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 gate isn’t normally open to the public. There was something vaguely contradictory about the staff’s relation with the public, like in an art museum where they’re there to smile at you but also to protect the place against you. At this gate, two people stood watch in suits: one of them was radiant and tried to persuade every passing person to come visit; the other (back to the camera) seemed silent and kept watch.

Farther inside the premises, there were security guards stationed at every corner. I suspect that they don’t patrol that heavily on usual days, since the workers seemed unfamiliar with each other. I overheard one guard asking another, “What was the name of that guy downstairs, again?” “Umm, no idea.”

This, the building where the Minister has her office, is what I would describe as standard French government architecture. Pale stone, French and European flags. Leaping arches, solemn columns. The decoration is more than merely functional, but not ostentatious.

The first room you saw inside was this, apparently a place where they hold press conferences and the like. I noticed that the decor combined very traditional features like a parquet floor and a chandelier with very businesslike, modern features like a tiled ceiling and little spotlights. I guess that’s how you try to be modern while retaining the aura of past forms of architectural dignity.

They were handing out little pamphlet histories of the last thirty years of higher education. I may look at the details of this ministerial history in a later post; it was an odd mix of Big Science accomplishments (particle accelerators and the like) with organizational reforms in French higher ed.

Looking back across the room, we can see that one guy rubs his forehead, one woman yawns, one girl scratches her shin, and a couple seems to be reading the informational display.

Up the staircase to the Minister’s office, a curious piece of art tells us that “nothing is not nothing.”

Abstract art seems to be the theme. This was the Minister’s outer waiting room, complete with a collection of random academic books.

This curious art project involved an army of little figurine soldiers arranged in a skewed, false-perspective grid.

“Liberty or Death!” If that message really does draw on the famous American Revolution speech (“Give me liberty or give me death“) then it might be the most prominent sign of American political inspiration in this whole establishment.

Old glass in the windows lets through droplets of oily sunlight.

The view from this second antechamber looks out over the Panthéon. I’m tempted to guess that this highly symbolically loaded scene was deliberately organized by the architects.

They had installed ropes for crowd control, and to keep you from touching anything important.

Here we have the shiny conference table in Madame Pécresse’s office. Always interesting to observe the prominent ceremonial use of plants, and more specifically of flowers, in these settings.

The Minister’s desk: it has some little stacks of books, some art objects, a few little photographs, a flag in the corner. Certainly fancy but hardly overwhelmingly ostentatious, especially by French standards. I was curious about why there were two telephones, given that either one of them looked able to handle a dozen telephone lines at once.

A ceremonial photo of her boss hung on the wall. To the right was a photo of a rocket launch, a further reminder of the ministerial emphasis on Big Science-esque national accomplishments. That thing at the bottom looks like a statue of dove siamese twins.

Beneath her office window, there was a carefully kept, walled garden. At left you can just make out the vertical figure of a security guard. He had excellent posture.

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s former library was in this room, they were proud to tell us.

Looking out from the back garden, the ministerial lawn mower was stowed away in a corner of a lower courtyard. Off camera to the left, I spotted a security guard sitting on an out-of-the-way bench, staring at nothing in particular.

A war memorial initially seems out of place at an education ministry, but you have to remind yourself that these buildings are the former premises of a prestigious military engineering school, the Ecole Polytechnique.

This sculpture seemed to me to evoke far more agony than the war memorial. The official description read something like this:

Three anthropomorphic sculptures in bronze stand in the garden to the right of the Court of Honor, enclosing the plants. Three characters, one upright, one kneeling, and the third lying down, are set on cement foundations laid in the soil. They have been there since the 1980s.

Giuseppe Penone, the sculptor, is an Italian representative of Arte Povera. Here his gesture sets a constraint on nature without preventing the growth of the tree. The presence of the plant also reveals a certain relation to time, growing with the rhythm of a different lifecycle from our own. The artist explains that the oxidation of the bronze, exposed to the elements, gives the metal an aspect much like that of the leaf or the trunk “as if the plants produced the sculpture”…

If you could see off to the left of the photo, you’d see that a small tree was engulfed by another one of these metal figures. At any rate, we have here a quite different ceremonial use of plants from that visible on the Minister’s conference table bouquet. If you wanted to theorize about it, you could perhaps say something about the way that art and plant life, far from embodying an opposition between “cultured” activity and wild nature, in fact end up serving a similar ornamental function in this setting. They render things solemn. They’re pretty. And in a place as cramped as central Paris, it’s difficult not to see this sort of deliberately unpragmatic space as a form of conspicuous consumption of real estate.

