I was struck by the grain of the windowpanes and the gravely complexion of the sunshine. The date was April 14, 2010. The occasion was a debate over the university’s impending transition to “expanded competences and responsibilities,” responsabilités et compétences élargies, which is French bureaucratic jargon for the transfer of various managerial functions (like human resources management and accounting) from the national Ministry of Higher Education to the local campus administration. In short, it is a sort of managerial devolution, wherein formerly centralized bureaucratic functions are removed from the national level and transferred to the local level. This process was mandated by the Sarkozy government’s controversial 2007 university law, the Loi Pécresse or LRU, and since Paris-8 was a center of opposition to this law, the transition to the new managerial regime was controversial on campus.

An elongated view of the center of the amphitheatre shows the windows carved high up in the walls, the central dais with the President in his suit surrounded by his counselors, the vertigo of looking down at him over the cascade of desks and the cascade of hair and the scattered ranks of faculty and staff, the monotonous lines of critical leaflets that had been put out on the desks before the meeting to sway over the crowd, the many empty desks and seats that reminded us that, in the end, only a tiny minority of faculty, staff or students would bother to attend an event like this one. (To be fair, it was a relatively well-attended event, but nonetheless the room was mostly empty.)

Looking across the room, we get a clearer view of the ranks of assembled heads, the baldness of old men, the pink hands of the guy next to me, the cris-crossed gazes of cris-crossed heads, of the way that most people sat in couples or small groups of their friends and allies (people seldom sat right next to their local adversaries, so that their physical proximity loosely mirrored their social proximity), and a good view of the trapezoidal shape of the desks, and of their emptiness, and of the elaborate grid of lighting and air handling mounted in the ceiling, and of the reflections of daylight in the ceiling, and of the way that the space was closed off symbolically and acoustically and spatially from its surroundings, on the one hand by its architecture, on the other hand by its sociology.

But the thing that strikes me most is the way that these sorts of phenomenological details don’t leave a trace in local memory, don’t much stick in anyone’s head as far as I know, don’t get recorded or memorialized unless through the passing, partial whim of a passing ethnographer. The debate over this reform continues at Paris-8 and has, if anything, gotten more bitter than ever in the last year — so I’m told — but the little details, the little visual impressions, of a debate like this one just don’t stick anywhere. And it’s interesting to try to document these sorts of things that don’t matter — or perhaps merely futile.

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

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

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

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

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

The yard was patrolled by a cat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously, though, I’m half kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The very tiles on the walls are gridded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s the grid of the Toulouse campus:

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

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

There have been a bunch of articles on the borders of campus spaces. One thing they all have in common is an insistence that universities in some way manage their boundaries, and usually the surrounding neighborhoods too. People have chronicled how universities put up fences to keep out the poor, how they tinker in urban redevelopment, how they build science parks and sometimes fail, how they create low-income college slums and low-budget small businesses like copy shops, and so on.

But when I was visiting Aix-en-Provence last month — its iconic mountain is shown above — I was struck by the sense that the university just didn’t have a neighborhood. Sure, there were a couple of little sandwich shops and a café where the faculty ate lunch. There was a complex of dormitories on a hilltop and a nearby park where it looked like a lot of students were enjoying the sunshine. There were streets where you could see students and even a few teachers hurrying towards class. Nonetheless, in some directions you only had to walk a dozen yards from the campus gate before the university was entirely forgotten in the quiet streets.

Here, then, as a supplement to the scholarly research that has demonstrated the existence of campus boundary zones, I want to write about a few photos I took that illustrate the relative nonexistence of the campus neighborhood.

The university was bordered by the railroad tracks. This is what the main Faculty of Letters building looks like, seen from the train. Its façade was crumbling; here you can just make out the nets over the entrance to catch falling rubble.

But if you got off the train and walk down the little side street by the campus, there’s no sign of anything academic. No pedestrians, even, when I took this around evening. A few parked cars. Emptiness.

The only visible resident of the neighborhood seemed to be this cat, which fled moments after I took its picture.

By the way, if you want to see where this is, I’ve given an approximate map of my walk on google maps.

The most common form of public communication was a “Private Property” sign. That, it seems to me, is decidedly characteristic of this rather wealthy town.

