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.

Basically, the article tells a disturbing story about the labor politics of early 20th-century American college students. In essence, college students from such places as Columbia, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley, Univ. of Minnesota, Univ. of Chicago, Tufts, Brown, Univ. of Michigan, Stanford, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Univ. of Southern California, and various engineering schools volunteered to serve as strikebreakers in a large number of labor disputes. It’s not news that college students of that era were elite and conservative, but their extreme hostility towards organized labor is nonetheless striking. Some 9 of 10 of Yale students, we’re told, “subscribed ‘to anti-labor attitudes with fervor’” as of 1910 (334); but the heart of their anti-labor sentiment was expressed less in political statements — as they were apparently too frivolous on the whole to articulate any clear political philosophy — than in the sheer violence of their physical confrontation with striking workers.

Norwood explains that not only did elite college students (a redundant expression, by the way, given the times) replace striking workers at their posts, they also relished the brawls that often broke out as they crossed picket lines. In New York in 1905, “Stories circulated around Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute that ‘Poly’ students working on subways had ‘bested roughs [ie, workers] a dozen times’ ” (331). Two years earlier, “hundreds [of students] answered the Minneapolis flour millers’ call for strikebreakers. Among the first to volunteer were varsity athletes from the University of Minnesota, who with a ‘lusty Shi-U-Mah’ (the Minnesota cheer) formed a wedge, and blasted through the picket line” (338). In 1912, students “joined the militia companies sent in to quell the Lawrence [Mass.] textile strike… students enjoyed the opportunity to precipitate violence, as they enthusiastically disrupted picketing and strike parades” (339). A few years later, in 1919, students were themselves victims of retributive violence. “In riots in the streets of Boston, Cambridge, Providence, and Malden, which were sparked by the strikebreaking of students from Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and Brown, the working class took its revenge on the collegians, badly mauling several. In Boston, for example, some student strikebreakers were beaten unconscious and one had his teeth knocked out” (339).

Norwood proposes a joint explanation for this strikingly physical form of class warfare. First of all, he argues that the antipathy of the rich towards the working classes made the students particularly suited for strikebreaking. While students themselves alternated between familial conservatism and sheer festive indifference to anything serious, their administrators, athletic coaches and trustees held clear anti-labor doctrines. “Columbia’s president Nicholas Murray Butler,” for instance, “denounced the strike in general as an ‘act of war’ ” (334). Students’ involvement in strikebreaking, apparently, was catalyzed by the active encouragement of these campus leaders. Moreover, because students were wealthy elites, they afforded businessmen the chance to hire a more publicly “presentable” group of scabs — the alternative being to hire lower-class, less seemly “riff-raff” and “slum dwellers” as substitute workers (332).

Now for the second piece of Norwood’s explanation: he suggests that involvement in strikebreaking was in large part a response to what he calls a turn-of-the-century “crisis of masculinity.” He argues that, as upper- and middle-class men were increasingly decoupled from physical work, they found themselves having more trouble performing the “muscularity,” violence, “daring deeds,” and “strenuous life” that were stereotypical characteristics of manhood. Violent sports, according to Norwood, were hence increasingly valorized as a sort of substitute site of masculinity pageants. However, the increasingly bloody and ridiculous rites of passage that emerged at elite colleges themselves became too unseemly, and administrators eventually banned them as “relic[s] of barbarism.” “Strikebreaking,” Norwood goes on to argue, “was the perfect replacement for the banned violent rituals. It provided students with the opportunity for mass participation, denied in organized college athletics, and satisfied their pressing need for a ‘test of masculinity’ ” (338).

As one would expect from this somewhat heterogeneous cluster of motivations, students’ experiences of strikebreaking were complex: they seemed to live it as a gigantic “lark” (333); as a test of physical prowess; as a sort of break from campus (some even got course credit!); but also as something that satisfied a certain craving for heroism. While this craving for heroism was no doubt essential to the masculinity complex of the day, it strikes me that these idly rich students may also have harbored fantasies of doing something less useless than drinking and making fools of themselves on a daily basis.

