To the university community,

The University of Paris-8 was recently asked to give its authorization for a conference on its campus entitled, “From new sociological, historical and legal approaches to the call for an international boycott: Israel, an apartheid state?”, planned for this February 27-28.

Initially, the President of the University did give an authorization to the conference organizers, on the condition that a certain number of obligations be scrupulously observed. These involved, on one hand, an absolute respect for the principles of academic neutrality and secularism [laïcité], and on the other hand, the removal of the university’s logos and visuals, since the university is not the organizer of this conference.

In giving this authorization, the President was mindful—as in every case when he is asked to approve public events—at once of the rights of freedom of speech and of assembly for campus users, of the maintenance of public order on the premises, of the institution’s intellectual and scientific independence, and of the principle of neutrality in public service vis-à-vis the diversity of public opinion.

However, today it appears that respecting these conditions will not be enough to guarantee the maintenance either of public order on the premises, or of the institution’s scientific or intellectual independence, given that the pluralism of scientific approaches, the pluralism of critical and divergent analyses, must be regarded as intangible academic obligations.

Indeed, the presentation of this “conference” as “academic,” along with the repeated presence of “Paris 8″ on the conference publicity, could be, in themselves, of such a nature as to create confusions that may infringe on the requirement to keep the university free of any political or ideological grasp. The reactions elicited by the conference, which have begun to compromise the university itself, reveal that confusion has set in, and that there is a real risk to the principle of neutrality of public services in research and higher education.

The theme of the conference, the nature of the planned presentations, as well as of the contributors’ titles, strongly polemical in nature, have caused strong reactions that foreshadow a serious risk of disturbances in public order, and of counter-protests that the university is obliged to prevent.

In such circumstances, the President of the University has decided to withdraw the previously given authorization.

The President’s Office has contacted the organizers to propose that on-campus space should be allocated for a day of public debates, in the framework of a diversity of views.

Concerning the organization of the conference on February 27 and 28th, it is decided that the President’s Office will offer the university’s services in locating other premises off-campus where the conference can be held.

-The university administration

This decision has prompted a fair amount of outrage from faculty (including American intellectuals like Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky), who, naturally, invoked the same principles of academic freedom (“intellectual and scientific independence”) that the campus president (Pascal Binczak) had invoked in defending his change of views. I think it’s quite interesting that the principle of academic freedom can equally be invoked to license or to deny campus space for controversial events — the proponents of an event can argue that political interference shouldn’t be allowed to censor campus events; the opponents can argue that politically charged topics are insufficiently academic to deserve campus space. At the level of principle, I think this is more of a real dilemma than most parties want to acknowledge. Not many people today want to live in a static university where ancient, let’s say Aristotelian, intellectual doctrines are the only ones allowed to be presented on campus. But most campuses these days also want to set limits on acceptable speech. And it’s not clear to me that there is a principled way to set such limits on a purely intellectual basis.

Ultimately the relevant “principle” seems most often to be “what’s currently acceptable given the social mores of the moment” or “what some plurality of current scholars think is acceptable,” but given that both of these are historically contingent and variable reference points, I’m not sure they are extremely defensible. It seems to me it would be much more honest if administrators admitted that the main principle, in moments like this one, was just to save face or to avert conflict, was in short a principle of sheer expediency. My sense is that large bureaucracies make decisions for such reasons of expediency much more than they can possibly admit in public.

Monsieur le Président,

I must say that it is with consternation that I read the letter you sent to university administrators in your region. This letter has made the rounds of the country, since I myself received it nine times. I can understand your disappointment in learning that the Idex wasn’t chosen in the Grand Idex Sweepstakes. I understand as well that, faced with drying up ministerial funds for higher education and research, the regions have done what they could to help their academic institutions—yours perhaps more than others.

