to classify all the objects in these photos; it would be impossible to find a neat distinction here, for instance, between “useful” and “aesthetic” objects. Even some of the most utilitarian kitchen objects were aestheticized, stylized; while conversely, even something seemingly decorative like a round stone might end up serving as an impromptu candelabra. I was reminded again that there’s way more to someone’s life than the little fragment of a self that gets presented on a university campus. A professor’s life — or at least this one — has a long history of social relationships that leave little traces of themselves in the form of collected things in the home. And this history (from what I heard of it) no more adds up to a single linear narrative than the mass of things in the living room conformed to a single principle of accumulation.

My host, I have to say, was someone who reminded me enormously of old American hippies of my acquaintance, the kind of person who you’d find at Paris-8 far more often than at more traditional French universities. He seemed to have a strong sense that his house was a non-normative space, a place that needed “cleaning up” to be presentable to company; and indeed, his home was noticeably more cluttered than other faculty homes I’ve glimpsed. At the same time, it was a tremendously lively space, full of projects done and half-done; most faculty don’t build their own workshops in the back of the garden, and that wasn’t even his only construction project. We can see here, it seems to me, that the home can be a space of deep non-normativity, partially liberated from the judgmental attitudes of the neighbors or the public, a space where an alternative order can be created that diverges from French society’s usual obligations of neatness and propriety.

There’s a lesson here for researchers, like me, whose main ethnographic sites are institutional ones. If you only look at what happens in, say, a campus, you’re at risk of forgetting that what you’re looking at is one of the most highly regimented spaces in the society in question, and probably needs to be understood in relationship to the relative spaces of freedom that people have in their domestic life. No one lives their whole life in institutional space, after all. At the same time, on the other hand, a foreigner like me is bound to have limited access to these domestic spaces, especially when they’re not the main focus of the project.

Maybe in some future project I can look into the interface between domestic and professional life in academia. I imagine that for many faculty, this boundary zone is full of painful compromise and fracture, somewhat like a dislocated shoulder.

This ought to give you the general idea. The other wall and the inside of the door were no less decorated.

Beside the chain that flushed the toilet tank, there was a little user’s guide. “Please flush the toilet with the softness of an old lady. Thanks!” (This incidentally is also a fairly characteristic example of French cursive handwriting.)

A lot of the decoration was concert announcements and seemingly random images.

There were also some mock-political slogans. “Work less to earn less and live better” (travailler moins pour gagner moins et vivre mieux) is a parody of Sarkozy’s “Work more, earn more” (travailler plus pour gagner plus). Interdit d’interdire? takes a bit more explanation: it translates as “Forbidden to forbid?” which is a famous 1968 slogan, but obviously the joke is that it’s juxtaposed with an image of a smoking smileyface, as if to say: you don’t seriously want to forbid forbidding something as unhealthy as smoking, do you, radicals?

Some essential technologies for hygiene and body care: toilet paper, air freshener, a radiator for the winter. (I know someone out there is going to be saying: what is the point of anthropology if the best it can do is tell us that the French use toilet paper? To which I reply: As an anthropology blog, part of the goal is to remind us that what’s taken for granted one place is nonetheless far from universal. Laura Pearl Kaya reports that in Irbid, Jordan, for instance, toilet paper is “an amenity generally considered disgusting… and rarely found outside of tourist hotels” [2009:263]. Even in France, as every tourist knows, a toilet seat is far from universally supplied, particularly in public toilets.)

If we look more closely at the art next to the toilet paper, we see a postcard entitled “The world as seen by the French.” The different parts of the world are labeled as follows. Europe: “Euroland.” Russia: “Bigger drinkers than us.” Mongolia: “Lots of emptiness.” Eastern Siberia: “We’ll never be going that way.” Turkey/Middle East: “Scary zone.” India: “Lots of little people.” China: “Cause of all our woes.” Japan/Philippines: “Live animal eaters.” Australia: “Very far away.” Mauritius: “Little piece of France very far away.” North Africa: “Former colonies.” Sub-Saharan Africa: “Incomprehensible zone.”