In the end, the period of strike-breaking (from 1901-1923) came to a close, Norwood argues, above all because campuses became more co-educational in the 1920s, and the frivolous pursuits of college boys were redirected towards “heterosexual activities.” It’s a ridiculous ending to a ridiculous bit of history.

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.”

This happened in 1860 in Aberdeen. The students wanted Sir Andrew Leith Hay, the ‘local candidate’, and there was in fact a numerical majority for him, since the numbers in the ‘nation’ which comprised the Aberdeen constituency were greater than those in the ‘nations’ which came from outside Aberdeen. Reckoned by ‘nations’ and not by numbers, there was a tie between Hay and Maitland, the solicitor-general. The principal gave a casting vote in favor of Maitland. This was taken as a deliberate move to back the professors against the students. In March 1861 Maitland came to deliver his rectorial address. The academic profession, along with the magistrates and the town council, entered the hall. Cheering, hooting and yelling greeted their appearance; this was to be expected: it was the traditional accompaniment to every rectorial address. But then the scene became ugly. Chunks of splintered wood hurtled across the hall. The audience were, of course, expected to come unarmed, but some of them had brought in hammers and other instruments with which they uprooted the seats and smashed them into pieces suitable for projectiles.

The principal took his place at the rostrum and called on the meeting to join him in prayer. Out of respect for the kirk there was a temporary lull. But the uproar resumed as soon as the oath was administered to Maitland, and he stood at the lectern to give his address. At this point some of the professors left the platform ‘to remonstrate personally with those taking a leading part in the row’.The rector kept smiling and endeavoured to proceed with his address, but at this stage blood was trickling down his face. The more respectable students were ashamed, and added to the pandemonium by hissing. There were cries of ‘Call in the police’. After ineffectual intervention by the principal, several police were ‘brought up to the hall door, but no force was used by them. . . ‘. The rector calmly and impressively completed his oration, the principal pronounced a benediction, and the proceedings, ‘which had lasted upwards of two hours’, were brought to a close. (20-21)

I’d like to imagine that these days outright violence is no longer a part of university politics, but there are just too many counterexamples to take that claim seriously.

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.

(Photo by Imen I., a student in sociological methods at Paris-8.)

The title at the top reads “Some people are pretending that students don’t have housing problems.” The caption in blue on the photo says that “Damien and Mélanie, 22 and 23 years old, each still live with their parents.” You can’t really read the bottom, but it informs you that UNEF, the biggest student union in France, demands students’ right to housing. (Relevant background information: there’s a major shortage of dedicated student housing in the Paris area.)

This poster has, as far as I’ve seen so far, tended to shock and irritate campus-dwellers more than it attracts support for its ostensible cause. It depicts a young couple having sex in a parental bed while the parents are sleeping. The couple is similar, they both look pale-skinned, they both have dark hair, they’re both equally nude. The sex is hetero although, since the girl is on top, it is slightly less normative than it might be. I don’t really have a good point of cultural reference here, but for lack of anything better, French wikipedia claims that “La plus courante est la position du missionnaire.” Anyway, the boy’s body is stretched out on the bed and he’s gripping his partner’s head and thigh with his hands; the girl seems to be holding herself up with her left arm. It looks like they’re kissing, and the boy’s eyes are shut. I hope he hasn’t fallen asleep.

The parents are sleeping. Or are they? The old man’s sleep mask hints that it takes an effort to stay unconscious. The parents are turned away from the middle of the bed as if trying not to pay attention, trying not to know; if this were a real scene, they would at best be pretending to be asleep. They’re wearing nightclothes that blend into the bedding, as if symbolically they were only the unwanted backdrop to the sexual act in progress, to the young couple’s bodies that, compared to the rest of the bed, are so much more visible and so much more saturated with color. The bodies of the young couple seem to be physically right up against the bodies of the old couple, the girl’s right side fitted into the curve of the old man’s curled-up body, the boy’s shoulder possibly propped up on the old woman’s back. But at the same time, the bedding (that garish quilt) seems to act as a physical and, by implication, a symbolic barrier between the young and the old couple. It seems to maintain a minimum of physical separation even as the whole scene emphasizes the reckless and scandalous closeness of the children’s sex act to the parental bed. Taboos are being broken in this image, but only within limits.