But how is it possible that this desire to do right, this will to defend your region has managed to blind you to the point of not seeing how the “Major Loan” in general, and the “Idex” even more so, are fraudulent? Maybe you forgot that the President of the Republic himself announced that the interest paid out from the loan will be compensated by deductions of regular funding—making it quite officially a zero-sum game, where the losers pay for the winners? Moreover, you obviously haven’t taken into account that the loan procedures are aimed at systematically removing any role from elected academic bodies and at further demolishing our system. How can you not see that it takes a grandiose stupidity to put Montpellier and Marseille, Lyon and Grenoble, Bordeaux and Toulouse, Paris 2-4-6 and Paris 3-5-7 in competition? That in such tournaments, whole territories in the West, the North and the Center will not have the slightest chance, in spite of their efforts?

In the words of a party you may know: “Competition is one of the engines of research. But exacerbating it, as the government is doing, is counter-productive. Instead of the systematic and permanent competition that’s being imposed… the accent will be on cooperation.”

Today, I am convinced that the staff of your academic institutions expect the following from you: aid for survival, in the first place, but most of all political support in reconstructing the academic system on a new basis, rather than playing the game of its gravediggers.

Please accept, Monsieur le Président, etc.

Henri Audier

I love the tropes of death, of “gravedigging,” of “grandiose stupidity” and “demolition” and anti-democracy, of fraud. We see in letters like this a whole moral universe of indignation, of hostile critique, of political opposition. We see that university politics arouse real anger, an anger irreducible to any simplistic rational calculus, an anger stemming from the fact that people really get attached to their university systems. The institution of a competitive grant process is likened to the irrationalism of a lottery.

My guess is that Audier’s use of this kind of rhetoric of anger is, while no doubt personally felt, also a political tactic. The question—one which could only be answered through empirical research—is: is it successful?

The generally staid newsletter of my disciplinary association (the AAA) suddenly had a leading letter by Eric J Montgomery in this month’s issue:

What happened to activist anthropology? To solidarity and support for those fighting injustice and inequality? At the AAA meeting in Montréal support for the Occupy Wall Street movement was conspicuously absent. As the masses converged upon Le Palais, I was anticipating a strong show of support. Yet, when the activists began shouting “Occupy….Montréal….Occupy…Wall Street,” they were met with disdain and not open arms. Are we just armchair anthropologists, all about observation and indignant toward participation? I was told activist anthropology was gaining steam, but that did not seem to be the case in Montréal. Where were the impromptu meetings or discussions dedicated to the most important movement of our day?

It is said that those who do not think something can be done should get out of the way of those people doing it. I guess that is what the majority of anthropologists chose in Montréal— simply get out of the way. When the activists stormed the meetings, I heard several anthropologists uttering “This is not the time or place,” “Someone should alert security,” or “They’ll let anybody in here.” Others ignored their chance to join the movement…

…It is because of corporate greed and profits over people that there are not enough jobs in anthropology and in education in general. Margaret Mead once said: “It only takes a few like-minded individuals to change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” Unfortunately, it seems many anthropologists have no interest in changing the world. They seem content doing anthropology from their armchair, waiting on the younger generation to fix the problems that they helped create. For the first time in my life, I was ashamed to say that I was an anthropologist.

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

Or in English:

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

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

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

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

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

Now, contrary to received wisdom, unemployment is in no sense inevitable. In fact, anthropologically speaking, the phenomenon of unemployment is an aberration. The majority of human societies have had no such thing as unemployment. This should be obvious, if we reflect for a moment on the structure of work in small-scale agrarian societies where people work primarily for themselves and for their household. There were, for example, no unemployed people among the Nuer of Sudan, at least not when E. E. Evans-Pritchard studied them back in the 1930s. He informs us that “there [was] enough land for everybody on the Nuer scale of cultivation… it is taken for granted that a man has a right to cultivate the ground behind his homestead” (p. 77). Or take the Gawans of Papua New Guinea, in Nancy Munn’s account. Gawan men and women alike were expected to work, and the lazy were condemned; as among the Maenge, “passivity [was] the social defect par excellence.” Nevertheless, “daily work,” which focused on the family’s garden, “is planned by each person or nuclear family… [and] a person’s participation in any wider group arrangements for work depends entirely on individual decision” (p. 75, p. 30). For that matter, Michel Panoff, writing about the neighboring Maenge, notes that it took an average of four hours of daily work per adult to feed a nuclear family.