Antarctica: “Terra incognita.” Southern tip of South America: “Home of Nicolas Hulot” (who’s apparently an environmental activist). Brazil: “Machucambos Country (indian musical groups).” Colombia: “Wicked FARC.” Guadeloupe: “Little piece of France very far away.” America: “New friends.” Canada: “Incomprehensible cousins.” Somewhere in the Arctic: “Santa Claus’ Country.”

I won’t get into a long commentary on this little image, but suffice it to say that it falls within the genre of this kind of maps; it involves a deliberate use of national self-stereotyping; and it invokes an interesting sort of national surrealism. It’s tacitly saying, in other words, that every nationality has its own, inevitably distorted, inaccurate, hyperbolic way of looking at the world. And it’s interesting to me that even in a space as tiny and enclosed and private as this toilet there’s an image of the world. As if even the smallest, most confined, most ostensibly instrumental and even profane spaces sometimes find themselves becoming scenes where the world gets presented as a totality.

Here at right we have the one potentially controversial image in this whole series: a silly photo of scantily clad men in towels labeled “Gay Saturday at The Baths.” I was ready to just accept it as one of the larger series of silly images, but soon after I moved in, one of my two (former) roommates made a point of saying something like, it’s not me who put that one up, don’t get worried, it’s just a joke or something like that. To make the most blindingly obvious interpretive comment about this, we see here that certain representations of sexuality are potentially threatening to the heteronormativity that pervades Parisian male youth culture, and hence evoke moments of boundary maintenance like this one. The message apparently being: Don’t worry, no one’s gay here. I guess if you wanted to meditate about this further, you’d have to think about how sexuality, privacy, intimacy, and bodily functions all get wound up together in spaces like this one.

I liked this poster, which is for the French publisher (called l’école des loisirs) of Where the wild things are.

Obligatory Beatles poster. To me, what’s interesting about it is its visual composition: we have here not just an image but an image of images, a compound image.

And to make matters even more analytically curious, I discovered that this particular toilet is — as ridiculous as it sounds to say this — a kind of reflexive space, a space that reflects back on itself, a space that represents itself to itself. Because on the back of the door was a photo of this very same toilet — presumably taken at the beginning before anything was put up on the walls. An image of toilets past, I suppose.

There were a bunch of other images of this apartment, of the roommates hanging out together, and of their living spaces. These two were photos of the living/dining room: a series of representations of the apartment itself as a domestic and social space. Of course, everyone including me has now moved out, so all this is gone now. They hadn’t found new tenants, so the place is probably sitting empty at this very moment, as I write.

I just want to end with a couple of broader observations about toilets. As American anthropologists recall from Horace Miner’s Body Ritual among the Nacirema, the (Western) toilet is a deeply profane space, and — as Miner observed fifty years ago — “excretory functions are ritualized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy.” That mostly holds true for France (with the major exception of male public urination, which is very widespread). Admittedly, there’s a whole economy of toilets here: there are people who make their living as public toilet attendants, collecting something like 35 cents from each visitor, and Paris famously has these peculiar self-cleaning public toilets scattered throughout the streets. Far from being totally private spaces, the shared public toilets create boundary zones between public and private, between physical intimacy and social distance. But they’re still deeply instrumental spaces, toilets: one associates them with what one can call in English “bodily functions” or in French, apparently, “faire ses besoins” (roughly, doing one’s needs). Which is why it becomes anthropologically interesting that a toilet would get so decorated, becoming as much an aesthetic space as a place for pure corporeal functionality. Along with the visual art, for that matter, there was an enormous pile of newspapers, which indicates that certain of my roommates spent long periods of time in this small space.