The little café with its colorful mural was closed by evening.

As I approached the tunnel under the railway, a little sticker on the back of a road sign, half scratched off, transmitted a plaintive cry: “Citizens, The Social Republic Calls us to Revolt.” It was signed by the CNT-AIT, which apparently is an anarcho-syndicalist union. I doubt that Aix would be the most receptive town for this sort of message.

If you look back towards the university campus along the railway (which was up on the embankment at right), all you’ll see is cascades of spring flowers and long grass. No one was present; and the omnipresent walls (at left) served to separate private space from this strip of semi-public, unclaimed territory.

I crossed under the railway and climbed up its embankment. The university may be that tiny hint of a building mostly hidden by the trees; note how quickly it disappears into the semi-urban landscape. One is hard-pressed to call Aix a city, but “town” seems the wrong word for a place of 143,000 inhabitants.

A bit farther along, I came to a nursery school. In the mornings I often saw parents picking up their children there.

The official sign reads: French Republic. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Marcel Pagnol Nursery School. I note that the security arrangements are less severe and the fences lower than on the university campus.

As I neared the campsite where I was staying, the scene looked very much like highways everywhere at sunset. The streetlights waiting to spring to life. A few cars passing. The sheen of the asphalt.

No sign that it’s a college town. Perhaps the category of “college towns” is somewhat overrated, or at any rate tends to conceal the fact that academic spaces never manage to totally control or colonize their surroundings. The idea of a “college town” is scarcely applicable in France, at any rate; Aix is about as much of a college town as you can get, and even then, it’s nothing like, say, Ithaca, New York.

If we climb up into the university building and look out, we can examine the inverse perspective: the town seen from the university.

This (taken a different day) was the view from the philosophy department. That’s the campus library in the midground. This balcony in the foreground is officially off limits, though I saw undergrads climbing out through the windows to play on it.

Oddly enough, just as the university doesn’t look like much once you wander off into the neighborhood, so too the town doesn’t look like much seen from the university building. Red roofs are scattered among the trees, beneath the surrounding hills. The university blends into the town and the town blends into the surrounding landscape.

What’s the point of all this, you ask? I’m not sure myself, yet, but it seems to me important to emphasize that no matter how much universities may fantasize about their own importance, they still rapidly disappear into their surroundings.

In this winter’s exhibition on the history of Paris-8 at Vincennes (the university’s first site in the 70s), I was particularly interested in a text that discusses the relationship between Paris-8 and U.S. academia. The exhibit was separated into panels each starting with one letter of the alphabet, and this was one of the last of them: “W – Go West.” François Noudelmann, the author, kindly gave me permission to post a translation. So without further ado:

W — Go West

And if Paris 8 was the most American of French universities?

Just kidding, of course: that would be forgetting all the isms (anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, …), forgetting that Vincennes’ breath comes instead from the East, or even the far East where the Cultural Revolution rose up. 1969: East Wind by Jean-Luc Godard, co-written with the future Dany the Red. Today the compass would be set South instead, towards that pole that defines non-rich countries in terms of the North. And as for the West? The response from the dictionary of received ideas would be: turn your back on it!

But the West may thus have taken advantage of us without our knowing it. While here new ideas [la pensée vivante] are forced to settle in the margins on the outskirts of the Sorbonne, in the United States they have grown so far they have their own label, French theory. Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard and so many other children of Paris-8 have inspired American campuses for the past forty years. And the contemporary minds of Saint-Denis are exporting themselves faster than foie gras: Badiou brings Mao to the far west in California. “Rancière is so cool!” New York galleries announce. And Obama’s America creolizes itself with the thought of Glissant.

In the flux of transatlantic import and export, Paris-8 too plays its part. The United States no doubt produces the best and the worst, and one wonders why the world always chooses the latter: the reality shows, the industrial food, the world music, the quantitative ideology, the drive towards security… but the worst does not always come to pass, and when it comes to academic matters, Saint-Denis is the place where people study gender, queer, cultural,  post-colonial studies and theories, which are still distrusted by the mainstream French [franco-française] academy.

Are they products made in the USA? No, because they bring with them India, Africa, Australia, the Caribbean… these others of a Europe encircled by its borders. Walls always end up crumbling and ships always come to birth.