A world where a normal family with no money could work four hours per day to keep itself comfortably fed is, to us, unimaginable. A world where people by default have decent access to the means of sustenance even if they’re not wealthy and haven’t done well in the “brutal job market” is, for us, somewhere past the horizons of our collective imaginations. A world where there wasn’t a harsh competition to be able to participate in reproducing the material basis of our world is, basically, inconceivable. And the limits of inconceivability are accepted as normal; and the fact that our society is an anthropological aberration is utterly unknown.

The America (or for that matter the France) that I know today is a world where people waste their lives begging to be part of a system that structurally can’t take care of everyone. A system that benefits from not hiring everyone, because not hiring everyone keeps pressure on the employees to accept lower wages, because someone else is always waiting to take their place. It is a world where people are completely acclimated to the ludicrous circumstance that work is scarce because the definition of work has become impoverished, taken over by a paradigm that defines work as wage labor for the private sector. Where people who can’t find wage labor sometimes just do nothing. Or, sometimes, die of depression from lack of work.

This is, in my view, a moral and social and psychological tragedy; but it is also a tragedy of the intellect and of the imagination, one which also amounts to a gigantic indictment of anthropology as an educational project. Anthropologists — there are thousands of us after all — ought to be able to get out the word that there is no law of nature saying work must be scarce; that societies can and do exist that aren’t ruled by the law of the wage, that there are societies where the labor system is better adapted to the material needs of the population. While anthropologists may not want to judge other societies by our values, there’s nothing stopping them from reminding their own society that it is killing off parts of itself for lack of collective imagination.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pretending I have a magical formula for a new labor system (or for the political process that might make one possible). Although I think the average subsistence farmer was clearly better off than the average unemployed American, I’m not proposing that we all become subsistence farmers, nor do I oppose a division of labor. But I think the current employment system is a disaster for all but a minority; I think the reduction of work to wage labor is suicidal, or at least that it drives some to suicide; and I am convinced that in a decent society or even in a normal one, unemployment would not exist.

But even if you don’t agree with me about that, even if you are convinced, for instance, that some unemployment is for the greater good of our economy, or that alternative models of work have no hope in the immediate future, or that the merits of cross-cultural comparison are debatable, I would argue that my basic point stands. Which is: that it makes no sense to look to higher education to solve our employment problems, because the problems of higher education are not the driving force behind unemployment. Perhaps at times certain kinds of higher education can create new kinds of jobs, but that, I think, is the exception to the rule, and the dominant vocational function of higher education today is to sort out who gets a job and who doesn’t. Hence, advocating that liberal arts degrees be more employable is really just a way of saying that you would prefer a person with a liberal arts degree to get hired instead of someone else. But this only shifts the burden of unemployment, the burden of misery, from one set of shoulders to another. And so anyone who hopes to improve employment in general, and not just the particular lot of their chosen group, needs to discuss the flaws of our whole employment system, rather than those of higher education, which has become nothing but an exaggerated scapegoat in our current discourse.

I may write more about this in the future (once I’ve finished it!), but I was struck by the very beginning of the introduction (pp. 15-16), which gives a nice capsule summary of how the university is seen as being at the absolute bottom of the prestige scale in French higher education. I’ll translate; bear in mind that “la fac,” short for “the faculty,” is French slang for “the university.” Bear in mind, also, that a major distinguishing characteristic of French public universities is that they’re open to everyone with a high school diploma, while other kinds of higher education have more selective admissions.