The image is organized in such a way as to manifest a series of oppositions between the two couples:

The bodies of the young couple serve here to divide the old couple from each other. Here the young mediate and interrupt the old: symbolically, this looks something like an allegory of the way that children’s sexual relations interfere with their elders’ relationships, of the way that inter-family sexual relations interrupt intra-family (kin) ties. One of these young people is presumably the child of the sleeping parents; but here this person, whichever it is, is represented not as the child but as a member of a new couple opposed and probably annoying to their elders.

At the same time, it has to be said that both couples are obviously very similar in some ways. They both look white. They both look straight. And although only the young couple is having sex in this picture, we can infer that the old couple was, at a previous time, also having sex, since we can assume that that would have been the social and biological origin of one member of the young couple. In that light, the old couple should perhaps be viewed as “post-sexual” more than “asexual,” as the sleepy remainder of past scenes of sexual passion. It comes to mind that the only thing really taboo about this scene as a social situation is that the young couple is in the same bed as the parents. Aside from that, it’s a textbook image of hetero sociosexual reproduction. One couple produces a child who forms a new couple which in turn strives to produce a new child… That’s about as normative as it gets, on my understanding of French social order.

Now, although it seems to me that everything I’ve just said about the image is basically obvious, is basically something that one can read in the image without a great deal of interpretive risk, it must be said that, to the best of my knowledge, none of these considerations figure in local interpretation of the poster where this image appears. No one I’ve met sees this as a picture that deeply invokes norms and scripts of social reproduction; my sense is that local interpretations start and end with a scandalized sense that it’s a picture of a couple having sex. The depiction of sex — at least in the fairly unrelated context of a student housing campaign — is viewed as a scandal in itself, end of thought. Or perhaps just as a tasteless bit of political advertising. Someone told me: maybe this would make sense for a condom ad, but here!?…

The implicit logic of the poster, of course, is something like: “for lack of adequate student housing, students have to live at home; thus they have nowhere to have sex but their parents’ bed; which is absurd and scandalous; hence the current housing shortage leads to scandal and demands action.” It’s a logic of political shock, quite likely designed to catch the eye and stick in memory more than to elicit any direct political action. And insofar as it has indeed caught the eyes of the campus (a long row of these posters is put up in a series by the solitary university entrance), it seems to be, paradoxically enough, a success. The scandal represented in the image becomes the scandal of the image itself.

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.

Madame Minister,

For the past two years, we—teachers, researchers, staff and students—have declared our total disagreement with the LRU university law, with the teachers’ education reform, and more generally with the spirit guiding the majority of measures and initiatives that come out of your ministry.

In spite of the longest strike the university world has ever known, you have refused all negotiations on the universities’ status, concerning yourself solely with your career as a politician.

In spite of last year’s general refusal to fill out the auditing forms that inaugurated the teachers’ education reform, this year your government is set to continue every measure that brought us out in the streets last year. You are even adding dangerous, aberrant rules about internships.

Madame Minister, our profession does not easily accommodate resignation.

Research, creativity and the transmission of knowledge all imply a freedom quite at odds with the reforms, these reforms that are turning us into petty administrators of social selection. For us to accept these reforms in silence would amount to renouncing our own idea of what a university should be, a university bolstered by a centuries-long tradition of research, a university engaged in creating a future that cannot be dictated by short-term economic needs.

