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.

This is the university where I do my research, this year. I like this picture because it has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with the overdetermined and crass narratives that so easily predetermine one’s whole perception of this campus space. This is the tree that has grown up behind the amphitheatre with its jagged roof, the arms of the branch entirely geometrically incompatible with the sawtooth linearity of the dark building. There’s nothing here about politics, nothing here about pedagogy, this picture contains no academic knowledge, it embodies no concept unless you count the concept of mute visual juxtaposition of organic and inorganic form. There’s no knowledge in this picture, no sociality, no people, no conversation, no texts, no pedagogy, no politics, no record of human activity besides the roof built to some absent architect’s scheme. It’s autumn but you wouldn’t know that except from a couple of tiny leaves that gleam yellow in the underexposed daylight.

If we look to the left we can see that I was in an empty courtyard, where I had retreated one afternoon to write my fieldnotes and gnaw my sandwich undisturbed on a bench. It’s a site meant for human interaction: we see the sulky lips of the concrete benches curled over as if waiting for someone to sit down and converse merrily; but no one’s there, as the site is slightly out of the usual circulation patterns and the pedestrian bridge that normally brings traffic through this area is closed for some sort of repairs. Trees stoop low almost sagging. Leaves are scattered across the asphalt and some of them are falling into the storm drain. The shadow of the rooftops leaves behind inversely jagged sunshine. Funny how such a small shift in the camera’s angle can shift the colors so completely; the high contrast of sky and twigs has been replaced by drably sunny grey and brick and ragged green and hints of graffiti.

Another day later in the fall the sun came out of a cloud and the trees began to look more barren. This peculiar street, a service road really, just dead-ends in the fence which marks the end of campus. I cannot adequately stress how peculiar it is that this campus has only one public entrance and otherwise is completely encircled by a wall; I suppose there must be a gate at the end of this little road, but I have yet to see it opened. Down there where the curve of the road ends, you can’t see him in the contrast and the low resolution but a young guy was sitting by himself on the bench, hunched over something in his lap like a book, as if keeping intentionally as far as possible from anyone. It was one of those days where the afternoon sunlight wavered and threatened to withdraw altogether as if at the end of a sulky monologue.

Incidentally, I also feel certain that the planner who designed this road must have felt very clever to have contrasted the blocky grid of the brick building with the sinuous bends of the road and its bordering flowerbeds. And the wispy trees at right have a verticality that parallels that of the building at left, framing the road in the middle as if it ran through a valley with obstacles on both sides; although the organic trees are also and simultaneously the symbolic opposite of the building. Symbolically speaking, we can see on this campus and on many campuses an emergent opposition between the natural, which becomes ornamental as it is represented by carefully arranged decorative plant life, and the social, embodied by the brick and metal buildings where university life happens. Though what’s funny is that it’s often the buildings which evolve in unpredictable and convoluted ways, getting covered with graffiti or just plain worn out or repurposed or speckled with cigarette ash, while the ornamental campus trees often remain relatively untouched and unworn and continue to fulfill their assigned purpose as elements in a landscaped landscape. As if the built structures were actually more organic than the plant life, so carefully tended.

If we look inside the building, here in the corridor of the art department where philosophy classes also meet, the scene is more highly aestheticized, the floor shined, the light arranged, the walls colored in dramatic dark hues, the students coming and going like blurred creatures with bookbags, two people at the end of the hall approaching each other (is the one on the left waiting for the other, leaned on the wall?), everyone in dark clothes, posters marked the walls, paint chipped off near the floor (those white marks on the wall at right center) where passing feet have damaged things by accident. At times this hallway is packed with people waiting for their classes. Most of the rest of the time it just sits there waiting to be passed through.