I went through a grim suburban railroad station in Dublin on my way there. But in the pedestrian bridge over the tracks, there was a pair of grills that produced one of the most intense moiré patterns I’ve seen.

When you got to the campus, though, there was an sense of almost physical relief compared to the tightly enclosed urban campuses where I work in France. This was the enormous lawn just beside the old part of campus.

It even had wildlife.

The old campus itself was stone. Everything there was very quiet. (I think this part of the campus is the seminary, matter of fact.)

Admittedly, the cars and parking lots have risen up between the old buildings like a bituminous tide.

And the rows of dumpsters were somewhat aesthetically out of place, to say the least.

I was surprised to find out that the library was named after Pope John Paul II. Across from its front door was a very… pastoral sculpture.

If we crossed a bridge we came to the new side of campus (it’s the National University of Ireland-Maynooth).

The reflections ran off to a vanishing point.

There was even a creche with a playhouse.

This low building was locally considered the ugliest on campus. It didn’t look that bad to me.

A whole complex of new dormitories had been built in the last couple of years (all those buildings in the far background).

Out in the town, on the other hand, houses were low, tightly packed, a bit glum, barely colored, very similar to architecture I’ve seen elsewhere in the British Isles. One of these had all its windows broken and the rain pouring in, and seemed to have been left that way for some time.

One notices that in the university’s advertisements, they don’t show images of that part of town.

It strikes me, in hindsight, that it’s worth emphasizing that the march bore a diversity of political messages. While an anti-Sarkozy, pro-immigrant message was certainly the predominant message and the one picked up by the media, there were also, for instance, a number of people marching on behalf of higher education and research, attempting to add their own message to the mix and to show political solidarity with the larger project.

To the left was the “Recherche Publique Enseignement Supérieur” (Public Research Higher Education) balloon.

Later on, I found the banner of Sauvons l’Université (“Save the University!”). I asked someone what the political situation was in the universities this fall. “It’s the rentrée [ie, homecoming, the start of the year],” I was told, “so there is no situation yet; it remains to be created.” I rather like that tiny comment as a fragment of local political temporality.

A group I hadn’t heard of: “Education without borders.”

And another one, the Teaching League, who apparently are there to defend secular public education. I asked one of them: haven’t you guys already won? France has had secular education for a century, I’m thinking to myself… Yes, in general, but there’s always something that needs defending, they answered.

This one is even harder to read, but it says: “Let them grow up here” (laissez-les grandir ici). It seems to me based on a very common immigrants’ rights slogan: “We live here, we work here, we’re staying here” (on vit ici, on bosse ici, on reste ici). The strong, poetically repetitive emphasis on being here, a case of what linguists would call spatial deixis, is a key component of this political symbolism. At the same time, there’s a complex invocation of political temporality here too. To begin with, there’s the temporality of exhortation, the temporality of a political demand (let them!…). But at the same time, this sign invokes the whole temporality of living, of growing up, of children in a crowd holding hands, of children being allowed to stay where they are, allowed to eventually become full-fledged French citizens and to fulfill their role in reproducing French society.

What’s poignant about this sign, and what makes it different from the slogan “we live here, we work here, we’re staying here,” is that it’s not the children themselves who are holding it; it’s the adults who are demanding a future on their behalf. At the same time, rather less poignantly, it’s the native-born white French here who are demanding a sort of mercy for immigrants. There’s a whole dimension of concealed group membership in a slogan like this one, a “them” contrasted to a tacit “us.” Most French street politics seem to be mainly about “us” and to involve groups advocating on behalf of themselves, but immigrants rights politics has an unusual orientation towards defending the other, defending the out-group. “Don’t touch my friend” (touche pas à mon pote) is a super common slogan in these contexts, and it has the same rhetorical structure as this sign: an appeal to power on behalf of some powerless third party.

And, of course, it also draws on the imagery of schoolchildrens’ crosswalk signs. Or perhaps those children holding hands are an image of the next generation of street protesters?