Bastia, August 2008. Conversation with a taxi driver. He finds out that his passenger is an academic. He brings up the case of his daughter, which he’s worrying about. She has just received her high school diploma, science track, with high honors. She wants to enroll in a private school in Aix-en-Provence to be a speech therapist. It’s a dream she’s had since childhood. This is the best school for it, it seems, but the tuition fees are high and you have to pay for lodging too (no dorm housing if you’re not enrolled in the public university). But above all, the results are uncertain: there are only a few dozen places for several thousand candidates. The academic tries to convince the taxi driver that it would be good for his daughter to enroll simultaneously in psychology at the university. That would at least guarantee that she’ll get a degree. Neither the taxi driver nor his daughter seem to have thought of that…

Paris, November 2008. Conversation between two academics. They’re talking about the problems at school that one of their sons is having: he’s a brilliant adolescent, but slacking off [passablement dilettante] in senior year, studying economic and social sciences in a “good” Paris high school. When he turns in his homework, he can get an A [18 sur 20]. But, often, he doesn’t turn anything in and ends up with a zero. So, of course, the average gets weighed down. The principal meets with the father and warns him: with these grades, he won’t get into selective (non-university) schools; and then, forgetting who he’s talking to, he lets go a little: “You know, Mister, with a file like this, there’s nothing left but the fac.”

“There’s nothing left but the fac!” This sentence by itself sums up the crisis of the French university. Testimonial abound of meetings for the parents of high school seniors, where teachers and administrators explain the different options for further studies after graduation. First there are prep classes for the elite schools [grandes écoles]. Then there are technical-vocational classes, organized by the high schools themselves [STS]. Finally there are university technical institutes (IUT), which are institutionally part of the university but, like the aforementioned programs, have the right to choose their students and to group them together by class, like in high school. Finally, “there’s nothing left but the fac,” that is the university, the “broom-wagon” that picks up the stragglers of higher education, tasked with accepting those who can’t get in elsewhere.

This whole logic will, I think, be unfamiliar for Anglo-American readers, for whom it’s probably not easy to imagine a system where the universities aren’t the most prestigious form of higher education. But such is the French case — at least at a very crude level of first approximation. It is, of course, the case that there are some kinds of prestige you can only get from a university; you can’t get a Ph.D. anywhere besides a university in France, to the best of my knowledge, and some universities are considered more prestigious than others, and some majors more than others… But it’s true that there is a very common French discourse about how the public universities are no good. About how they’re abject. About how they’re falling apart and don’t give you jobs and hence don’t give you a future. Well, Anglophone readers, here in this text you have a couple of examples of people who think the fac is no good or who just forget about it altogether.

Among other things, this is a text rich in the imagery of social status. Since I am in cultural anthropology, I feel a compulsive need to comment on a couple of these images, which tell us something about how the texts’ authors think that status works.

The first paragraph gives us the intriguing case of low status figured by forgettability. “Neither the taxi driver nor his daughter seem to have thought of that…” — thought of the university, that is. For the authors, this apparently is a striking thing, a striking case of absent interest. They, of course, as academics, seem to value the university very highly. But what’s interesting isn’t that they value the university but simply that they seem to be drawing a symbolic equation between being forgettable and being low-status. Between being ignored and being abject. I’m curious: is this something that’s generally true about status systems? Does being low-status normally correlate with being forgettable?

The last paragraph proposes the voiture-balai, the “broom-wagon,” as a further symbol for the abjectness of the university. I would assume that many anglophones are also not really sure what this is, a “broom-wagon”: apparently it’s a car with brooms symbolically strapped to its sides that brings up the rear of bike races, and picks up stragglers. Basically, a car to pick up the losers. This is something of an interesting symbolic move because, I would argue, it’s not obvious that college students should be ranked in the same way as bike racers; there is no rule that says that college students must be classified as clear winners or clear losers. To employ this image of the “broom-wagon,” then, would seem to suggest, if not reinforce, a more deeply hierarchical and stratified notion of the student body.

A broader suspicion starts to emerge here: that it is all but impossible to have a value-neutral description of a university system; that to describe a university is already to assume a particular political stance towards it…

Paris
April 28, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christine Coënon

Commentary
Just a few quick notes here:

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

To be honest, as an ethnographer, I haven’t been extremely curious about this whole political affair; it’s only peripherally about the universities, and I’m mainly interested in the politics of the university system. And I’m not the only one who feels separate from this movement: at a faculty activist meeting a week ago, teachers commented that their concerns about the institutional situation were radically different from their students’ involvements in the pension question, and they weren’t sure (at that point) what points of commonality with the students they were going to find.