Madame Minister, the university will not understand itself, it will not manage itself, and it will not evaluate itself in terms of productivity and profitability, for it is based on the inherent risk of research. This risk is at the base of the formative gesture that brings students and professors together, and it falls to universities in the public service to keep this risk alive. Yes, the university needs reform—indeed, we know this better than you do, we teachers, researchers, staff and students who ARE the university in all its contradictions, and who are devoted to preserving and restoring a democratic future for the institution.

Madame Minister, on every one of our campuses, we are working to invalidate each one of the measures you hoped to use in your project.

Madame Minister, beyond these points of resistance and days of protest that will mark our defense of public education from nursery school to the university, we believe it is indispensable to show the public that we resist your policy of dismantling the university, to re-establish the truth against your lies, and to remind the world that the university is a common good that should not be open to corruption by politics. This then is the reason why, having already held vigil for a thousand hours last spring in front of the town hall, we are now going to revive this Infinite Round of the Stubborn. You can find us every Monday starting at 6pm, from here until the day when real negotiations over the universities’ status are opened.

Our stubbornness is total because, in wanting to transform our universities into corporations, you have gone past the limit of what is tolerable.

Our stubbornness is total because we are in no respect inclined to renounce the freedom without which there would be neither research nor creativity.

Our stubbornness is total because, whatever the difficulties of battling your policies, we know that the university community is massively hostile to them.

Our stubbornness is total because of the high stakes we defend, stakes which go far beyond any simple categorical reading of this conflict.

[Second Page:]

Why we are stubborn:

-To remind everyone that the university is a common good, one not open to corruption by a political ideology.

-Because we refuse a third-rate teacher’s education brought about by the disappearance of practical training.

-Because we refuse a university conceived as a business, thrown open to competition between campuses, between employees, between students.

-To defend everyone’s access to quality education—freely chosen, secular, and free of tuition.

-To defend independent research.

-Because we refuse the coming rises in tuition fees and loans that logically follow from the reforms.

-Because we refuse the social selection that will become part of the university admissions process, as budgets come to be calculated in proportion to graduation rates.

-To show the public our resistance, in the face of the dismantling of the whole system of public services.

AGAINST THE LRU

The Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn
meets every monday starting at 6pm
in front of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, 1 Rue Descartes

http://rondeinfinie.canalblog.com

bloginfi@gmail.com

Just a few really quick points here, since I don’t have time for a real analysis (wait for my thesis, I guess).

1. You can see a number of characteristic points of French university political vocabulary, a vocabulary substantially different from that known in the United States. The whole system of public service looms large, as one might expect from a university world that has long conceived of itself as a unified, public, national system; “public service” serves here not only as an organizational and legal status but as an object of attachment. Some of the dangers to this public service are also unfamiliar to American readers, like for instance social selection (séléction sociale), a term which echoes Darwin’s “natural selection” and is supposed to designate the process of selective university admissions according to criteria which, according to critics, can only wind up disadvantaging the disadvantaged. The very term “social selection,” as far as I can tell, embodies a claim that all selective admission is necessarily prejudicial to some social groups over others. A lot of the policy measures mentioned are, of course, also locally specific. For instance, the “teacher’s education reform” I mentioned is actually called masterisation, an unwieldy term that designates a controversial initiative to integrate the national teacher’s exams into master’s degree programs. And the infamous “LRU Law” of 2007, put into place soon after Sarkozy came into office, deserves an exposition of its own which I can’t manage here.

2. There’s a huge rhetorical emphasis on “We” and the collective body of the universities. On reflection, this fits with the fundamental premise of the Ronde Infinie, which is that no matter how many people do or don’t show up, the people marching are there to represent the university world as a whole. In other words, the Ronde participants (as far as I can tell) see themselves as working on behalf of thousands of their colleagues and hence distinctly not as some kind of sectarian group. Several people at the Ronde say that it makes a difference that their colleagues elsewhere know that the Ronde is continuing.