Related to the temporal frame of political fragility that I heard evoked by Sauvons l’Université, these people’s t-shirts read: “provisionally at liberty.” As if invoking the spectre of a future in which the government will round them up.

The same temporal frame of a fragile and hazardous future comes up in this handmade sign: “Tomorrow it could be you!!” As Moacir’s post notes, the memory of the deportation of the Jews was quite present in this event, and I have an intuition that this slogan here also has a bit of an echo of that famous poem about “first they came for the communists…”

Sarkozy’s government has for some time declined all interest in street protests, but it’s interesting to note that lately, especially with this week’s much larger march against their reforms of the pension system, they seem to be at least pretending to pay a bit of attention to this form of political expression.

The very tiles on the walls are gridded.

The bars and grills of the windows recede along their grid towards an unreached vanishing point.

In a courtyard at Toulouse, the pillars run in rows. The cement beams run in columns. The bench has a predictable railing. The windows are little boxes of crosses. The grass is boxed in. The one curved cement beam in the open ceiling only serves to set off the space’s overall linearity.

The chairs and desks are in alternating rows, their regularity still evident even if we look at them from an angle.

One starts to wonder if the campus was designed to make the individual feel a sense of vertigo in the face of the endlessness of this rectangular tunnel. The plane of the ceiling, broken up into a vast set of cement indentations, mirrors that of the tiled walkway. The sides, admittedly, are less regular, but even there we see regular columns, symmetrical pathways leading off on both sides.

The deeply gridded forms of this campus space make for an even more unexpected contrast with this mural, with all its organic and chaotic lines, with its clashing colors and sense of incongruous corporeality, its bulging green face and stark hair, the folds of its purple robes.

At the same time, not all student decoration breaks with the grid form. Here we can see that even the activists sometimes decide that their posters look better laid out in a neat 3 x 3 square.

If we look inside a lecture hall, we can see down to the vast square of the projection screen, the grid of the ceiling, the grid of the brick walls, the rectangle of the table, the rectangle of the doors, the smaller rectangles of the papers taped up on the walls.

Looking up from the point of view of the professor, we can see the crease where the pattern of the bricks meets the pattern of the desks.

Though if we look closer, we can see that graffiti takes over on a smaller scale, rupturing the longer rectangular patterns of the bolted-down furniture, taking us away from the regimented view towards the professor’s dais that a lecture hall is designed to create.

One has to remind oneself that even if we look close up at the graffiti, even if we try to lose ourselves in its colored snakes and curls, we still see the blurry edges of the long wooden tabletop stretching off again into the distance along parallel lines that appear to meet.

There is long precedent for this kind of Cartesian architecture in French official spaces. This here, for instance, is a gigantic canal built as an ornament to Napoleon’s former palace at Fontainebleau. It too stretches out almost to the apparent horizon, flanked by rows of identically pruned trees.

Even seen from above on maps, the griddy similarities are evident. Here’s Napoleon’s park at Fontainebleau:

And here’s the grid of the Toulouse campus:

Obviously this second map is much denser and more convoluted than the park, but the similar pattern of long avenues remains apparent.

I’m still not really sure what to make of this apparent cultural-architectural pattern. And of course grids are hardly the sole invention of the French. But there’s something to be said for trying to notice patterns and preferences, like this Cartesian pattern, that usually pass without notice, being entirely taken for granted in the course of everyday life.

Une manifestation is the French term for a protest march in the street. It’s a pretty standard local political ritual, mocked and memorialized by local jokes and international stereotypes alike. “Don’t bother going today if you don’t feel like it,” an  American grad student tells me one day when I feel lazy, “there will always be another one.”

The “manif,” as it’s called, strikes me as a paradoxical social form: imagined as a massively, even paradigmatically collective event, its collectivity nonetheless has a somewhat fictive quality. Most marchers stick to little groups of their friends, paying attention mainly to the people immediately around them. Phenomenologically, a manif is fractured and disorganized, with people leaving and showing up, wandering back and forth, stopping perhaps to take a leaflet or a snapshot. For a marcher, the crowd is a visual jumble of strangers’ bodies crisscrossing. As if to make sense of the constant random motion, a curiously quantitative consciousness descends at times even on the defenders of the most radical causes. The march’s success gets perceived as proportional to the apparent size of the crowd; it can become almost actuarial. People take note of who shows up and of who didn’t make it.

