Philosophizing in senior year???

1) The 2003 “official instructions” for the philosophy teaching program in senior year say: “Philosophy teaching in senior year… contributes to forming autonomous minds, warned of reality’s complexities and capable of putting to work a critical consciousness of the contemporary world.” What do you think of this?

These formulations pose two major problems.

First, it strikes me as shocking that a philosophy textbook should begin with a series of “official instructions.” An instruction, in the sense of a directive, is entirely contrary to the “autonomous minds” that we are told to “form.” Are we told to “force our students to be free”? Moreover, in the context of schools, “instruction” has a second dimension: we still talk about “public, obligatory, civic instruction” [in connection with public education]. But instructing is not educating. Instructing basically means shaping someone’s mind to fit the competences that the institution judges socially useful. Educating on the other hand means communicating a potential to a mind which, one day, will allow it to help define what is or isn’t valuable for its society. Yet according to the “official” declarations, we’re still on the model of instructing, in both senses of the term.

Second, the goal proclaimed for high school philosophy teaching is completely exorbitant. I know that many people subscribe to it. But we should be astonished by the excessive disproportion between the end and the means: they have groups of thirty pupils, a very limited range of practical exercises, lecture courses, etc. And above all, it’s impossible for philosophy teachers to “form autonomous and critical minds” if the pupils haven’t been invited to be autonomous or critical since the day they arrived in the schoolhouse. Not to mention that the art of thinking isn’t reserved for philosophy. Would one be exempted from “thinking for oneself” in history, literature or physics? It must be said that the goal [of our philosophy teaching] is, in our present circumstances, pretty disconnected from these realities; and we might therefore give up on grading students’ homework against an ideal that very few people can claim to have attained. We could, at least for starters, propose simpler exercises that would be better adapted to our students’ competences (the ones “formed” by our instruction) and to our own. At the university we do all this readily enough.

2) What should be at stake in philosophy teaching? What should be its goals?

Well, I don’t want to say that there’s nothing special to expect from philosophy teaching. To my eyes, philosophy is in essence a critique of our values and an effort to demonstrate, by one method or another, the legitimacy or pertinence of the values we hold. The philosophers who we’ve read and reread over the centuries have all undertaken an examination of the values of their times. That said, these philosophers don’t play the moral purity card [la carte de bonne conscience]. They direct their critical examination at themselves, working with their own keen perceptions of the possibilities and blockages of their epoch. Today, as in the past, many people, including our official instructors, defend some values without examination and try to impose them on others. Wondering where our values come from, going over them with a fine-toothed comb and sorting them out, creating new ones, scrutinizing the motives for our adherence to them and the mechanisms that inculcate them — that’s what a reading of the philosophers can invite us to do. And that’s a truly priceless service.

Like Zask, I’ve been struck by the official rhetoric in France about teaching people to have free and critical minds, which always seems to entail, as Zask points out, the contradictory project of “making” people free, and to presuppose the unlikely premise that educational institutions know what freedom or criticality are. But I’m most interested, here, in the part of the interview that proposes a definition of what’s essential about philosophy: a critique of values.

It’s not an easy exercise, at present, to come up with a well-defined area of inquiry that’s essentially philosophical. Many areas of inquiry that formerly “belonged” to philosophy — physics, society, politics, the nature of “man” or of language, the structure of thinking — have over time (and not without struggle) developed autonomous disciplines of their own, which contest and quite often dominate the intellectual terrain formerly occupied by philosophers. There are plenty of philosophers who still write about all this stuff, of course, but these objects are no longer exclusively philosophical, and as André Pessel has put it, “if this link with constituted knowledges [in other domains] disappears, philosophy sees its field extraordinarily limited and reduced to an exclusive study of subjectivity.”

Without going into great detail about competing conceptions of philosophy (see some American examples), it seems to me that some of the more obvious options aren’t terribly thrilling. Consider some of the most well-known: there’s philosophy as the conceptual foundation of all the other sciences, or (in an alternative version) philosophy as the conceptual handmaiden of the sciences (ie, the philosophers show up to help scientists “clarify” their theoretical ideas); there’s philosophy as a specialized conceptual inquiry into fairly narrow but autonomously philosophical domains; there’s philosophy as the history of ideas; in a more instrumental version, there’s philosophy as a place for building “skills” in critical thinking (as in the lycées).