3. Stubbornness as a political affect. In practice, I have to say, this stubbornness is not as total as it appears rhetorically; in my fieldsite at Paris-8, people are talking about how to adapt to the government’s new regulatory regime, and are far from being in a state of pure anti-pragmatic obstinacy. But it takes stubbornness, all the same, to keep coming out week after week to the Ronde and to stay attached to a political movement. And two things strike me about this stubbornness. First, it isn’t a pure, mute feeling; it actually has a ton of cognitive content and instrumental purpose (enumerated in that list of reasons “why we are stubborn”). Second, it is something other than a more pragmatic political hope that believes it might realize its objectives; to be stubborn is to believe that whether the objectives are realizable or not, it would be even worse to give up. Stubbornness here implies a complicated political temporality, something like our desired future is blocked and inaccessible, but we nonetheless plan to blockade the Minister’s future, as if all futures could be put on hold until a less unacceptable one surfaces…

The occasion marked the results of a major study on precarity in French higher education and research. Precarity, needless to say, can become a contested and complicated concept, and I want to write about this too but first I need to read more of the prior literature. But the funny part, as it turns out, is that the researchers themselves seem to have faced these very same agonies of literature review and conceptual clarification; and, wanting to avoid having to settle on a single definition of precarity, they decided to let precarity be defined by the research subjects. Hence if you considered yourself precarious, you counted as such in this survey, which had 4,409 responses and appears to be a fairly representative sample of French disciplines and institutions. In practice, I venture to add, ‘precarity’ seemed to come down to a fairly straightforward matter of having a temporary, hence unstable, job situation.

The gist of the study is that precarity is rising fairly rapidly in this sector, the non-permanent workforce having for instance increased by 15.5% at the CNRS between 2006 and 2008, and university workforces currently being estimated at about 23% precarious (looking across all categories of university staff). The major findings of the report included a marked feminization of precarious jobs, a notable concentration of precarity in the social and human sciences (which Americans would call “humanities and social sciences”) in relation to the hard sciences, a definite group of young precarious workers (under 30) combined with a significant group of older “perma-temps,” a range of rather low wages (as someone put it rather sarcastically, temporary contracts are not being compensated for by better salaries), and, subjectively, a set of waves of anxiety and uncertainty about the future. As one would guess, there’s also a lot of struggling to make ends meet through multiple jobs (apparently a few even teach under assumed names, to circumvent age restrictions on some teaching assignments), a certain amount of disdain and nonrecognition from the tenured staff, and a set of inferior working conditions coupled to a lack of workplace rights in the face of the organizational hierarchy.

This has to be taken as only a quick provisional summary; the actual research report is 83 pages long, and I’ll write more about it when I’ve read it all the way through. But what I wanted to post for now was a quick translation of the political declaration announced at the end of the afternoon, after the research results were explained, after a panel of precarious workers had testified, after a distinguished roundtable had chewed things over. At the end there was a long line of academic union leaders (100% male, surely not accidentally) who sat in a row and released a joint statement. It reads as follows:

Press conference against precarity, Feb 8, 2010

Final declaration

The massive growth of precarity in research and higher education, the multiplication of “irregular” contracts, the practice of firing people just before they would legally be entitled to permanent contracts (CDI), and the degradation of working conditions for those with temporary contracts (CDD) — all this requires a large-scale response from the whole corps of academic staff, from the tenured [titulaires] and the precarious alike.

The academic unions and associations call on all academic staff to take stock of the results of the precarity study, and to meet in their workplaces to spread the word about this scandalous situation. Together, we will commit ourselves to collective actions which, this spring 2010, will bring the precarious out of their state of invisibility and inaugurate a fight for stable employment.

Universities and research centers have operated with precarious employees for too many years. But the rise in project-based research financing (in particular at the National Research Agency, ANR), the contractualization of the universities, and the policy decisions that eliminate tenured employment and accelerate deregulation have brought the spread of precarity to unacceptable levels. We demand the creation of new statutary posts with tenure [titularisation] for the long-term precarious staff, whether they work in universities or research centers. The government must stop the false promises and start negotiations.