It would be hasty, no doubt, to conclude that the lack of verbal communication between most members of the march indicates indifference. The manif is an event whose significance derives less from the usual forms of personal interaction than from the sheer effervescence of mass bodily proximity. From the heat of the crowd. From the noise of the crowd. From shouted slogans, even the inaudible ones, and from the shouts of colors of hundreds of signs, and from the hiss of mass motion. From the fact that, for a change, strangers on the street are assumed to share a common purpose.

A manif has a point of departure (often a big Parisian square), a destination (maybe a government ministry), and a route connecting them. It becomes a performance of political linearity, its physical progress iconic of the political progress tacitly demanded by the marchers’ signs and banners. By cultural convention, the crowd becomes iconic of a social group (the homeless, the miners, the students…) and the march itself becomes symbolic of a populist political process where the governing powers are expected to bend to the people’s will, a will manifested in the collective body.

But not everything about a manif fits into this neat political schema. The manif’s collectivity is partly a product of the mass media: dozens of dozens of photographers record not so much the lived experience of the marchers, which is often mundane and incoherent, but the dramatic banners and spectacular images of the crowd as a whole, often taken from rooftops or cartops (left). The whole collectivity is almost never visible to the marchers themselves at the time; at best they see it afterwards in the papers. But even as collectivity is technically mediated, individuality is effaced: most people carry premade signs and placards with standardized messages (“The university is not a business!”), as if disinclined to think up their own slogans and happy to blend into the crowd. Sidewalk spectators, for their part, tend not to talk to the marchers, usually content to watch the march pass like a spectacle. One person’s corporeal effervescence is someone else’s commodity image.

And even leaving aside these internal paradoxes, the manif is a political ritual that often fails to produce results. In spite of dozens of street marches over a four month period, the Spring 2009 university movement failed to persuade Sarkozy to withdraw his reforms. Today in France, university activists are looking for new tactics.

This fellow was from UNEF. As I asked to take his picture, an older man he was talking to edged back out of the frame, and the activist drew himself up in a sort of pose.

The local leader of the Mouvement Étudiant. I think he was sort of like the boss of the other Mét militants; one of them later stopped talking to me because, he said, he was afraid the boss would be annoyed he wasn’t giving out fliers. I’m struck by the definite posed look here too. I guess you can’t just ask to take people’s photos and then expect them to not pose.

This person sitting at the left-wing Fédération Syndicale Étudiant table was actually from the CGT (a larger labor union). He wanted to know what the labor situation was like in the US. Looks a little more relaxed than the others, perhaps in part because he’s sitting down.

A militant from the Confédération Étudiante.

A trashcan by the student election tables labeled “trashcan for tracts” where you could throw your political fliers once you’d voted. I guess we should applaud their dedication to recycling, but it somehow seemed funny that ten yards from where they gave out the tracts, there was a place for you to throw them away. These tracts have a very short lifecycle and duration of meaningfulness, it would appear.

I have to remind myself at times that an anthropologist’s careful scrutiny of a local artifact like a tract is totally alien to the inattentive, half-bored way that most students seemed to regard them. Very few tracts are actually read, people say here. Some people throw them out immediately, without even looking, as if the only reason they accept them to begin with is to humor the people distributing them. Others refuse them outright — which seems far more honest.

Now as it happened, the week I arrived they were in the last days of campaigning for student elections to various university administrative councils, primarily the Administration Council (Conseil d’Administration, which is the major decision-making body) and University Life and Study Council (Conseil des Etudes de la Vie Universitaire, which handles pedagogical matters). Graduate students are also eligible to sit on the Scientific Council (Conseil Scientifique), which sets research policy.

This was the courtyard by the main entrance. In the center of the photo you can see the little group of people handing out leaflets, in what became practically a competitive sport to reach the maximum number of potential voters.

There were also informational tables, such as this one for the Mouvement Etudiant, which is the right-wing student group associated with Sarkozy’s UMP government. As you can see, they didn’t always bother to sit by their table.

