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.

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

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

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

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

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

Actors in masks, some with stockings over their heads, made a pretend argument for burning the university. For the foreigners in the audience, a disjointed translation of their performance was projected on a screen like so:

We want Godard, Proust, the Princess of Cleves, not commercial trash culture

Let us burn the university! No! The University is not for profit! It is there to create more freedom, more riches (that are not material), “Latin is useless and that’s why it’s beautiful!” against the death of “dead languages”, let us burn the university! In the name of all erasmus students, I would like to say I had no time to write a speech, because I work to pay my way and so we say “let us burn the university”!

[They shouted their discourse from the stage.]

Experiment time! First we will build a fire, the first spark. Take your sheet of paper, fold it over, then again, and cut it, and lick it and keep your strip of paper (etc),

[The actors circled back into the aisles of the large lecture hall with sheets of paper, with which they mimed an effort to create fire.]

It doesn’t work!!!!!

[—they said as they pretended to discover that rubbing two pieces of paper together doesn't make a spark.]

It would be crazy; it would be like killing oneself; like putting one’s head in the freezer, like throwing oneself under a car, like…

[As if they were delighted to discover that they didn't need to burn the university after all... but the translation trailed off and the actors came through the aisles hugging the audience. Even including the ethnographer, yours truly.]

The more serious debate went on with a panel discussion.

However, among the panelists was the university president. And every time he opened his mouth to speak, people in the audience booed and hissed. He waited for them to finish; the moderator made failed pleas for civility; he spoke some more; his face became agitated.

In essence, his speech was a failure, blocked by the crowd. “By anarchists,” someone claimed later. He didn’t stay to the end of the debate, leaving by the side door soon after his (interrupted) speech had come to an end.

One of the other people talking was a representative of a squatter campaign. He explained to us that squatting had the advantages of being exciting and rent-free, but that, of course, there were “strong chances of legal trouble”… at any rate, I was interested in his negative comments on traditional protest forms. “Internships mean that corporations use young graduates for months and then dump them instead of hiring them. This will be your future if you don’t resist. New forms of protest must be invented against the Thatcher-like governments that resist “traditional” protests by waiting them out.”

And this has indeed been one of the common remarks about last spring’s university protests: that traditional protest forms (i.e., street marches) seem ineffective against a government that can simply ignore them.

Now looking back up into the auditorium, we can see one of the protestors standing up. He was shouting about the undemocratic format of the event and about how the voice of the audience had been excluded. The original format dictated that panelists spoke first, followed by “invited” audience comments, and finally general comments. That fell apart when the “general” audience wanted to speak sooner: after the speech you see pictured here, the event never returned to the sedate form of a well-groomed public event. Rather it hissed permanently with the noise of loud conversations among the audience, it hissed with interruption, it hissed with anger and incoherence.

Incidentally, it doesn’t look like such a large crowd in this photo, but there may have been a couple of hundred people there all told.

A number of foreign activists were present. At the end, an Austrian fellow took the stage to give a sweeping critique of the chaos of the event and to express a general sense of disappointment. He was speaking English, so the translation was into French. I’ll translate back:

We cannot simply talk about politics, we must act! It is a matter of respect not to insult others during the debate; we’ve gotten results at the end of six weeks of occupation of our university. The presidents of the university and of the region were obliged to negotiate with us. I’ve been surprised to see that this debate has been so philosophically oriented… and not adequately pragmatic. We’ve come a very long distance to bring you ideas and not to talk about philo[sophy]! Let’s move on!

Since I’m interested in the relationship between philosophy and politics, this last remark interests me. It seems to say: philosophical discussions are antipolitics. Philosophy discussions are a withdrawal from action. Philosophy is mere metadiscourse.

A minute later, someone, perhaps the protestors in the audience, set off firecrackers in the auditorium. Naturally, everyone jumped up out of their seats. (Including me.) We waited anxiously to see what would happen; another little explosion went off, even louder than the first. The crowd became muddled and people started to walk out. The security personnel showed up on the stage and waited outside in force. Someone made a half-hearted proposal to “occupy” the Sorbonne but I don’t think it got anywhere. At any rate, I got out of there and went home, not even stopping like a good ethnographer to survey other participants on their reactions.

A painted character hangs from a coat rack. He appears striped. Bald. Stretched out by the neck. Striped shoulderbag too.

My friend Emmanuel proposes that we translate this as, “At Paris VIII in the philosophy department, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by LMD.” Alternatively, “had our minds blown by LMD”… the Law LMD being one of the first university reforms of the last decade (2003). I’m not sure who’s represented by this skeletal face: the government? the philosophers? But I note the little hint of Greek architecture in the broken columns: classical Greece often seems to be iconic of philosophy in France (more, I think, than in philosophical circles I’ve come across in the U.S.).