Passing space. Quite often this corridor space of freedom and transition turns out to be more socially fruitful than the classrooms that it connects. This is a space where you see people make friends, where people make plans to meet later, where they inquire where the bathroom is (just on the right here before the doors), where they try to find the right classroom, where it’s easy to talk to strangers, where people sit on the floor trying to finish their lunch before class, where people sit waiting for someone to show up with the key, because classrooms are kept locked up when class isn’t in session, because of an ill-defined fear of misbehavior. This ill-defined fear is prevalent across campus, indicated by the barred windows on buildings within the campus, which is itself already walled in and guarded; and there is a definite class subtext to the security measures, an interpellation of the student body and of the neighborhood youth as a threat. Now, this corridor, and its twin on the next floor up (the cinema department), are visually nothing like the rest of campus; they’re remarkable for their boldly painted dark walls and their colored lighting effects; if you look at the end of this hallway you can see that normal fluorescent lights return out in the lobby. Still, the aesthetic differentiation of this corridor does nothing to lessen the pervasive security measures; I wouldn’t be surprised if over the last couple of months I’ve wasted an hour of my life, cumulatively, waiting for someone to show up with the key to the classroom. It’s a contradictory space, a space of visual differentiation and security concern and lively but very periodic sociability. Right before class is a good time to hang out. Other times, the hallway looks more lonely, and you feel loud and conspicuous if you’re talking, like the time on this very spot when I asked an old man about his PCF political background during the class break.

Outside the front gate of the university on a different day and more recently, on a cloudy day before (american) thanksgiving around nightfall, a series of pink banners announces the 40th anniversary of the university. An art exhibit is in the process of being mounted, scaffolding inside used to install things that hang from the ceiling or decorative lighting. Last year there were doors in this wall, and these doors were cracked and postered, and the interior of the room you see here was not an art exhibit but rather the university’s main and only entry hall, a gloomy but politically active space plastered with signs and slogans like “vive la lutte armée!” and battered vending machines and towers of chairs arranged as if leftover from barricades. (I wasn’t there for the barricades, but I heard someone say this fall that it was convenient, at the time, because if you needed a spare chair, you knew just where to find one.) Now the doors are gone and it’s glossy and someone has decided to spend money on backlit pink signs that glow in the blue of dusk. The university looms up in this photo, a tower of a chaotic building. And as we see from the signs, the university is also self-memorializing, a phenomenon often locally referred to as “nostalgia for ’68″; I fully expect that when the exhibit opens here, the chaotic political space that used to be there will be entirely replaced by fancy text and artfully chosen photos that aestheticize the messiness and incoherence and spontaneity of actual political action on campus. The genius of the culture industry that seizes on 1968 and other such glorious resistance fantasies lies in their ability to turn political spontaneity into a theme to be ritually commemorated and reinvoked.

As I took these pictures, no one was looking at this unfinished exhibit besides me. Someone came up behind me and said: “Salut, Eli!” I jumped. I wasn’t expecting to be seen. “Salut,” I say, “ça va?” but the kid had already walked away. Obligatory greetings at Paris8 can be interminable but also superficial.

Across the street in the subway station there is a little bakery where people buy coffee and sandwiches. Or pastries. Sometime maybe I’ll write a structural analysis of campus eating establishments, but suffice it to say for the time being that this place, being a private establishment, charges €4.20 for a lunch special (un menu étudiant) versus €2.90 for the cheap sandwich deal at CROUS on campus. But the difference is that the sandwich at the bakery is far better tasting.

You can get an idea of the way that social life takes place here on the casual social ground of empty space in front of the subway gates. It was almost night and raining a little; people were clustered inside or under the eaves outside. The space had a regular rhythm, like any subway station; every four minutes a big crowd streamed out from the gates, having just gotten off the train, while in the other direction people trickled in towards the inbound platform at a lower and more even rate. This station is the end of the line. You can see in the picture three people (male) standing in baggy jeans and sweatshirts talking to each other, five or six people in line for pastries, a couple of people walking in towards the subway. It’s an anonymous space, part commercial, part social. It’s not a place where everyone is dressed in downtown Paris bourgeois getups.