It seems to me that there’s something to be said for most of these fairly academic projects, though I’m especially skeptical of the first one. But most of them (leaving aside the first and last) don’t afford a particularly exciting public role to the field. Of course, in France we also see more politicized conceptions of philosophy: philosophy as (in effect) the training ground for public intellectuals (always a small group), philosophy as “class struggle at the level of ideas” (via Althusser), philosophy as an emancipatory project (often cited at Paris-8). Here again, however, the latter two are extremely marginal and the first, ultimately, is fairly elitist.

Zask’s proposal for philosophy as a critique of values, in this light, has the advantage of being potentially open to all, sociopolitically interesting, and not necessarily a buttress of the status quo — without, however, necessarily becoming self-marginalizing (as so much marxist philosophy tends to). As an ethnographer of philosophers, obviously my relationship to philosophy is a bit strange, but let me just say that while I’m ambivalent about some of the field’s more grandiose claims, the idea of a field that does critique of values seems pretty compelling. A lot of anthropologists want to do work like this, but disciplinary norms of empiricism and relativism tend to prevent us from producing very well-theorized normative work.

Questionnaire on Sexuality

• Where do you think your heterosexuality comes from?
• When and under what circumstances did you decide to be heterosexual?
• Could it be that your heterosexuality is only a difficult and troubling phase that you’re passing through?
• Could it be that you are heterosexual because you are afraid of people of the same sex?
• If you’ve never slept with a partner of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer one? Could it be that you’re just missing out on a good homosexual experience?
• Have you come out as heterosexual? How did they react?
• Heterosexuality doesn’t cause problems as long as you don’t advertise these feelings. Why do you always talk about heterosexuality? Why center everything around it? Why do the heterosexuals always make a spectacle of their sexuality? Why can’t they live without exhibiting themselves in public?
• The vast majority of sexual violence against children is due to heterosexuals. Do you believe that your child is safe in the presence of a heterosexual? In a class with a heterosexual teacher in particular?
• More than half of heterosexual couples who are getting married this year will get divorced within three years. Why are heterosexual relationships so often bound for failure?
• In the face of the unhappy lives that heterosexuals lead, can you wish for your child to be heterosexual? Have you considered sending your child to a psychologist if he or she has turned out to have heterosexual tendencies? Would you be ready to have a doctor intervene? Would you send your child to in-patient therapy to get him or her to change?

After this mock questionnaire, the flier remarks that “these questions which marginalize, psychoanalyze and denormalize (anormalise) — non-heterosexual people suffer from these questions, and face them on a daily basis.” And it goes on to enunciate a political agenda which argues, in effect, that queer and women’s issues belong together, “because heterosexuality,” in addition to harming gay, lesbian and trans people, “is a political system which divides the world in two, into men and women, and which assigns one side to maternity and domestic labor while giving the others privileges and power.” Their list of political demands hence included not only equality and an end to homophobia but also (and this struck me as being a little more unusual) an end to the traditional system of dichotomous sexual classification. Indeed, they claimed “the free disposition of one’s body and the free choice of one’s sexual identity, sex and gender.”

This placed them in the paradoxical position, it seems to me, of being a feminist group trying to undermine the category of ‘women’ that served as their tacit basis of political unity: while open to all, as of yesterday no males had joined. I’d guess that they’d interpret this apparent paradox by saying that in fact they’re brought together by shared domination on the basis of their gender, and that of course the whole point of the project is to overcome this domination. But the political horizon of this project is very far off; the moment where gender domination will be overcome is infinitely far in the future from the point of view of the present.

A further note on this data: The last question here deals with wearing religious signs (strongest among the Greek Orthodox, as you’ll see). I’d emphasize here that our analysis of these religious artifacts ought to be somewhat different from our analysis of the rates of evil-eye-belief. A worn artifact is a sign of external identification (or verification) of one’s social identity in a way that a mental acceptance of some phenomenon (e.g. djinn) need not be. Even religious signs that are worn under the clothing, it seems to me, still have this characteristic of identity marking, even if one is thereby only signaling to oneself one’s own identity. (It’s interesting to note that among these signs of identity, only one, the headscarf, seems to have become a major public controversy. But we won’t get into the French politics of the veil just now.)