What does all this have to do with universities, you ask? Well, first of all, as a room in a student apartment, I reckon it falls under the broader rubric of “student culture” and hence deserves our attention. (Two of the three long-term residents here were students; the third was a recent graduate.) Indeed, universities themselves have toilets — ones which, in the badly underfunded French university environment, have sometimes become cause for consternation. So in a purely empirical sense, I’d point out that even the little temples of “bodily functions” constitute part of the institutional and social arrangements of academic culture.

But beyond that, it seems to me worth recalling in closing that, if it seems particularly inane to comment on toilets in connection with universities, that in itself is only a sign that we still live in a world built around a deeply felt opposition between the “higher” life of the mind and the “lower” needs of the body. I guess the hyperbolic way of putting this argument would be: there could be no universities if there were no toilets. Partly that’s just for simple biological reasons, of course. But it’s also true inasmuch as the cultural divide between mind and body — which the university embodies institutionally and draws on conceptually — would simply make no sense if there were no embodiment of the lowest and most corporeal side of things. For the university to be a very highly valued cultural institution, there must also be a very disvalued and stigmatized cultural institution to stand in opposition.

Seriously, though, I’m half kidding.

Last week I was sitting on a hilltop with my book in basically the absolute middle of nowhere in Wales. Dressed in gray and brown. Motionless.

Two women maybe my parents’ age walk past me on the cliff path. We say hi, in the cursory way that’s the norm for passing hikers.

A third person goes by, and I don’t even look up. But then she peers down under my hat brim.

“Are you somebody?” she asks quizzically.

“Yeah,” I say, nonplussed by the nonsensical question.

“I saw something as I was coming,” she explains, “but I thought it was a bush or a rock.”

I laugh.

“Are you studying?” she asks after a moment.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Nice spot for it,” and she looks around at the view.

“What are you studying?”

“French politics,” I say after a second of scrambling around in my brain for a quick explanation of what I do.

“What?” she says. Her accent sounds a little German.

“French politics.”

“French politics!” she exclaims in surprise. “Well, good luck with it.”

“Thanks!” I say, smiling with a half laugh.

She goes on to her friends, tells them “French politics!”

And they go on among themselves, speaking another language, German perhaps, and taking each others’ photos with a cheap tourist camera as they vanish downhill.

…

The moral of this story would appear to be that if you aren’t careful and you do academic work in nonacademic places you may be mistaken for a shrubbery. Or perhaps a small boulder.

Alternatively, the moral of this story is that overinvestment in academic work can become a bizarre spectacle for passers-by.

The moral of this story, and here I’m going to be serious for a second, is that it’s mighty strange that graduate school can manage to induce this state of perpetual work where even the most obscure corners of summer are subjected to neurotic productivity compulsions.

In the end, in spite of everything that this blog pretends to know about the little dominations of academic life, I have to confess that I can’t help mostly feeling that I love my work.

Disturbing, I know.

But what I wanted to write about, briefly, was a little exchange I discovered in Critical Inquiry from 1999 between Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian, and Nicholas Royle, an English literature professor. The year before, LaCapra had written a fairly critical response to Bill Readings’ well-known 1996 book, The University in Ruins. In his earlier 1998 essay, LaCapra notes that Readings’ claims of “ruin” are hyperbole, and he goes on to make some very sensible points about Readings’ tacit theory of institutions and his forms of evidence. Here’s a typical passage:

Readings’s very understanding of institutions is largely conceptual rather than oriented to institutions as historically variable sets of practices relating groups of people. His perspective on the institution and what he considers institutionally relevant thus seems very high-altitude in nature. In this approach… Readings relies not on studies of the institutional functioning of universities but on a decontextualized reading of such figures as Kant, Humboldt, Arnold, and Newman. These figures did elaborate paradigms or normative models, at times embodying critical and self-critical elements, and these models may have had a problematic relation to institutional practice that varied over space and time. But what that relation was, including the differences between model and practice, is not immediately obvious. (1998:38)