And if we look back towards campus out the window of the subway station we can see the little crowd of people, again mostly in dark clothes, many in jeans I think, but at any rate a large crowd who has finished class for the day and is going home, trickling towards the metro, crossing this large expanse of empty asphalt that is an even more transitional space than any campus hallway or courtyard. Sometimes people hang out here and smoke, but mostly people just rush back and forth, actually running, sometimes, when they’re late for class. (If you get off the train that arrives at 9:05 a.m., this is fairly common.) There’s a fruit stand out here too, just out of view at right, the type where if you only have 30 centimes or a ten euro bill for a 55 centime orange, the guy will probably just take the 30 centimes. You can see here that the courtyard is bleak, looks rained on, with a few dents and blemishes and tattered posters, and you can see that the aesthetic attention put into the interior campus landscaping doesn’t extend to this courtyard outside the campus gates, even though, by all rights, this courtyard is a far more central campus space than anything I showed above. You can’t go to this university without crossing this courtyard. At dusk the university glows in the dusk, the rows of lights show warm in the library windows against the cold gray of clouds and the cone of a single tree sticking up and a metro station pillar in the middle, and yes that’s the library glowing over there above the pink signs of the art exhibit I showed above. The reflections of the metro station’s lights swim through the photograph in a little school.

In this picture we see a university that isn’t visibly a “maoist university” (as someone described it) or necessarily “une université de banlieue” (a university of the outskirts) or “une Université-Monde” (a University-World) or “une aventure de la pensée critique” (an adventure of critical thought, as one current slogan would have it). Or to the extent that we do feel inclined to apply any of these retroactively produced labels to what we see, we can do so only through an exercise in classification that, at times, interferes with our comprehension of the social and visual spaces of the campus. They say that ethnography is an exercise in trying to understand the local understanding of local life, but sometimes local systems of classification can become an ethnographic burden, can interrupt and conceal the lived curiosities and contradictions of carelessly evolving ordinary worlds.

I have a bunch of photographs of university quads to look at here, and some more recent articles from the U.S. context to think about, but to start off this new set of posts I wanted to begin with this extract from a History of the University in Europe. It offers a very suggestive picture of how universities began to acquire real estate in the first place:

“In the late Middle Ages, as student populations grew and universities ceased to migrate, universities acquired buildings and movable property. For a long time time in Paris and Bologna the administration had not needed to take care of buildings, because there were none. Lectures were held in houses rented by the masters, examinations and meetings in churches and convents. In Paris, however, both the theological faculty and the nations began renting property as early as the fourteenth century, and acquiring it in the fifteenth century. With lecture halls in the rue de Fouarre and many other places, with colleges and lodgings, and with churches (all of them on the left bank of the river), the Quartier Latin became the university quarter of Paris. The young Bologna studium, too, contented itself with private houses and religious or public buildings for lectures, meetings, and ceremonies.

Growing numbers of students, some of them very young and needy, made housing facilities more necessary as time passed. College buildings arose everywhere, but especially in universities with large faculties of arts, such as Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and later on the German universities. Italian studia also looked for lodgings for their students. The comparatively few colleges in northern Italy were founded in and after the fourteenth century, at first in converted private homes. After 1420 a special type of building appeared, the domus sapientiae (house of wisdom) or sapienza, a teaching college modelled on the Collegio de Spagna in Bologna, built in 1365-7. The rooms were grouped around an arcaded courtyard. Gradually the sapienza ceased to be dwellings and in early modern times became the official university buildings with lecture rooms, discussion rooms, a library, rooms for accommodation and administration, archives, and a graduation room. The palazzo della sapienza became the current name for these sumptuous university buildings. (136-7)

[It goes on to describe 14th-century quadrangles built at Oxford and Cambridge, funded by donations and university funds.]

… By 1500 old and new universities alike possessed proper academic buildings — lecture rooms, assembly rooms, a chapel, one or more libraries, lodgings for students and teachers – and many articles of value. Throughout Europe, faculty buildings, and particularly college buildings with libraries combining functional needs with a show of magnificence, were visible signs that the masters in the late medieval university were no longer footloose. No longer could universities threaten to migrate, no longer could public authorities tolerate strikes or secessions; the monumental disposition and architecture of the late medieval university showed how completely it had become a part of society. University towns had acquired a character of their own. (139)

The back story here is that the early medieval universities (composed after all mainly of a bunch of masters teaching in rented rooms) were capable of wholesale mobility. If the local authorities ceased to be congenial, scholars could threaten to leave town, taking the university with them. (As in Bologna in 1211-20 or Prague in 1409; the former was only a threat, the latter involved doctrinal dissenters leaving to found a new university in Leipzig.) The acquisition of campus real estate spelled the end of this mobility and thus the loss of a major political option. Not that I really know anything about medieval society, but I imagine this moment as being the end of the powerful rootlessness that American hobos celebrated in song.