So without further ado…

Table 2: Belief in the Evil Eye by religion

Table 3: Belief in djinn (spirits) by religion

Table 4: Belief in astrology by religion

Soulié comments:

Astrology concerns first of all the Buddhists, those who belong to other religions, the Catholics, and the Greek Orthodox. Leaving aside the Catholics, we observe that within this population women (35.5%) believe in astrology more than men (20.5%), and that believers who are moderately practicing believe in it more than others. (This fits with the results of other studies of this matter by Daniel Boy and Guy Michelat.) Globally, the Protestants subscribe the least to magical or paranormal beliefs, and bear the fewest religious signs. Inversely, while Catholics tend not to be practicing, they do tend to wear religious signs more frequently (along with the Greek Orthodox and Other Christians). Muslims tend not to wear religious signs; although wearing the veil does characterize Islam, it ultimately involves only a very small minority of respondents.

Table 5: Wearing religious signs by religion

Table 6: Type of religious signs worn by the students

(Table numbers come from Soulié’s original document, available on request.)

This report looks into the ways that undergraduates [étudiants de 1er cycle] at Paris-8 relate to religion, and into their opinions and practices about their customs and politics. It is based on a questionnaire and interview study conducted in 2004-5 with a group of undergraduate sociology students at Paris-8 (Vincennes-Saint Denis). The project looks at these students’ undergraduate classmates who were present in class across a selected sample of some ten disciplines. It was initially planned as a form of research training through research practice.

The framework of inquiry

Paris-8 has the greatest fraction of foreign students of any French university. In 2003-4, grouping all levels together, they formed 34.7% of enrollments. At the same time, as a result of its location in Seine Saint-Denis [a working-class suburb just north of Paris], this establishment has a high percentage of immigrants’ children. The high proportion of migrants, and of children of migrants, thus makes the establishment a privileged observatory of the processes of religious, moral and political acculturation.

(…)

1,280 students responded to the questionnaire and around thirty interviews were conducted. 65% of respondents were first years, and 67.6% were women, the percentage of women ranging from 85.6% in psychology to 19.4% in computer science [informatique]. 80% of the students were French, 10% came from the countries of North and Central Africa [des pays du Maghreb et d'Afrique noire], 5.6% from Europe, 2.9% from Asia and 2.1% from America or elsewhere. The majority of foreign students at Paris-8, therefore, come from the countries of North and Central Africa, which are largely Islamic.

The proportion of foreigners varies by discipline. It’s highest in French literature (57.9%) and computer science (45.8%), and lowest in history (7.8%), plastic arts (9.9%) and cinema (10.2%). The particular nationalities also vary by discipline: the Europeans are most present in French literature and communication, the North Africans [maghrébins] in computer science and economics, the Central Africans in economics, and the Asians in French literature and computer science. This distribution also generally corresponds with the observable tendencies on the national scale.

We must also add that the notion of a foreign student, beneath its apparent bureaucratic simplicity (being a foreigner means having a foreign nationality), is a complex and ambiguous one. For some have lived for a very long time in France, or were even born here, while others are in positions of mobility; and this varies greatly according to nationality. 37% of North African students have a father who lives in France, against 20.8% for European students and 12.5% for those from Central Africa. These students’ family roots, and hence also their social, economic and cultural roots, thus differ strongly.

To the question about methodology, this was a survey administered in class across the disciplines. I don’t know the exact criteria for which disciplines were chosen. I do know that, in 2005, there were some 10,049 students enrolled in the first two years of the undergrad program (formerly called the DEUG), so it would seem that this survey reached more than 10% of its target population. (I might point out that Soulié, in the first paragraph above, is tacitly emphasizing that this is a survey of the fraction of the student body that actually comes to class. It doesn’t claim to represent the large absentee population.) I’d imagine that most of the students who got a survey would have filled it out, since it was administered collectively in a classroom setting.