University discussion of the movement has, nonetheless, been ongoing, and I was particularly interested in one sociology student’s testimonial from the barricades in Lyon. I’ve taken the time to translate it; there’s something important to learn, I think, from stories of what happens when privileged, educated people suddenly find themselves subject to irrational and overwhelming state violence.

Thursday, October 21, 2010. Testimony of events on Place Bellecour, Lyon.

I arrived around noon at Place Bellecour, accompanied by some student friends. A protest was supposed to start at 2pm, on Place A. Poncet just beside Place Bellecour, with college and high school students, partnered with the CGT [a major union] and SUD [a left autonomist union]. A number of young people were there, mostly high schoolers and middle schoolers. You crossed a police cordon to enter the square. There were several dozen of them at every exit from the public square, which is one of the largest in France. They were armored from head to foot, with helmets, shields, nightsticks, pistols… There was also a truck from the GIPN (National Police Intervention Group, who had an armored truck and wore masks) and two anti-riot water cannon trucks. A helicopter surveyed the site from a low altitude. Half an hour later, after a few stones were thrown towards the police and their vehicles, the cops went into action and fired tear gas grenades. The crowd dispersed.

Around 1:30pm we start moving towards the Post Office, where the protest was going to leave from. The police cordon was still there, separating the protesters already on Place Bellecour from those on Place A. Poncet. They refused to let us through. After half an hour of discussion, probably with the help of the unions, they opened the cordon and let about thirty people through, after which they abruptly closed the cordon again. Apparently, the population going through didn’t fit the criteria for a “good protester” (light skin, not too young, no sweatshirts or hoods). No one else was allowed to leave Bellecour. Tensions rose. A few projectiles were thrown, and the police responded by firing tear gas, nightsticks raised. For more than an hour, we tried in vain to rejoin the other group of protesters, who were waiting for us on the other side. They also got teargassed. The crowd on Bellecour was broken up.

At 3:30pm, finally, the “free” protesters decided to leave on the march. For our part, we waited. There were several hundred of us on the Place. It was relatively calm. We waited, splintered into little groups all across the square. The cops said that we could leave once the protest had left. We waited. The helicopter hovered over us with a deafening roar. There were a few movements in the crowd, but the scene stayed calm. Frankly, we were getting pissed off. I was just planning to go on the march, and I had brought nothing with me: no water, no food, nothing to do. I waited like the others. A little later we decided to leave with a friend. But the cops still refused to let us out. It was probably about 4:30pm, so they had been holding us for three hours. I told them I needed to eat and piss, but they said no way. I started to get seriously pissed off, and it dawned on me that I was being forcibly retained. The cops told us it was an order from the Prefect, and that they didn’t know when they would be authorized to let us leave. To a friend who asked if it would be possible to get a soccer ball from the outside, to have something to do, the cop says that he should just take the inflated bladder of the young girl who had just asked to leave to go to the toilet. Then he and his colleagues burst out laughing.

No one understood the situation. In spite of everything, the square emptied out somewhat. Some people managed to leave, helped by the residents and shop-keepers who opened up their back doors. I heard that the police had let some students leave, but that, on the other hand, the young maghrébins [North Africans] right beside them were kept back. Systematically guilty of not being white [Le délit de faciès est systématique]. On the square, we didn’t organize ourselves. Everyone stayed in their corner, we were bewildered, we just expected to be let out. The average age of the people detained wasn’t over 18.