Inside these doors under the election banner, there were a series of informational panels, one for each group. From left to right:

UNEF, the National Union of Students in France, is the largest French student union. These signs proclaim that they are “the” student syndicate — the only one present on every French campus, they’ve told me. They’re said to be close to the Socialist Party. Their election platform had a long list of 21 different demands; the more notable were “against competition” (which is a way of opposing the government’s market-oriented university reforms), “quality job placement,” “against selective admissions to master’s programs” (open admission is a traditional university value here, though more and more threatened), for a university daycare center, and for reimbursement of students’ costs who commute to Aix from Marseille. A few of the demands, for instance for recycling on campus, seemed more perfunctory and designed primarily to compete with other groups (the Greens in this case). And the demand for free photocopying on campus seemed like a good bit of pork for their student constituents.

Cé, the Student Confederation, also seemed relatively centrist by student politics standards, defining themselves in opposition to UNEF. The big slogan here is “for the success of working students I vote Cé.” The cartoon has the green character saying: “and for THE SUCCESS OF WORKING STUDENTS, what do we do?” Response (from the yellow-scarfed UNEF militant): “AGAINST WORKING STUDENTS bla bla bla STRONG SIGNAL TO THE GOVERNMENT bla bla if you’re still voting for us promise this time we’ll get something…” — which I guess is saying that UNEF has made campaign promises they haven’t followed through on.

Cé also advocated an alumni network (un réseau des anciens), which is a proposal I haven’t ever heard elsewhere; they demanded that “skills learned from experience” be validated by the university; and they proposed a government supplement to student workers’ salaries. On a more tactical level, they officially opposed UNEF-led (or left) blockades of the university, calling them “sauvage”; these blockades presumably lasted a long time during last year’s strike.

Fac Verte, the equivalent of the Green Party on campus. They explained to me that they are a group of various subgroups — “ecologists, décroissants, disobedients, alter-mondialistes, libertarians, anticapitalists” — and their politics proposed a sort of student labor exchange, a daycare (cf. UNEF), free public transit for students (cf. UNEF), recycling (cf. UNEF), recycled paper in the xerox machines, organic fair-trade food sold on campus, a carpool network, new environmental standards for academic buildings, and the like. They say they’ve already succeeded in building a collective garden.

The left-wing groups (notice how these panels were arranged in a progression more or less from most centrist to least centrist) on campus are SUD-Etudiant (SUD stands for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique) and FSE (the Student Union Federation). They are “syndicats de lutte,” which could be roughly translated as “fighting unions” or “unions in struggle”; they say “we privilege collective action over backroom negotiations to obtain our claims.” Their claims involve a total opposition to government reforms; they also demanded a campus daycare, “free and easy means of contraception,” and the renovation of the (decrepit) campus buildings. I was told that they don’t really do elections or care greatly about electoral politics, and they were probably the least aggressive in their campus outreach.

Mét, formerly known as Uni, said that they changed their name to be more appealing to the public. Not to mention getting a nice cheerful new color scheme, grey and pink. Their big argument here was “Stop the Strike!” or “Against the Blockages,” and they explained that they were for a closer link between universities and the business world, for more job placement, and, in essence, against the campus left. (Their pamphlet argued for punishing student strikers.) They were very slick and professional and extremely pushy, deploying canvassers at the campus entrances, intentionally encroaching on other campus groups’ space.

The elections themselves took place at this table (the above signs were hung on that white structure at left). As it turns out, UNEF won. Their site had a little press release:

“A large victory for UNEF, with 38% of the votes. It was a clear victory, leaving no room for appeals. UNEF showed a strong progression since 2008, gaining 3 seats, and returned to its place as the foremost student organization. UNEF obtained 2 seats of 5 on the Administration Council (1 seat for the Greens, 1 for SUD/FSE and 1 for Cé), 6 seats out of 16 on the University Life and Study Council (3 seats for the Greens, 3 for SUD/FSE, 2 for Mét and 2 for Cé), and 3 out of 4 seats on the Scientific Council.

“The other organizations showed strong losses. This elections shows that today there is no union alternative to UNEF, the other organizations (Greens, SUD/FSE, Cé and Mét) not getting more than 16% of the vote.

“UNEF thanks all the students who have supported the UNEF project; its three priorities will be:
-annual compensation for students in all majors
-fighting against competition between universities
-fighting against selective admissions in master’s programs

“We thank you for the confidence you’ve shown in us.”