On a more substantive level, the interesting thing here is that, again, foreign students from relatively poorer regions of the world (mainly North and Central Africa in this case) seem to tend towards more professionally, vocationally oriented fields. The case of French Literature, however, seems to be an interesting one in terms of this question of professional motivation, since it’s almost 60% foreign students but leads to no obvious professional future. I’m wondering what motivates people to come from abroad to study French literature, especially if we’re talking about undergraduate degrees. It makes more sense for graduate degrees, since France would presumably be the best place to write a dissertation on the national literature. But the professional stakes of a doctorate are quite different from an undergrad degree. All I can really imagine is that students who are becoming fluent in the French language might be drawn toward a field where they can keep immersing themselves in increasingly high-status language registers. (More “orthodox” French students of French literature, by the way, most likely don’t go to Paris-8, but more often to more traditional institutions like the Sorbonne.)

The extreme feminization of psychology and masculinization of computer science is worth noting too, in passing. I can only say it doesn’t seem too shocking.

Charles Soulié, of the Paris-8 sociology department, kindly shared with me some unpublished results of a survey project on campus religious belief that he conducted in 2004-2005. I’m going to post my translation of it in three segments: first the basic figures, then his comments on foreign students, and finally some very interesting results about campus beliefs in magical phenomena like the Evil Eye (beliefs which, moreover, aren’t as extinct as one might expect in our supposedly postmodern era).

Here’s what the figures look like, broken down by discipline. (I’ll post some details about the survey later; for now let me just note that it’s a survey of undergrads.)

* None designates no religion, atheist or no response.

Soulié’s commentary on this goes as follows:

50.1% of students are religious believers, the Muslims (19.8%) being more numerous than the Catholics (11.4%) or the other Christians (9.4%). The believers, in other words, are a majority at Paris-8, which is at the very least surprising in view of the history of this university. For it was created in 1968 by academics at odds with authority, academics who often claimed the banners of Marxism, Nietzscheanism and psychoanalysis, and who cast themselves, in some cases anyway, as the apostles of a way of life liberated from all constraints, especially sexual ones.

This said, the rate of religious believers varies strongly by discipline, seeing as it runs from 77% in economics to 28.6% in cinema. The Nietzscheans and Freudians are certainly more numerous in cinema, plastic arts, or philosophy than in economics, computer science or law, which moreover holds true for teachers as much as for students.

In addition to the historical irony that Soulié notes, I’m amazed to see that economics students are the most religious on campus. My amazement emerges, I guess, from my own American cultural prototype of economics students as the least spiritual people imaginable, as embodiments of sheer economic practicality. And conversely, it’s a general symbolic surprise to see that some of the most impractical humanities are simultaneously the least religious disciplines. The American stereotype, it seems to me, would be that religion and religious studies are more closely linked to the humanities than to any other disciplines, sharing with the humanities a common concern with moral, cosmological and existential issues. It makes me wonder if people who go into philosophy, anthropology or the arts are finding in these fields more a substitute for religious worldviews than a complement to some prior religiosity. It’s almost as if the humanities were competing with religion to offer students a symbolic relationship to the world. (I’m probably biased here by personal experience: I feel like anthropology does for me pretty much what religion does for many others, i.e., offers a meaningful way to interpret and inhabit the social universe.)

At the same time, one gets the sense that the more religious people are tending to go into practically oriented fields, as if their interest in higher education tended to be oriented more towards the economic and material than the philosophical. Of course, the figures (the disciplines are ordered from least to most religious, by the way) don’t give a completely clear picture; French Literature for instance is a relatively religious field, while something like Psychology is the third least religious while being a fairly “practical” field (in the sense that you can get jobs with a psych degree, like social work I guess). But even more importantly, it needs to be said too that religion can have a class correlate, such that an apparent correlation between being religious and choosing a more practical, job-oriented field may actually just reflect the fact that people from working-class backgrounds tend to choose practical, job-oriented fields. In particular, being Muslim (the biggest religious group) probably correlates with being working-class or at least not from the haute bourgeoisie, while some of the students who go into vocationally futile fields like, say, cinema are from wealthy Parisian backgrounds and not needing immediate economic returns from their education.

Soulié doesn’t give us figures on class background, but in the next installment we’ll look at the Paris-8 immigrant population, a social group that itself has fairly definite class trajectories.

Management at the University

Managerial university administration supports itself with numerous organizational measures; computer software on the corporate model, for example, has already profoundly modified universities’ operations. And the language of entrepreneurial discourse — “efficiency,” “control,” “evaluation,” “project,” “objectives” — is being transposed onto centers of teaching and research which worked, until now, according to other logics. The critical and cumulative temporality of knowledge, after all, has nothing to do with a realized project’s profit timeline.