It was around 5pm, and we heard that maybe we weren’t going to be let out before 9pm. People began to panic. I heard middle schoolers on the phone trying to explain to their parents that they couldn’t come home because the police were holding them. It got colder and colder. I went back to see the police for some explanations. One of them explained to me that “we’re lucky to be in France because if were in Spain we would already have been beaten up by the Civil Guard,” and that “when there are problems of public order, freedom of movement can be suspended.” The square, at this point and for more than an hour before, was perfectly calm. A little bit later, when some kids gathered to protest in the middle of the square, the cops we were talking to turned their weapons towards us (I don’t know if they were tear gas launchers or rubber bullets) and told us to get back. Which we did. Tear gas was fired all across the square: the grenades shot into the sky and scattered out, falling, in incandescent form. People ran in every direction. We tried to stay on the sidewalk, along the buildings, to protect ourselves as much as possible. A young man was on the ground. Others came to help him, and ten meters away the police still threatened them with their pistols. I heard that he was hurt, and kids, with their hands in the air, asked the cops not to attack. Eventually the cops made everyone get back. They came to get the young man, who resisted. Three of them held him down on the ground, and then they dragged by him by the arm for 20 meters to their truck, which he disappeared behind. In front of me was a 15-year-old girl, in tears, in the arms of her friend. They went to see the police, asked to leave, crying, said they couldn’t take any more, wanted to go home. The cop told them to get lost. Explosions kept ringing out, smoke covered the square. It was hard to open your eyes and to breathe. Thirty meters to my right a girl was stretched out on the ground. People gathered around to help her. I didn’t see her react, I don’t know what was happening to her. Maybe an asthma attack, maybe a rubber bullet shot? (In the end I don’t think they shot any rubber bullets.) People shouted to call the firemen. Eventually, after maybe ten minutes, the police pushed everyone back farther along.

The helicopter hovered, still, above our heads.

Seeing our incomprehension, a cop told us: “It’s a policing innovation.”

I walked. People began to assemble in the middle of the square. Everyone had had enough. We started to be afraid that we wouldn’t be able to get out. Shouts of protest. A few stones were thrown. They respond, again, with tear gas and deafening sounds of explosions. Eventually they decide to get out the anti-riot water cannons. They fire. People are dispersed. We wait. They come back once or twice with the water. We stay dispersed. We wander around. People walk. I’ve had too much. I start to break down. The sun has set. It’s cold. I haven’t eaten since morning. We started walking, more or less in groups.

Around 6pm, the cops tell us that we can leave from the north side. Everyone goes over there. They respond with tear gas. People shout, hands in the air: “They told us we could go out this way!” Repeat. Tear gas fired, dispersion. On the third try, they let us approach. They finally let us leave. They make people leave one by one, stating their name and address, doing body searches (“checkup [palpation?]” they called it), and emptied people’s bags. As there were more than 200 of us, this took a long time. We lined up in the queue, docilely, heads down. They brought all the prisoners to one end of the square. They told us that we would all get out, but only one drop at a time [au compte-goutte]. We waited. People without their identity papers were put to one side. Eventually they let us through. While she searches me she tells me that she’ll be quick. I’m disgusted [écoeurée]. It had been more than six hours since the police had gotten the order not to let anyone leave place Bellecour. Six hours that some 200 people (at a minimum) were deprived of basic freedoms: moving, eating, drinking, going to the toilet. Six hours that we were held on a public square, battered [sonnés], confused, encircled by more than a hundred police, pointing their weapons at us with the least movement in the crowd, and firing on us… and the helicopter that hovered permanently overhead. The cop who checked my friend’s ID told him, “at least, eh, you won’t want to come back [vous avez plus envie de recommencer].”

It’s disgusting.

Nerves fraying, a policeman saw that I was in tears and took it upon himself to bring us past the last line of cops that separated us from the outside. He led us through the middle of a group of thirty or so kids, all Africans or Maghrébins, who were getting on a bus. They weren’t more than 18 years old. I asked where they were going: to the police station, to have their identities checked. It was 6:45. The cops said they would let them go that evening. Two buses left for the Commissariat.

Once I was past the riot police [CRS] lines, I rejoined the free protesters, who came towards the Place Bellecour to support us after the protest. They invited us to eat, to regroup. The protesters tried to stop the bus from leaving. Undercover cops [la B.A.C.] intervened, and the buses left.