The real situation of precarious staff must be immediately improved. Contract workers in public establishments can no longer live with so few rights. It is time to put an end to the successions of short-term contracts, to the nonrecognition of accrued experience and qualifications, to the frozen salaries and denied benefits. We call on all the forces of our unions and associations, in every establishment, in every region, and across the whole body of tenured staff to scrutinize precarity in all its concrete instances. We call on them to demand that local and national administrations put an end to the abuses, to demand that the most favorable possible policies be put in place.

It is everyone’s responsibility to help the precarious out of their state of invisibility, and without the active solidarity of the tenured staff [titulaires] this struggle will only be more difficult. We call on all our tenured colleagues to stop the discriminations that still exist in too many of our workplaces; for it is also by changing our own behavior that we can deal a final blow to all the forms of devalorization inflicted on our precarious colleagues. It is by improving their working conditions and in defending them in front of management that we can improve working conditions for all.

Together, we will begin collective efforts to fight against the policies of individualization and forced competition between employees, to obtain a multi-year plan for creating statutory jobs, to put an end to precarity.

Paris, February 8, 2010

SNTRS-CGT, FERC-SUP CGT, CGT-INRA, CGT-IFREMER
SNCS-FSU, SNESUP-FSU, SNASUB-FSU, SNEP-FSU, SNETAP-FSU
SGEN-CFDT Rechercher EPST
SUP’RECHERCHE-UNSA, SNPTES-UNSA
CFTC-Recherche
SUD Education, SUD Recherche EPST, SUD Etudiant
UNEF
SLR
SLU

I don’t post this text as a literary masterpiece or a window into anyone’s subjective experience but rather to give you a sense of the kind of collective political declarations that get made in Paris. This one, as you can see, is co-signed by a veritable forest of symbols, or rather a thicket of acronyms, each one representing a union or an association. In effect, this text is signed by a collective of collectives, one which generally refers to itself in the text as a generic “we,” the “we” of a collective social body, the “we” of a united entity (the whole corps of academic staff) that is nonetheless well aware of its internal hierarchy and fragmentation (between tenured and precarious employees).

Unlike some of the other political manifestos I’ve seen, this one walks a fine line between framing a fight against an external enemy (the government and administrators) and reprimanding its own members for their own continued discrimination against precarious employees. In advocating “changing our own behavior,” it strikes a cautious balance between critique and autocritique. But in spite of this apparent ambiguity in the text’s political target, I’m struck in reading by the sense that the very idea of “precarity” is one that serves to frame the issue in such a way as to automatically claim the moral high ground. For is there anyone who is, or even could be for precarity? Although the particular harms associated with precarious work are amply documented in the research report I described above, I get a strong sense that in this discourse precarity is construed as a self-evident wrong, one needing no further moral analysis. As if precarity set the limits of a political doxa (though perhaps I should emphasize that I say this as a purely analytic statement, not as some contrarian defense of precarious work).

One last thing to note here: it’s a text where we can see legal, procedural and contractual details getting recontextualized as features of a deeply moral, emotional and political landscape. Call it the moralization of the technical: seemingly bureaucratic French notions like the difference between a CDI and CDD (fixed-duration versus indeterminate-duration employment contract) here can be seen to be weighed down, if not indeed rather overloaded, with an intense symbolic significance. I always have to remind myself of this as an ethnographer: what seem like arcane policy details draped in ragged acronym robes so often turn out to be objects of intense concern or attachment here in France. It’s as if, the more academic life gets routinized and bureaucratized and standardized, the more we find, paradoxically, that bureaucratic procedures and impersonal frameworks themselves get re-enchanted and repoliticized and gummed up with idiosyncratic symbolism. Not that this always happens by any means — certainly sometimes the bureaucracy is just used as a technical tool and more or less taken for granted — but I’ve been struck in French universities by the degree to which academic bureaucracy becomes an object of intense disdain and bluntly political critique.