At any rate, acquiring real estate obviously had logistical advantages. We see in this passage that there was a real need for student housing and classroom space, and later libraries, offices, and so on. Universities entered into a regime of private property and ownership. And, the last paragraph tells us here, these buildings came to confer social legitimacy, “combining functional needs with a show of magnificence” that must have been equally a show of significance. The overly schematic reading of this passage would be that early universities acquired social legitimacy in the moment of their entrance into regimes of conspicuous consumption of private property.

It’s overly schematic because, even without really knowing the historical or institutional detail, it’s obvious that there were more complicated forms of political recognition at work; a quick glance at the book reminds us that there were real political tensions between kings, local authorities, the Pope, the local Church authorities, the local townspeople… social recognition of universities in such circumstances was obviously not one-dimensional. Nonetheless, the basic link between property and legitimacy seems clear. Such a link appears self-reinforcing: the more a university is legitimate, the more it can acquire property; and the more property it has, the more legitimate it is. It’s no coincidence that the richest universities today are the wealthiest; Thorstein Veblen noted a hundred years ago that money confers prestige. It’s interesting to note, however, that according to the passage above, functionality came first in the acquisition of campus real estate, while the ostentatious magnificence of the buildings came second. As if social distinction was patterned first of all on functional utility? That seems somehow a very American notion.

At any rate, even today university mobility is not entirely dead, even in spite of the long-strengthening equation between universities and their physical presence, i.e., their campuses, i.e., their property. One of my fieldsites, the University of Paris-8, was forced to move to a new campus at the hands of a hostile government in the early 80s. (I won’t get into the story just now.) This year, an American case is very interesting: Antioch College in Ohio was closed by a hostile board of trustees, but in an itinerant fashion worthy of the Middle Ages, some of its faculty moved into new makeshift lodgings, kept teaching, and lobbied to be given back their campus buildings. They had to change their name, because apparently they had no legal right to the old one, and are now the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute. There are a lot of documents online about the closing, but it sounds like there might be a new college opening before long, after a great deal of struggle by alumni. Hearing a presentation about this last spring, I had the sense that these Antioch activists were themselves deeply attached to the physical space of their prior campus buildings. Paradoxically, then, even as they demonstrated that actually a university can detach from its real estate even now, their desire for their lost physical premises evinced something of an ideological attachment to the historically emergent equation of a university with its physical place.

I won’t get further into the details. I’ll just note for now that the birth of university real estate was the prerequisite for the enclosure of university space and the making of what’s now considered (in America) the college quad. More historical fragments of this political history in future posts.

It has slowly dawned on me that a huge number of universities came by their premises, by which I don’t mean their philosophical axioms but their physical environments, in exceedingly peculiar ways. Some of what follows below is hearsay and I don’t really have time to do historical research. But there’s more odd variation here than one might have predicted.