Nothing shows this penetration of managerial ideology better than the realization of university “newsletters” (journaux). We find in these newsletters a clear expression of this “enterprise culture,” a cleverly disguised and hence valorized means for the indoctrination of a firm’s employees, whose aim is an interiorization of the objectives of productivity and an acceptance of organized forms of domination. These newsletters aim to give a handsome image of the university, without wrinkles or folds, which has no more relation to reality than advertising icons have to social reality.

The newsletter delivers an official lie: “Everything is going great.” It is in no way a public space that would allow a debate about campus participants’ activities and conditions of existence. One doesn’t talk about the misery of foreign students who go to the hospital in a state of physical deterioration because of malnourishment, nor about the short-term jobs that other students string together, nor about anguish in the face of precarity, nor about academic failure. Neither does one talk about the working conditions in the university’s offices or among its laborers. One doesn’t talk in this newsletter about the faculty’s working conditions, nor about the reactions to the latest ministerial injunctions, nor about the problems of research work. The newsletters keep silent on the reforms imposed on university workers, even though they could be the best placed to forecast the University’s development.

As the University is also a center of research, one can only be amazed to see that the newsletter doesn’t open up its columns to notes on current research projects, on the ideas currently up for debate, or on the knowledges currently being developed. In reality, the newsletter is copying business newsletters: it wants to be the vector of an “enterprise culture.” But everything shows us that the University, a place of confrontation between different knowledges and truths and research projects, loses itself in wanting to “sell itself.” It ceases to be by wanting to be what it’s not.

(pp. 46-47).

I’d have to do some library research to be sure, but I get the impression that PR-style university newsletters are a very recent innovation in France, perhaps dating from the last fifteen years or less along with the rest of the “managerial” innovations that de Montlibert deplores. In some ways, these newsletters seem similar in form and function to the U.S. institution of alumni newsletters, but I suppose that even in the U.S., alumni associations are sometimes organizationally distinct from the university administration itself, so that even if they frequently dispense hollow propaganda, the origin of their propaganda is slightly different from something coming straight from a university P.R. office. My sense is that elite schools have long had alumni associations, serving to obtain donations and to maintain a sense of exclusive institutional identity. A quick look at JSTOR indicates that American alumni associations have been around for almost two centuries — the first one was formed in 1821 at Williams College. I initially guessed that American university public relations offices would be a much later creation than alumni associations, but interestingly enough, it turns out that they came into being as early as 1904, and formed a national association, the American Association of College News Bureaus, on the very same day in 1917 that the U.S. entered World War I. The next year, it appears that the alumni associations had grown to such an extent that they too formed a national group, the Alumni Magazines Associated. By the later part of the 20th century, in fact, the university PR association had even merged with the alumni association — which gives the lie to my supposition, earlier in this paragraph, that these are separate entities.

But in France the situation seems to be different. French public universities — which are quite different from, and much less prestigious than, the elite grandes écoles here — have never had alumni associations, although some groups currently advocate them. The grandes écoles, in contrast, seem to have quite strong alumni associations; the Ecole Normale Supérieure is famous for producing an elite academic fraternity that sticks together for life, and French engineering schools turn out to have had alumni associations since the late 1840s (caveat: I’ve only read that article abstract so far).

In the universities, however, it seems that the absence of alumni associations was coupled, until recently, to an equal absence of public relations departments. I suppose the centralized French university system, earlier in the 20th century, probably saw no reason to give each university its own press office; official communication probably used to be handled by the Ministry. But the more that French universities are asked to be autonomous, the more they need (or are forced) to develop and differentiate their identity. The campus newsletters that de Montlibert attacks, I suppose, are just one piece of the longer history of newly developed “branding” activities on French campuses. I’ve seen some curious examples of this here, which I’ll write about soon, I hope.

I also hope that de Montlibert’s comments speak for themselves (which would be a good indicator that my translation isn’t a total failure), but let me just signal in closing that I’m very curious about his emphasis on the university’s “being,” as if the university was constituted by a sort of transhistorical essence which consists in being the site of a perpetual confrontation between different “knowledges.” This, I would emphasize, is one major rhetorical strategy of the academic corps faced with neoliberal assaults: to claim that the reforms undermine the very essence of the university.