This strikes me as wise methodological advice for anyone who wants to understand what a university is and how “the university” relates to the various ideas that actors have about it. LaCapra argues, in short, that one has to look at the relations, gaps, tensions, between discourse and practice. But what strikes me as hilarious, and what drives me to write this blog post, is how Royle writes in his response to LaCapra the year after. In short, Royle gives a flawless performance of what I recognize, from essays I read in college, as stock deconstructive rhetoric. Here’s the start of Royle’s essay:

In his extremely measured and seemingly even-handed essay, Dominick LaCapra recalls Jacques Derrida’s well-known (though still perhaps inconceivable) proposition that “one must begin where one is” (p. 50).[1] He does not recall the more difficult and disconcerting supplement that accompanies it, that is to say “Wherever we are: in a text already where we believe ourselves to be” (“Quelque part où nous sommes: en un texte déjà où nous croyons être”).[2] To be already in a text, that is to say, in a context, is to be in ruins.[3] It is to have to reckon with a thinking and an affirmation of ruination at the origin. As Derrida has observed: “In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.”[4] An affirmation of this experience of ruination is, as Derrida says, “experience itself”: the ruin “is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything.”[5]

How do you feel about this passage? Yes, I’m serious. I want to hear your reactions. But since, alas, I can’t find out without finishing this post first, I’ll start by telling you some things that strike me about this passage.

1. It starts out with utter sarcasm about LaCapra’s text; seemingly even-handed is basically academese for ridiculously unfair.
2. Derrida is cast in a very strange way: as at once a sort of nearby interlocutor, someone who needs no introduction and whose propositions are “well-known,” but also as an absolute authority whose (in fact controversial) claims can be cited as if they were self-evident truths.
3. It’s unclear why it would be an inconceivable proposition to “begin where one is,” and Royle makes no effort to explain what he means.
4. Moving on to the second sentence… I note that being “more difficult and disconcerting” is cast as an obviously good thing.
5. In passing, this is an incredibly scholastic bit of prose: every sentence ends in a footnote.
6. Royle cites Derrida to the effect that we are (presumably always and everywhere) “in a text already.” (He also quotes the French original to no apparent purpose.)
7. He needs to assert that we’re already in a text so that he can then claim, in the third sentence, that texts are themselves contexts. If there is nothing outside the text (are we far enough into the Derridean ritual incantations yet?) then, presumably, LaCapra’s “differences between model and practice” don’t exist, or at best can only be rephrased as mere differences between one text and the next.
8. Having claimed that contexts are themselves texts, Royle can then present us with the fantastic metaphor, presented however as a seemingly literal claim, that being in a text is already being in ruins. My point here isn’t that we ought to strive for non-metaphorical thought — anyone who believes that should try reading George Lakoff — but rather that Royle fails to acknowledge the metaphorical status of his own claim.
9. (Incidentally, I observe that Royle has casually slipped from Derrida’s voice to his own, blending one with the next.)
10. In sum, Royle’s initial retort to LaCapra’s paper appears to be something like this: If all being involves being in a text, which involves being in a context, which is itself a text, and all being in a text involves being in ruins, then Readings can’t be accused of hyperbole in claiming that the university is in ruins. For we’re all always already in ruins.
11. I’m tempted to point out that Royle himself is appallingly hyperbolic here, but as it turns out later in the essay, Royle is already well aware of his own hyperbole. I won’t quote the whole passage, but he tries to avoid the patent hypocrisy of his hyperbolic reaction to (what he views as) LaCapra’s hyperbolic reaction to Readings’ hyperbole by asserting, feebly, that “there is hyperbole… we could say, as soon as there is text” (fn. 11). Royle, of course, makes no effort to substantiate this sweeping statement.
12. If we go on to read the last few sentences of the passage I quoted, we get a sense of the way that this Derridean language seems to constitute a limited, abstract literary cosmos, one which seems to have a strong aesthetic appeal for writers like Royle. A Derridean utterance like “At the origin comes ruin” certainly sounds mysterious; it has the patter of poetry; but it becomes a blunt form of thought, an intellectual anaesthetic that blocks us from distinguishing different origins and different ruins. There’s something Pavlovian about it, come to think of it: it’s as if, every time anyone uttered the word “ruins,” Royle were obliged to respond by citing Derrida to the effect that we’re already ruined. As if Derridean language makes its intellectual world less by persuasion or dialogue with its critics than through sheer force of repetition. A sad fate for a intellectual project that often wanted to be more discriminating, to read more carefully, than any other.
13. Just to pick out one last quality of this Derridean style, I’m struck by the casual reference to something like “experience itself,” which apparently can be entirely defined (by Royle) as “an affirmation of this experience of ruination.” Really, all experience is an experience of ruination? This is a kind of writing that talks freely about extremely abstract entities and takes pleasure in giving lots of paradoxical definitions, but it’s simultaneously theoretically committed to the impossibility of ever defining anything. It’s a theoretical language that revels in its own paradoxes.