A very bad experience, this situation, yes. Shocked, yes. To conclude, I went to the first bar I saw, to go to the toilets. The owner refused, he told me he had just refused ten other people and that he wouldn’t make an exception for me. I piss in the street, watched by protesters and passers-by.

Humiliated, yes.

They took away my right to protest, they took away my right to move freely [on m'a retiré le droit...]. We were packed like animals, attacked from one side of the square and then the other by armed groups. I didn’t insult a single person; I didn’t raise my hand against anyone. Six hours of open-air detention with police intimidation. During these six hours, no window on the square was broken, no damage to public property. But I can tell you that, after several hours, even me, a pacifist, began to feel a certain anger growing. Need to protest. Yes. Because need to say No to “policing innovations” of this order. This detention was unjustified, abnormal. We were put under constant pressure, and the weapons deployed were not proportional to the crowd at hand. Like many of those present that afternoon at Bellecour, I was simply going to a demonstration, one that was declared and authorized by the police.

That night, I couldn’t get to sleep.

Lou-Andréa, student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, sociology MA program.

(Note on the language: I’m less sure of some of the expressions in brackets. Francophones, don’t hesitate to chime in.)

As usual, I don’t have time to really analyze all this. I’ll just note two things. (1) The idea of a “right to protest” ingrained in French national ideology is quite interesting, especially given that the author makes much of the fact that the police don’t even obey their own orders or live up to their own promises. It’s as if what produced anger was a failure of the expected bargaining with the state over the right to deviate within pre-arranged limits (eg, to go on a pre-approved march). As if, as long as the state respects its side of the usual bargain, the activists will do the same. It’s as if all political normativity was supposed to be mediated by the state, as if only the state was a truly legitimate authorizing agent.

(2) I’m struck by this being a story of the development of political anger, even fury. There is a great sense that things are undignified and that this indignity is really the chief thing that brings anger into being. The sense of having put up with too much. The sense of having exceeded the standards of emotional tolerability. Of being deprived of basic human rights. Of being subject to useless, gratuitous cruelty. As if the affront was partly a matter of the police being morally and intellectually incomprehensible. (Clifford Geertz liked writing about this: the intolerability of the incomprehensible.)

To me, most of the time the basic policy issues in French debates are more or less comprehensible, but what’s harder to relate to is the whole emotional world that the policy debates elicit. I mean, I just don’t have the same relationship to the State as your average French militant. I don’t have good intuitions for what makes people annoyed and what they tolerate, for what makes people feel like they’ve just had it and are going to crack… But narratives like this are good for trying to relate to that emotional world.

Mobilize together!

Working and studying conditions in research and higher education

As this school year starts, staff and students are seeing no improvement in their working, studying and living conditions. The government’s reform of teacher education [mastérisation] is showing all its negative effects: there are former job candidates who can’t apply twice, candidates who pass the hiring exam but still don’t get jobs [reçus-collés], acrobatics aimed at creating [new] “teaching MA” programs after a parody of accreditation, interns put in front of classes without any real professional training, whose secondary school colleagues have refused to tutor them… The university and research map has been profoundly modified by the accelerating restructuring of research organizations (new Instituts at the CNRS, merger between the INRP and the ENS-Lyon) and of universities (with processes of inter-campus “fusion”), which have lurched into being through bidding on the government’s recently borrowed infrastructure funds [Grand emprunt]. The multiplication of individualized research grants (PES, PFR, …) threatens teamwork, essential in our sectors. Precarity is rising among the students, under the combined effects of rising fees set by the government (tuition, student health insurance [sécurité sociale], campus dining halls) and rising housing expenses.

Job cuts

We have already seen a freeze in government workers’ salaries for 2011, cuts of 36,000 public sector jobs, and a drastic fall in the number of teaching jobs up for hiring (11,600 jobs versus 15,125 the year before, with a 55% decline for primary school teachers). Under the cover of “deficit reduction,” the latest government announcements presage new public sector blood-letting, further falls in our purchasing power, accelerating degradation of the services offered to the public, and accelerating degradation of staff working conditions, with an ever-rising growth of precarity.