To enter after hours when the campus was supposed to be closed, you had to climb up on that chair and through the window and down a little stepladder on the far side.

One of the occupants’ favorite activities was decorating the walls of adjacent university buildings. This wall was, as far as I recall, pretty much blank before the occupation began; the slogans now read “Bureaucrats outside!” “McDonald’s, we’ll burn you.” “State Rabble.” “Screw the government’s cleansing system before it screws you.” “Riot!” “Fuck may 68, fight now!” “Anti-France” (I have no idea what this one means, by the way). “Drops of sunshine in the city of ghosts.” “Long live the canteen and worker’s self-management” [this refers to a recent campus event I can only describe as student-organized Food Not Bombs for undocumented workers]. “Popes, popes, popes, yes. But nazi and pedophile popes?” “Burn the prisons, destroy the immigration detention centers.”

We can deduce from this photo that someone had invested in numerous colors of spraypaint.

I met one of the graffiti artists and he was particularly proud of “Loveless.”

And of his slogans about “Class War.” (“We need love” it says in the corner.) (Don’t ask me what it means that he wrote in English, because I don’t know myself.)

Baptiste Coulmont, a Paris-8 sociology professor who’s also posted about this occupation, posted some similar pictures, describing it as “vandalismes et de dégradations (oups) d’expressions artistiques contre-culturelles sur lesquelles il ne faudrait porter de jugement.” That is, it’s “vandalism and degradation (oops) counter-cultural artistic expression that must not be judged.” Whatever Coulmont’s personal position may be, self-contradictory sentences like this show us the split consciousness and irreconcilable values that are so common at Paris-8. On the one hand, campus graffiti is viewed as a traditional form of free expression; on the other hand, there’s a major desire to build new, clean, “nice” university spaces. The more the campus improves its physical architecture, the more (implicitly) it sets itself apart from the somewhat downtrodden neighborhood it lives in.

The occupied space itself was divided into various areas: an agitprop table, a set of bookshelves labeled “feminist library,” a “free shop” that had clothes for exchange, a sleeping area, a bunch of tables where people ate, a kitchen. This was the agitprop table, looking out onto the semi-occupied terrace with its littered chairs.

That’s the feminist library in the background.

The kitchen felt curiously familiar: it reminded me of hippie co-op houses I know in the United States. Everything was sort of a mess but it felt lively. (There aren’t any pictures of the occupants here, though; they didn’t like the idea of being on camera. Possibly worried about the legal repercussions of being caught at the scene.)

The occupiers were apparently planning to accompany their wine with a side salad of green peppers, eggplant and broken carrots.

I asked someone in the feminist library what I should take pictures of, saying I wanted to record some traces of the scene. He suggested I look at a political book he had handy: “Chechen Children’s Drawings: I don’t want to draw war any more.”

The drawings were, frankly, depressing, but that’s only to be expected.

Although the overall political merits of the occupation are very much open to debate, I was quite impressed by the overall flourishing of new social organization. Everywhere there were lists of supplies to buy, lists of projects to attempt, instructions on how to use kitchen appliances. Here you can see another sign of nascent domesticity: a long list of proposed names for the occupied space.

Some of the names were awfully straightforward: “The Place (le lieu)” or “Free Occupation (occupation libre)” or “GAV, the Anarchist Vandalist Group.” But others were more idiosyncratic: “Siberia” (which was also the name for the walk-in freezer), or “The Eye (l’oeil),” “The Asylum (l’asile),” “The Ambush (l’embuscade),” or “The Non-Place (le non-lieu).” Some even managed to be incomprehensible: “Le Bischkek (capital of Kyrgyzstan?),” “Panorami (?),” “Fikdouin (?).”

At any rate, in this desire to find a name, I felt an intense and fascinating desire to create a new, almost-domestic space in an otherwise impersonal, sometimes slightly grim campus environment.

After about two weeks, the university administration chained the doors shut and the students gave up the project. I’m told they were discouraged by a brawl which took place there about a week into the project. “The open space is now closed,” a friend informed me mock-seriously afterwards.

One of the occupation’s many spray-painted slogans, the one pictured here, had read: “Eat them before they eat us.” As it turns out, it was the occupation that got eaten first.

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.