The problem, of course, is that these critics seldom manage to acknowledge that the university’s “essence” is itself largely fantasmatic. I suppose there’s a broader theoretical question here about whether or how much any institution can be rightly said to have an essence (is the essence of business to make money? is the essence of government to maintain a monopoly on legitimate use of force?), but I’ll leave that aside to point out that even by de Montlibert’s own provisional definition of a university, most universities aren’t and never have been universities. Most modern universities are places where interdisciplinary conflict is an exception to the rule and where conflict is averted by increasing hyperspecialization (which means that we seldom have to talk to people we deeply disagree with). Many universities have been places where knowledge was, if we believe Thomas Kuhn at least, neither extremely cumulative nor particularly critical. If the university has an essence, I don’t think we’ve figured out what it is yet.

But I can’t be too hard on de Montlibert, because there’s another interesting thing about this little passage. In short, there’s a sort of textual clash between his idealistic definition of what a university at heart “is,” and his list of all the university’s undiscussed problems. To me it seems contradictory for de Montlibert to define a university as home of a “critical and cumulative temporality of knowledge,” while immediately going on to acknowledge that campuses are rife with misery, precarity, bad working conditions, and malnourishment. The former points towards a defense of the university as it is or could be; while the latter tends to suggest that actual universities are deeply problematic institutions.

This thought crosses my mind: Shouldn’t de Montlibert also admit that the traditional humanistic definition of a university is itself another nice official lie? At any rate, he seems caught in the rhetorical tension between the actual and the desirable. But I won’t try to resolve things here. I just find it an interesting page in an interesting book. And I appreciate his historicization of a campus artifact that I might have otherwise taken for granted.

(One last note on translation: the polemic is about university journaux, which might sound like it should be translated as “campus newspapers,” but as there don’t seem to be student-run campus papers here in the American mode, I’m assuming he refers to the glossy little publications that campus administrations put out here to trumpet the latest local achievements. They tend to have carefully uncontroversial little stories, as far as I’ve seen.)

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.

Paris, February 22, 2010

Madame Minister,

I’ve decided to write to you to offer my personal testimony about the current conditions of doctoral students in France. It is exactly 10:30pm, and after a day of full-time work (to make ends meet), I’m starting the second part of my day, the part dedicated to my research work. In the fourth year of my dissertation, I should be putting real effort into writing up my thesis, but given the lack of time and resources, I’m just trying to keep these activities afloat. Some days, my will to continue emerges from my intrinsic interest in research; other days, I’m remotivated by the long years I’ve already spent on my work. And on other days still, I work double shifts because of the 552 euros I had to pay at the start of the academic year. In the end, on certain evenings like this, I find it hard to see the sense in this situation. I’ll sum things up: I had a good academic record, oriented towards professionalization (with publications, conference talks, fieldwork, teaching…), with encouraging results; but in spite of all this work, all this willpower spent, I don’t know how, materially speaking, I’m going to be able to finish my thesis.

I’m from the silent majority that doesn’t have a research grant, that juggles between paid work and self-financed studies. I’m from the silent majority that has no real status: as a student and a worker at once, I get neither the advantages of workers nor the advantages of students (discounts and such…). I’m from the silent majority whose future opportunities look like a dense fog. This last sentiment is particularly strong among my colleagues in human sciences, in spite of the fact that, when it comes time for a debate on national identity or some other media polemic, people go straight to the researchers in human sciences — to historians, sociologists, anthropologists — to take the pulse of our society. I am one of these future PhDs in human sciences, I’m eight years into university studies and, when I find I can’t trade a job as a receptionist for a better job in administration somewhere, I find myself worrying about finding the nth next short-term contract — the idea of a paid vacation not yet being part of doctoral students’ vocabulary. We hear talk about billions of euros that the government is about to release for higher education and research. Me, I’d just like to know how to pay my bills and defend my thesis. That said, I don’t mean to draw an intentionally miserable picture of my situation. I made the choice to get involved in research, and I made it with conviction. I believe in my abilities and competences as a young researcher, and in those of many of my colleagues; I believe in the quality of francophone research and of its scientific results. I’m only wondering about what’s becoming of it. What is happening, Madame Minister, when ultimately the only option that presents itself to new French PhDs is to look abroad if they hope to make a living in their fields?