The University-World doesn’t have a statue, but it does have an address: liberty.

I suppose I should start by clarifying a few references. The “University-World” is the current official slogan for Paris-8, a concept-slogan that draws on the large fraction of foreign students at the university. Historically, it’s been a radically left-wing campus, hence the significance of the orientation towards the formerly socialist East. The university is currently located in Saint-Denis (if you haven’t picked that up from my earlier posts). And in Saint-Denis, the university’s mailing address is on the Rue de la Liberté, which is used here in the last sentence to amplify the consonance between the United States and Paris-8.

Now, I have to tell you that this text would come across as pretty counter-intuitive to most French readers. American universities in France are pretty often pictured as the incarnation of pure neoliberalism, of entrenched business influence, of massive structural inequality between rich and poor. In that light, it’s a bit of a shock to see the American university portrayed here mainly as a bastion of intellectual progressiveness, as the home of new ideas, of the “French Theory” of Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Cixous & Lyotard, of what Noudelmann called la pensée vivante, literally living thought. That goes against the stereotype.

Of course, and this is what I like about the text, it has some interesting ambivalences in its characterization of nations. France is cast as at once the bastion of a conservative, quasi-nationalist Sorbonne but also as the home of Paris-8, the radical institution from which much French Theory is said to have come. The United States, for its part, is painted as “producer of the best and the worst,” its trashy culture industry clashing with its intellectual openness. On the other hand, Noudelmann’s ambivalence about the U.S. is hardly identical to his ambivalence about France. One notes a certain asymmetry: France never appears here as a definite entity, but only as a cultural and institutional context designated by the adjective French. The United States is on the other hand made into an entity by being called by name. It’s as if France’s contradictions were spread out spatially and institutionally (the Sorbonne appearing, for instance, as the locus of conservatism), but the United States’s contradictions were condensed into one being.

The key conceit of the text, given the France-USA opposition, is to make Paris-8 into the key mediating figure between France and the United States. The U.S. appears here at moments as a massively magnified projection of Paris-8′s intellectual life. One wonders, of course, whether Noudelmann isn’t a bit overly optimistic about the life of French Theory in America. Many would argue that it became a radically apathetic, professional-intellectual commodity in its passage to the American humanities. I can certainly testify that the link between French radical thought and social movements, precarious even here, is dramatically more absent in the United States, so that there’s an effect of political deracination in reading, say, Foucault. And, of course, Paris-8 as a mediating institution is far from being without contradictions. A full analysis of this text would have to examine what it means that the text was displayed in an exposition on the history of Paris-8 that was derided by students as being an excuse for the past generation to relive their past radicalism in the glossy form of an exhibit. (I’ll have to come back to the exposition another time.)

In a way, this text is a commentary on the way that political space is nationally marked. At the start of the text, the (once socialist) East opposes the (emblematically capitalist) West, leaving France is somewhere in the middle. But by the end of the text, Europe is cast as a walled global center, encircled by its post-colonial others (Africa, India, the Caribbean) whose intellectual presence in France is thanks to their passage through the USA, where post-colonial studies has been more successful. In this later passage, the USA is cast as a point of intellectual mediation between Europe and the postcolony. I’m not sure what to make of this, to be honest, though it’s a good reminder that any understanding of French politics would seem to demand a fairly complex account of spatial metaphors.

There’s something to be said here about style, too, about the sly turns of phrase (not all of which I very adequately translated), about the sense of a continuous stream of thought created by the narrative’s twists and turns (is Paris-8 the most American of French universities? No! Unthinkable! And yet… And yet…). There’s something to be said about the paradox of a text that describes the globalization of ideas in a language that’s so full of local references as to be barely translatable (who abroad has ever heard of Saint-Denis, to say nothing of Liberty Street?). One sentence in the second paragraph was especially hard to translate: “l’Ouest nous a peut-être fait un enfant dans le dos.” Faire un enfant dans le dos can mean “take advantage of” but also has a more specific sense of getting pregnant against the wishes of one’s partner. Noudelmann explained to me that the idea is that the United States has given birth to French thought without France wanting it to, which is a rather striking sexualization of intellectual traffic, and one that reverses the usual “France is to the USA as feminine is to masculine” imagery.