• The Danish School of Education occupies a building that, I’m told, was during World War II the Nazi museum of Scandinavian folk cultures. (This apparently had something to do with creating an Aryan heritage, though I gather that Germans at the time were hard pressed to pass themselves off as more Aryan than the Scandinavians!)
• Cornell University: Was once a farm (albeit financed by the massive business success of Western Union’s telegraph operation in the 1850s). University of Connecticut: likewise was once a farm.
• The University of Paris-8 used to be in Vincennes but was forced to move to Saint-Denis in 1980, and all its original buildings were demolished on the government’s pretext that it was a den of drug dealers (according to a film I saw).
• Columbia University: founded in 1754 by royal charter of King George II. It originally met in a schoolhouse with eight students; now owns $2 billion in New York real estate assets. Has suffered recent controversy about potentially displacing Harlem residents in a campus expansion. (NYU, founded in 1831, also now owns about $2 billion in NYC property.)
• The University of Paris-Dauphine is housed in the former NATO headquarters. These were left vacant when Charles de Gaulle decided to withdraw France from NATO in 1966.
• The University of Illinois-Chicago was built just next to an interstate highway exchange that had already destroyed much of Chicago’s Greektown neighborhood. The new campus, built over local protests, displaced 8000 people and 630 businesses, according to the university’s own historical documents. According to this article, the university’s development also effectively destroyed nearby Little Italy and Maxwell Street.
• The University of Chicago was built on some surplus real estate bought from the business tycoon Marshall Field. Now has expanded to $2.4 billion in land, buildings and books. Controversial involvement in 1950s “slum clearings” that demolished some 193 acres and displaced as much as 30,000 people (if you believe this source; I haven’t found a better one).
• According to many rumors, various post-60s campuses (possibly including Syracuse Univ, UC-Irvine, University of Texas, and/or certain French campuses), were built or remodeled to prevent student radicals from gathering in threatening crowds.

If per French myth little boys come from cabbages and little girls from roses, then here I suppose we might conclude that little universities come from farmlands and slum demolitions while little colleges come from royal charters and spare military headquarters… which are delivered from the sky by storks, no doubt. Seriously, though, just this little sample suggests that many universities come to exist through absurd and somewhat disturbing circumstances, ones that don’t make it sufficiently into our theories of the university. Can one find in any existing philosophical concept of the university – Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, for instance – the merest hint that universities would be involved in sometimes surprisingly massive projects of urban dislocation, in urban destruction that can only so very optimistically be called “creative“?

These historical absurdities in the origins of academic institutions aren’t to be sloughed off; they can teach us something important about the irrational kernel that lies at the core of seemingly neat institutional teleologies. My point is not, mind you, that universities are to be understood as pure historical accidents, purely random organizational conglomerates. Kant’s aforementioned book starts out by saying: “Whenever a man-made institution is based on an Idea of reason (such as that of a government) which is to prove itself practical in an object of experience (such as the entire field of learning at the time), we can take it for granted that the experiment was made according to some principle contained in reason, even if only obscurely, and some plan based on it–not by merely contingent collections and arbitrary collections of cases that have occurred.” And indeed, it’s true that there are always principles of organization, “ideas of reason” if you’re inclined to call them that, at work in university organization. The purpose of looking at the oddly arbitrary origins of universities is hence not to discount university structure, but to show how this structure is constantly hiding and appropriating the little historical mistakes (or sometimes calamities) that set it in motion.

The picture I started out with is an empty lot a mile to the west of the University of Chicago. Did you guess that this scrubby patch of worn snow is adjacent to one of the nation’s richest institutions of higher learning?

No to the LRU! says a figure falling into a trash can. Or is it the LRU itself that’s falling into a trash can?

“For a critical and popular university [fac]!” Apparently this is a traditional militant slogan at Toulouse.

“Get a new slogan please!” is the caption written below by someone who apparently disagrees or is simply bored.

[La fac, i.e. la faculté, is a now bureaucratically obsolete term that used to designate a college, a faculty, a division - as in the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Law, etc. It is still used in common parlance to refer to the public universities - les facultés - as opposed to other institutions of higher learning (private business schools, elite government institutes, and the like).

"For a hard and copulating university!"

This is one of those semi-untranslatable parodies. Instead of "une fac critique et populaire" we have "une fac qui trique et copulaire," a perfect rhyme with a perfectly divergent meaning. "Triquer" is, according to a semi-reliable online source, a verb meaning "to strike" (like with a baton), which has militant connotations, but also "to get hard" and "to possess carnally." And "copulaire" is an impromptu adjectival form of "copuler," to copulate. So instead of a critical and popular faculty we have... well... one that gets aroused and copulates. Is anyone really advocating a sexual university, though? I guess this is mainly sheer parody, though there are long-standing and noteworthy associations between '68 French leftism and sexuality that are in play here too. A famous slogan was, for instance, "Plus je fais l'amour, plus j'ai envie de faire la révolution. Plus je fais la révolution, plus j'ai envie de faire l'amour" - the more I make love, the more I want to make the revolution; the more I make the revolution, the more I want to make love.