I am not a renowned researcher or recognized specialist; I am only a doctoral student among many others; I am not up to date on the latest figures, statistics and predictions that your Ministry has available; I have nothing but a few figures I’ve discovered, my coping strategies, and a lack of visibility on the horizon. But I’ll keep going tomorrow, keep working on my research project somehow, not just so I can frame my diploma on the wall, nor even to open up new job opportunities. I’ll keep going tomorrow because I believe in my work. The one thing I deplore is simply that in France, the country of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, I find myself faced daily with the echo of Precarity. And in thanking you very sincerely for your attention, I hope you will accept, Madame Minister, this expession of my best regards.

Klara Boyer-Rossol
PhD Candidate in History, University of Paris-VII

I’m really not sure I’ve captured the prose style of the original, its peculiar mix of bluntly personal revelation with courteous formalities; and I worry that this blog is becoming more of a private translation laboratory than a useful resource. The more I translate, the more it feels like translation is a craft of its own demanding a long labor of apprenticeship. There’s no choice there, of course, but to keep doing it and see if things get better; though I do find that publishing, even here on this blog, is a good minimal guarantee of quality assurance. The thought of having a reader is a good motive for proofreading…

Analytically speaking, I’m struck by the strong rhetoric of French national-scientific virtues that comes out in the last paragraph. It’s as if, as the conclusion of the letter drew near, it suddenly wasn’t enough to base a moral critique of the institution on the fact that it produces precarious, anxious, inefficient actors; and it suddenly became necessary to make a further appeal to apparent contradictions in national ideology. In other words the argument here isn’t just precarity is unlivable but also that precarity is out of place in the revered French national image.

I guess I’m just much more cynical than this author, but I’m also struck here by the rhetoric of sincerity (a term which also rhymes with “precarity,” by the way). In particular, I’m interested in the moment where the author says: I assure you, I actually do believe deeply in my work. This reminds me a lot of the general conclusion drawn by the national report on precarity I wrote about a few weeks ago: there too the general contradiction was that many people believe that their precarious work is unlivable and yet they remain deeply committed to it. Maybe one of these days I should find out what philosophy folks of my acquaintance are talking about in their incessant references to La Boétie’s “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.”

Moderator: We have all been precarious at one time or another… perhaps not all but many of us. We have picked a few people who represent the different categories [of precarious work] we presented a moment ago, with all their complications. Our precarious colleagues aren’t here to cry over their lot… Do you want to introduce yourself?

“Aurélie Legrand, I’m 33 years old, I’m at the master’s level in my studies [bac+5], with a decade of professional experience in the private sector. It’s been a little more than a year that I’ve been a contract worker at the university, and so I’m part of what they call the precarious workers of higher education. So I work on a short-term contract (CDD) as a research engineer (ingénieur d’études) in a social science lab at the university. The post became available on May 1st, 2008. I came to apply for it in December 2008, and… I can tell you that it was a little bit hard for me to accept this post, even though it did represent a good opportunity for me at the time. It was hard to accept because they offered me a very short-term contract. So, I had an interview in December, and they offered me a short-term contract (CDD) from the beginning of January 2009 to May 1st 2009, so a 4-month contract, because the permanent occupant of the job who went to the private sector on May 1st of the year before could return to their job on May 1st the year after. So… I had to leave the region where I was coming from because [unclear], anyway for this 4-month contract.

“Finally I accepted this offer, and the permanent person [titulaire] didn’t take the job back on May 1st in 2009, so they had me sign a second short-term contract from May 1st to June 30th. A two-month contract. It had a gap of two months built in for the summer. So honestly the situation wasn’t really good at all. But finally, when they brought me in to sign this second short-term contract, they realized it was a category A job, so there wouldn’t be a break in the contract. So they extended the contract to August 31st 2009. And… what else was I going to tell you… so during that summer, sometime around mid-July, I got a letter from human resources indicating that I was summoned on September 1st, in the early morning, to sign a new contract, this time from September 1st until August 31st — so a year-long contract. So I was brought in to sign this new contract and things more or less worked out because that was the end of this deal with the two-month summer interruptions.