The Department of Philosophy Annual Party.
Friday, June 29, 2007. Starting at 7:30pm. At Montreuil sous Bois, 6bis rue Dombasle. People’s House.
Metro: Mairie de Montreuil and Bus 121 or 102
Bus Stop: “Cemetery” and it’s to the right of Lycée Jean Jaurès.

Thanks to the hospitality of the Montreuil People’s House, the Paris 8 philo annual party will take place this friday june 29th at 7:30pm. It’s a nomadic, autonomist tradition that sees itself as a sort of philosophico-gastronomical and musical banquet where everyone can share food and drink with five other mouths, everyone presenting their own national or regional culture or their own culinary preferences. Much live music will bring out our mutual hospitality, and our pleasure in being together to share a festive moment (and to nourish the wish to see each other again next year). Students, teachers, and their family and friends are strongly invited to participate in the success of this EXCEPTIONAL ENCOUNTER.

Let me just note that, compared to the monochromatic deathscape of the last image, we see here a dramatically different style in indigenous art: more like the art of celebration than the art of nightmare political laments.

It has the nose of a bull, a mouth full of baleen stuffed with gravel, the whiskers of a bloody mop and the facial shape of a television set (complete with little feet like a dimpled chin). Don’t ask me what this face indicates, but since it was high up on the wall near the ceiling, I doubt many people look at it on a regular basis.

It’s some kind of an object with handles…

“Madness is when you keep acting the same way, expecting a new result… -Einstein.” There are similar versions of this statement in English, but I’ve never heard it was Einstein who said it. Still, it’s entertaining that a slogan that in a sense critiques repetition would be prominently displayed in a classroom, which is, after all, a place for the repetition of knowledge. It’s also entertaining that this (written) utterance of the slogan is itself a repetition of a well-known formula that has seldom been known to produce definite results — thereby also arguably performing what it criticizes.

The view out the window is obscured by bars, or anyway a sort of anti-vandalism metal grating. Is it there to keep the philosophers in? To keep the masses out? Neither, but it does seem that its function is to make sure that the only way into the room is via legitimate possession of the classroom key, thereby maintaining physical control over academic space.

Security at Paris-8 deserves more of an investigation than I’ve given it so far. Maybe later this week…

This post is going to be boring for people who believe that social life can only happen in a crowd. This is a post about the signs of past social action inscribed in architecture and writing.

To see your way around you had to turn on the lights. This switchpanel did the trick. Stop for a second to notice its anti-aesthetic aesthetics, its calculated practicality, the way that its intentionally secondary, instrumental functions are mirrored by the camouflaged design of its switches. Note, too, that the designer has blundered by not making provisions for labels: the users have been obliged to write on labels with black marker.

If we climb up to the back of the room, our gaze falls into the standardized pattern of lecture hall vision, angled down, aimed at the blackboards, aimed at the podiums, aimed down at a desk where, if we were students we could be taking notes. It’s empty. A few people wandered into the room while I was there only to glance at me and wander out. It’s not only events that are scheduled on university calendars; it’s also emptiness and empty space.

If for some inexplicable reason we peer under the desks, the long landscape of the amphitheatre is disrupted by the iron trunks of chairs and the round wooden wings of seats and hanging desks. No more clean linearity of the sightlines.

Not everything was what it appeared to be. This discolored patch on the back wall, now decorated with a fire evacuation plan, was almost certainly once a window into an AV booth. I couldn’t say why it was walled off.

“It’s your university, don’t dirty it.” I saw a couple of these signs. Apparently someone believes that little moral exhortations on signs are going to radically improve the course of student conduct and reduce (what must look to administrators like) vandalism. Ironically, the sign itself is dirty, crumpled and worn.

Someone ignored the sign and left tags on the wall. (Let me know if you have any idea what this means.)

“We want a rich life, not the life of the rich!!!” It turns out that some of the seeming student “graffiti” was also a carrier of a moral message. But a radically other moral message from the “don’t get things dirty” imperative of the other sign. This is an anti-wealth or anti-class message, I guess. A curious image of human beings in the cage of a shopping cart. I hadn’t heard of this group, No Pasaran! they seem to be called, but they seem like some kind of small left-libertarian group. From their website, I couldn’t tell what they do besides publish a journal. That and put up stickers.

They made an attempt to paint the windows black, but if you found the gap in the paint there was a view out into the bitter gray of near-dawn, the lit windows of the next building fading into the reflections of the desks in the glass.