There’s something curious about this text for an American reader too: doesn’t this tale of Paris-8 as the origin of French Theory run counter to the simplistic ways that French Theory is typically recontextualized in the United States? As far as I can recall from my undergraduate education, we weren’t taught to think of French post-structuralists as coming from a precise institutional location in France; rather, they were contextless ideas that seemed to come from “France” in the abstract, subliminally playing on the high-status connotations that French culture and language still enjoys in the American cultural imagination. There are in fact famous American academics who visit Paris-8, but I think most Americans of my acquaintance who read “theory” have never heard of it.

Well, my American readers, now you have.

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.

As you can see, Paris is still by far the biggest university town. If we look at the accompanying figures for 2007-8, it turns out that Paris proper has 156,743 university students, with 320,942 total in the Paris region (Ile-de-France). After that, we have Lyon (73,262), Lille (58,788), Toulouse (57,907), Aix/Marseille (56,590), Bordeaux (53,335), Montpellier (43,355), Strasbourg (37,299), Rennes (37,008), Grenoble (32,978), Nancy (28,078), Nantes (26,329), Nice (21,664), and from there on down… As in the last post on centralization, here too, mapping by student population size, we can see that the Parisian region remains by far the largest university site — its 320,942 of 1,225,643 total public university students comes out to 26% of the nation’s university population. (Note that universities only constitute about half–56%–of the French higher ed population, but we’ll talk about the rest of them some other time.)

But our thinking about centralization has to shift when we find out that, over time, provincial universities have grown and thus diminished Paris’s relative standing. In other words, it seems that historically, Paris used to be even more the center of the academic universe than it is now. To better understand this process let’s look at a thumbnail sketch of French university massification by a sociologist I know here, Charles Soulié:

Dit de manière extrêmement schématique et en si on se base sur l’évolution du nombre d’enseignants titulaires dans chaque faculté, discipline, on observe que la 1er massification, celle des années 1960 donc, sera à l’origine d’un développement sans précédent des disciplines de lettres et sciences humaines, tandis que la part relative des facultés de sciences, et médecine, baissera considérablement. Plus précisément en lettres et sciences humaines, la progression sera notamment le fait des nouvelles disciplines de sciences humaines sociales (psychologie, sociologie, etc.).

Put very schematically and looking at the evolution of the number of teaching appointments in each faculty and discipline, one sees that the first massification, that of the 1960s, originated an unprecedented development of letters and human sciences; while at the same time the relative fraction of the science and medicine faculties was considerably diminished. More precisely, in letters and human sciences, growth occurred primarily in the new social and human sciences (psychology, sociology, etc).

La seconde massification verra l’explosion des IUT, universités de proximité, antennes universitaires diverses, la part de Paris et de la région parisienne diminuant considérablement dans le potentiel national à la faveur d’un processus de régionalisation croissant de l’enseignement supérieur. Concernant les disciplines, elle s’accompagnera d’un développement très important de la faculté de droit sciences économiques, les lettres et sciences humaines, et surtout les sciences dures, connaissant une augmentation inférieure à la moyenne, tandis qu’en raison du numerus clausus la part relative des enseignants des disciplines médicales diminuera considérablement.

The second massification saw the explosion of IUTs (University Technical Institutes), local universities, and off-campus university branches; the relative size of Paris and of the Parisian region fell considerably in the face of a process of growing regionalization in higher education. This was accompanied by major growth in the faculty of law and economic sciences, while letters and human sciences, and especially the hard sciences, grew less than average. The medical disciplines, because of the fixed limits on their admissions, saw the relative size of their teaching faculty considerably diminished.

I’m not an expert like Soulié on what he would call changing disciplinary morphology — that is, the changes in proportional sizes of the disciplines. But the gist here, which is supported by various other publications I’ve come across, is that the “new” social sciences grew in the 60s, while now it’s the more vocational fields (business, economics, etc) which are the major growth fields. And if it’s true that, as Soulié says, the most recent university expansion goes hand in hand with university regionalization, then we might reasonably expect that Paris, the more traditional academic capital, would remain more dominant in older fields like “letters, languages and human sciences.” As is, to judge by this map of letters and human sciences enrollments, indeed the case:

It’s obvious from visual inspection that the relative size of Paris is much larger here than in the other diagram. I couldn’t easily find the exact figures for each city, but the key (which I had to crop) suggests that Paris has 120,000, while the other large dots are only a few tens of thousands. In other words, it does seem to be the case that the most traditional subjects (the humanities and social sciences) are particularly Paris-centered.