“That said, I was pretty much astonished by the way the human resources people had us sign the contracts. We were brought in collectively, all the contract workers summoned on September 1st. They had us in a room that might be about the same as this auditorium. There was no real group welcome, everyone waited in their own corner, and finally two people came in with the contracts. The group was divided in two, maybe from the letter A to the letter L on one side and the rest on the other, and everyone lined up to sign their contract. So you didn’t have the time to really read all the conditions in the contract; you signed, and if you had questions it was pretty hard to ask them, to have any personal discussion of your work contract. Voilà.

[Inaudible question.]
“Yes, I found out that I was pretty privileged after all, I realized that among the contract workers of my university, well, this contract starting September 1st was what I was expecting, a contract for the same job for the whole year. On the other hand, I heard other people around me who were summoned by mail, who were brought in on September 1st to sign a contract that was only ten months long. Eventually, when they got to the table, and they got to read their contracts, they found out that they were only getting hired for three months at one site and then for four months at some other university site, which they weren’t expecting at all. Others found out that they had an initial contract one month long and after that they weren’t getting any guarantees of further work. So I saw some people refuse to sign these contracts and leave. Voilà.”

I’ve tried not to clean up the very “oral” quality of this discussion. It’s full of redundancies and not always perfectly clear. That’s as it should be, it seems to me. I should admit that the translation is a bit loose; I don’t have much practice translating oral discourses.

What we have here is a personal story that reveals a structural situation whose dry bureaucratic parameters themselves become grounds for all kinds of emotional reactions. A robot programmed like a sociologist might make the mistake of believing that the length of someone’s work contract is a purely quantitative variable, a simple matter of longer or shorter; but we can see here that, in reality, quantitative differences get magnified into local dramas. Ask yourself: what’s the difference between a 10-month and a 12-month contract? Two months, the math types will say. But they’ll be wrong, wrong; the difference between 10 and 12 months of employment, for Aurélie Legrand, is the difference between having relatively steady year-round employment and facing a huge seasonal layoff.

And we can see too that, in the algebra of precarity, the variable of “contract length” is multiplied (metaphorically speaking) by another anxiety factor: the uncertainty of contract renewal. The problem with having a succession of four or two or one-month contracts isn’t just short duration as such; it’s also the accompanying anxiety of constant contractual renegotiation and uncertainty. After a few months of such circumstances, we can see here, even a meagre year contract — itself hardly a recipe for long-term stability — comes to seem a blessing.

And farther along towards the end of this discourse, we see a new theme emerge: the theme of precarity’s place in a differentiated field of suffering, of precarity’s place in a world where some people have it worse than others. Needless to say, a peculiar feature of the panel presentation “where the precarious themselves will speak” was that the participants were publicly interpellated as precarious workers, with all the implicit stigma that that entails. Early on we can see Legrand accepting her classification among the “precarious workers of higher education”; but what’s interesting is that, by the end of this discourse, she is claiming in effect that she doesn’t have it so bad, that she ended up pretty much with what she wanted, and that it’s the others who really have it bad, the others who are really getting shafted with their 1-month contract offers, the others who need to negotiate but can’t. The most critical, outraged part of this discourse is also the part that does the most to minimize the subjectivity of the speaker, as we see her turn from describing her own circumstances to critiquing the collective misery of human resources’ assembly-line method of contract signing. As if there were after all a certain desire to ascend to a somewhat detached critical standpoint, one that would critique precarity while attempting to avoid entirely identifying oneself as its victim. The discourse on precarity is not without its internal contradictions.

Part of the answer involves this poem I came across today, by Jean Harold Paul, a Haitian doctoral student in philosophy at Paris-8 (a department that turns out to have long-standing links with Port-au-Prince). I’ve translated it with his permission for you all.

The night that we are
(in memory of Jésula and Wilmichel)

bric-a-brac of apocalypses
bric-a-break of our utopias

and if…
and then…
but are we still?

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
a horrible night
where only our dead appear dimly
without name or register
without farewell or burial

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
what’s left of us?

bric-a-brac of apocalypses
bric-a-break of our utopias

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
it’s still night
at least our presence is reflected there
a simple sensation of being somewhere
without knowing who we are
where we are
without knowing with what or with who we are

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
when will we be able to mourn
for ourselves?