Now, LaCapra obviously was seriously annoyed by Royle’s critique (which went on for several pages). His 1999 response to Royle is one of the more witheringly comic bits of academic prose I’ve read in a while; it has moments like these:

I would begin by noting the seeming condescension in his tone of the initiate. This tone has become familiar in a certain discourse that seems to situate itself both textually and contextually somewhere between meta-metaphysical hyperspace and Planet Earth (conceived of course in appropriately global terms). This labile (non)position of the Luftmensch allows for rapid gliding between quasi-transcendental critique and historical (or pseudohistorical) commentary.

[In response to an argument that LaCapra is US-centric:] If Royle really has something to say about other university systems that would contradict or qualify my argument, it would have been enlightening for him to have said it.

[In response to Readings's and Royle's advocacy of short-term, non-institutionalized structures:] A university made up only of self-styled anti-institutional institutions of short duration could be the realization of the superbureaucratic, transnational manager’s wildest dream—the ideal place for the blissful rendez-vous of such an apparatchik with the Deleuzian nomad following a ligne de fuite.

[In response to a claim that LaCapra ignores students:] Royle asserts that “in a sense, students do not exist” (p. 152). I shall resist the invitation to sustained irony this formulation holds out and simply observe that in another sense they do indeed exist.

[In conclusion:] Readings’s book was striving for something while Royle at times seems to equate thought (or is it Thought?) with rather predictable, in any case “undisconcerting” and histrionic, verbal gestures.

So in the end it doesn’t appear that Royle managed to persuade his opponent of anything of substance. Instead, he managed to call attention to his own textual performance. But for me, this whole exchange elicits above all a feeling of the rapid passage of time in academia. It strikes me that I very seldom see anything from the last ten years written in the Roylean style — that style where Derrida is a vast authority yet close at hand, where certain kinds of universal claims (for instance about “experience itself”) combine so readily with a fixation on the irreducibility and undecidability of texts, where a certain form of in-group irony passed for the height of intellectual sophistication. I don’t even know if most grad students my age have encountered this Derridean style — it was a staple of undergrad literary theory education when I was in college, but that was a while ago and may have been particular to my undergrad institution. At any rate, it’s not a style I’ve really encountered in the humanities at Chicago where I am now (though admittedly I’m not in a humanities department). Does anyone else get the sense that this sort of deconstructive writing is now slipping away into the archives?

By contrast, you could rent a room in Paris for an entire month (my rent is €400) for less than the sum cost of these three days. Yes, a month’s rent: which, from a student perspective, is a rather amazing sum of money. It’s enough to make one think that major academic conferences like this are structured around a sort of tacit class exclusion. They do, of course, have some participant funding available, but it apparently comes to €20,000 for a conference that’s supposed to attract more than a thousand people.