Indeed, if we look at the distribution of doctoral enrollments, we can see that Paris is, if anything, even more overwhelmingly dominant:

Here Paris is represented by a dot that means 20,000, while the other dots are probably one or two thousand and less. In other words, even if university education has been spread around the country, the reproduction of the disciplines, of the professoriate, of the academic “corps” remains almost exclusively a Parisian concern.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find data about the changing rates of Parisian (demographic) dominance narrowed down by discipline and degree level. But I think we can assume that some disciplines are less centralized than others, and that the degrees of Parisian centralization have shifted at different rates depending on the disciplines. I’ll try to track that down. In the meantime, it’s interesting to reflect on the curious interrelations we see here between ongoing Parisian dominance and growing but only relative decentralization. It’s as if there’s decentralization, but only according to a pre-existing spatial hierarchy. Ongoing centralization and gradual decentralization at once. Which should be no surprise to readers of David Harvey on contradictory spatial processes…

The scale refers to the number of universities in a given region. A few regions, shown in white, have only one university each; the majority of regions, colored grey, have two or three or four; and then there are a handful of regions with five or more, shown in various shades of red. Paris (or rather Ile-de-France, which simply means the Parisian metro area) is the major outlier, with 17 universities. Alas, I couldn’t find a color bright enough to indicate this degree of institutional dominance, and this isn’t even taking into account all the other major academic institutions that are primarily based in Paris: the Collège de France, the École Normale Supérieure, Sciences Po, EHESS, and so on. As for the universities outside France proper, there is one in Corsica (Corse) and two each in the Territoires and the Départements d’Outre-mer. (I actually know nothing whatsoever about these overseas universities; it would be interesting to learn about them.)

Looking at the diagram, it’s striking how Paris is surrounded by relatively empty academic space. The other big university poles would seem, in fact, to be as far from Paris as possible, at the southwest or southeast or far northern corners of the country. As if outside Paris there was an academic void for a while and major university centers only sprang up again when they could begin to escape its presence. The smaller red regions are far from the capital city.

All the same, I should acknowledge that this is probably a moderately misleading map. It doesn’t show number of students or number of teachers or institutional prestige, and these don’t always vary directly with the mere number of universities. In fact, it seems that when a city has multiple universities, they often began as one institution and were organizationally separated at some point. The University of Paris, after all, began as one entity and now there are 13 of it; 13 separate Universities of Paris, I mean. So sheer number of universities in a territory is not itself a conclusive measure of much.

But I do think if we mapped out student populations on the same map we’d find a roughly similar distribution, and this map does help visualize the Parisian center—provincial periphery system that continues to organize academic space in France. Nothing like it exists in the United States, where the most prestigious universities tend to be somewhat spaced out and located in different cities (they once primarily served students from their own regions, I suppose); of course there are major university cities like Boston and New York, but no single center is dominant.

That said, even within Paris there is enormous intellectual stratification, amounting to a center within a center. The oldest and fanciest institutions are clustered in the Latin Quarter right in the center of town not far from the centers of French government, as if spatial proximity to the French State went hand in hand with intellectual dominance in the academic world, while the universities of the outskirts (banlieues) are often poorer, serving more working-class students in poorer conditions, as in Paris-8 in Saint-Denis where I’m working this year. If you wanted to say something abstract about this, you might observe that it’s curious how national space symbolically structured according to these sorts of status differentials, which moreover form a sort of fractal where every center has its own internal periphery and every periphery appears to have its local center. Within Paris there is another periphery; and then again even within the center of the Parisian center we can still find marginal zones; and yet still within the periphery of the Parisian center, as at Paris-8, there are still smaller zones of dominance and zones of social abandonment. I was just hearing about Alexandre Bikbov’s research where he asked people to draw maps of how they see their social world: and it crosses my mind suddenly as I’m writing that it would be tremendously interesting to ask people to draw me maps of the French university world as they picture it.