Freedom in search of itself (with no compass). Seems rather ambivalent.

The muscled figure of a rather peculiar, gender-ambiguous creature, with long hair and what looks like lipstick but also with huge knees and three arms, is beating the reforms (LES REFORMES) with a yellow club.

A neat movement is a lifeless movement.

But "propre" is also an adjective signifying possession as well as propriety... so this could also be read as "a movement that's on its own is a lifeless movement," "a private movement is a lifeless movement."

(At bottom, there's something about Tunisia. Did I mention that the university is in a major immigrant neighborhood?)

Social movements are made to die.

More ambivalence here, no? Or at least ambiguity: we don't know if this is the gleeful pronouncement of someone who hates social movements or the bittersweet musings of a militant. Does it mean that social movements are bound to accomplish nothing and end in uselessness? Or that social movements disappear when they win, transcending themselves through victory, as it were?

Free your mind [conscience, consciousness] and then you’ll be able to free your university [ta fac].

This struck me as a particularly hackneyed and empty slogan, personally, although an acquaintance in philosophy thought it was fine and not unreasonable. But I think she may not have shared my ingrained cynicism (or my sense of resonance with tiresome slogans from The Matrix).

Voilà: a trashcan with a human face! Or a face of some sort, at least, more cartoon than realistic.

I have no idea what this symbol means.

This one seems clear enough, by contrast. Always curious when French speakers choose to resort to English…

Act! Disobey! Alternative Libertaire!

Evidently this is a sticker belonging to a small libertarian socialist-anarchist organization. Their color scheme – black, red and white – and the red star are pregnant with ancient left-wing symbolism, and tend to communicate their identity more than the rather abstract slogan itself.

I rather like this one. It masquerades somewhat as another political slogan (Delirium! What a wonderful political emotion!), but turns out to be a sticker advertising a local band. (The link is in small print unreadable here.) Hence showing us yet again that political signs are vulnerable to various forms of recontextualization, reappropriation and culture jamming.

Women take back the night on March 7th!

The fine print is worth reading here too:
“Marre de la domination masculine” (Sick of masculine domination)
“Marre qu’on contrôle notre sexualité” (Sick of them controlling our sexuality)
“Marre des violences faites aux femmes” (Sick of violence against women)
“Marre d’être les premières victimes de la crise” (Sick of being the first victims of the crisis)

And then in the torn part of the page: “Manifestation non-mixte,” i.e. a non-mixed-sex demonstration for women only. With a curious icon in the background: set upon the traditional symbol for women, we find, reaching out of it, the figure of a woman (whose femininity appears to be indicated essentially by long hair and context) raising up her fist. An interesting icon, I think, because it reappropriates the raised fist, such a traditional symbol of leftist, revolutionary masculine power.

Looking back over this post… I see that I am not halfway through my collection of these images, but I suppose I should save the rest for a new post, lest this one grow any longer, and I miss dinner because of my blog. Which is a distinct possibility.

For now, I’m thinking of this collection of images as an incoherent political landscape, a collection of traces of contradictory political projects, commercial projects, rhetorical disagreements, nihilistic skepticism, comic optimism. I guess, in this presentation of images isolated photographically from their architectural and spatial contexts, one loses a sense of how the images become part of the buildings, blend into the walls or jump out from them, form a piece of everyday life. Walking around the university, no one besides me was looking at these messages. They become part of the background. The ambiance of the place. There’s an interesting paradox in these messages: their various cries for attention and urgency become reduced in daily life to a kind of vague institutional atmosphere. They signify student intervention in academic space even as they signify the impotence of this intervention as it turns to mere ambiance, something that appears to be largely felt rather than seen, ignored rather than heard. Of course, as types of media, graffiti and signage are remarkably unidirectional, leaving no indication even of their authors’ identities, much less a way of offering a response, aside from scrawling one’s own message (which creates an apparent dialogue between graffiti tags or signs without necessarily reaching the original authors). Unless some kind of contact info is given in the message (the occasional URLs, for example), these signs are just there, provoking reaction without affording any obvious possibility for interpersonal contact.