Xenophobic and securitarian attacks

During the summer, the government has stepped up its xenophobic interventions and expulsions, especially of undocumented foreign students. Foreign professors and researchers have been frightened in France or been prevented from coming here. More and more unionists or social activists have been taken to court. To push back against these attacks, a citizens’ petition has been set up: “against xenophobia and the politics of pillory: liberty, equality and fraternity,” which the undersigned organizations ask you to sign: http://nonalapolitiquedupilori.org/

Pension counter-reform

The government’s pension “reform” project, which exacerbates the effects of the 2003 Fillon Law, will be brought before the National Assembly on September 7. It involves major benefit reductions for everyone. It means:

• Obligations to work more for smaller and smaller pensions
• Major increases in already massive youth unemployment
• Falling net salaries for public-sector workers [fonctionnaires]

For research and higher education, it also involves a refusal to give pension credit for the years spent on education, writing a thesis, working abroad (post-docs), professional service work, or late hirings.

A completely different pension reform ought to aim at improving pensions for everyone, as much for people on State retirements as for everyone else. It would especially allow:

• The right to retire at 60 with a full pension, calculated as 75% of the average salary for the past six months for public-sector workers.
• Maintenance and improvement of women’s rights.
• Indexing the pensions according to reimbursement rates themselves indexed by the cost of living [indexé aux prix].
• Taking into account the structurally short careers of research and higher education staff.
• Taking years of higher education into account in pension calculations.

This calls for other financing, based on a redistribution of wealth more favorable to workers [plus favorable au travail]. Exemptions to employers’ contributions must be revisited, and corporations’ financial products must be made to contribute. This requires an employment policy, especially a public employment policy, that’s equal to our needs.

While young people are having such a hard time finding jobs, we refuse to see old people forced to stay at work longer in hopes of a decent pension — which will augment youth unemployment even further.

Opposing this policy

The undersigned organizations call on all university staff and on the whole university community to massively react:

• Respond to the petition “Against xenophobia and the politics of pillory: liberty, equality and fraternity,” by participating in the demonstrations of September 4th.
  Paris: September 4th at 2pm from République to Nation under the Higher Education Research balloon.
• Participate massively in the September 7th day of strikes and public-private sector protests over “Pensions, employment, salaries.
  Paris: September 7th at 2pm from République to Nation under the Higher Education Research balloon.
• And throughout September, we’ll be amplifying our mobilizations in order to make the government back down.

Signatory organizations: FSU (SNESUP, SNCS, SNASUB, SNEP, SNETAP), CGT (SNTRS, FERC’Sup), UNSA (Sup’Recherche, SNPTES), Solidaires (Sud recherche EPST, Sud Etudiant), CFTC INRA, UNEF, SLR, SLU.

(I should note that a few of the French expressions in square brackets are ones that I’m not 100% sure of knowing how to translate. Corrections welcome.)

I won’t give much of an analysis of this text, except to note that it seems to revel in a certain political eclecticism, drawing together immigration policy, pension policy, public-sector job cuts, and the arcana of university policy into a sort of buckshot critique of the government at large. This political eclecticism, moreover, apparently gets knit together largely through a sort of temporal rhetoric designed to instruct the reader about the state of the political present, to predict the bad future ahead, and to conjure up the optimism of a political mobilization that might avert the worst of what’s to come. In other words, a major implicit project of an activist flier like this, I would argue, is to say to the reader: this is the moment in history where we are now; here’s how we can intervene. I know this point is totally obvious, in a sense, but it seems to me that it’s worth thinking, as analysts, about the fact that political practice involves trying to alter people’s sense of time, to make them realize that they are in a political present, backed up against the wall of the future… And again, it’s banal to observe that political mobilization involves creating a sense of urgency, but it’s worth thinking twice about the fact that urgency involves a whole relationship to time and crisis.

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.