One is reminded in flying to Europe of the class indistinction of anthropologists as professionals, of their dreadful similarity to tourists, study abroad students, bourgeois American adventurers and the like; one wonders whether anything is either valuable or particular to anthropological knowledge-making; one is irritated by the ideologically ritualistic nature of fieldwork (the sense that it is expected, even forced, to be a rite de passage). One has an uneasy sense of oneself as a phenomenological instrument, the trembling urge to record everything, everything, the peach of sky or scrape, the rustle of signs, the footfalls of quarrel and procedure, the texture of an ordinary life — one wonders whether ethnography is in fact the verification of a hypothesis or the interpretation of a social world (for the benefit of its inhabitants? for the benefit of foreigners? for one’s own amusement?), or the aestheticization of a set of flittering scenes that only cut skin deep, an artful display of surfaces; the freeing or subjugating or an ethnographic object, or the effort to induce a greater state of consciousness in an object; a form of collaboration intellectual exchange between actors taken or mistaken for intellectual subjects, or simply an exercise in concocting a misplaced authenticity of a culture that one falsely imagines one can experience immediately, done for the benefit of a disciplinary system of reproduction?…

What’s interesting about this to me in hindsight, I suppose, is that none of these questions really get resolved by doing fieldwork or by writing up your results. It’s just that you just learn to not worry about them after a while. I note that I posted a version of these comments — a cleaned up version! — early on in my fieldwork. I think I thought then that these sorts of questions would receive positive answers.

I hear this turn of phrase so often. It’s what academics often say when they mean “the way that x.” There is often, as far as I can tell, not much difference in meaning between saying “the way that x” and “the way in which x,” except that the latter is a much more academic usage. The way that(in which) academics use this expression bothers me. It seems gratuitous. It seems wordy. It creates barriers to communication with non-academics that don’t have to be there.

In case anyone’s not sure that “the way in which” is a specifically academic usage, I’ve compiled some handy evidence from Google that clearly shows “the way in which” to be more scholarly than popular. On regular Google, “the way in which” returns 180 million results, versus 839 million for “the way that.” In other words, in the general Google corpus, “the way that” is about 4.66 times more frequent than “the way in which.” On Google Scholar, on the other hand, there are about 2,420,000 hits for “the way in which,” versus 1,080,000 for “the way that.” So among scholars, on the contrary, “the way in which” is 2.24 times more frequent than “the way that.” Or put otherwise, scholars use “the way in which” about 69% of the time, versus only about 17% of the time for the general population.*

Let’s take some examples of this usage, drawing at random from the academic articles on my computer.

From Merle Curti’s 1955 “Intellectuals and Other People,” an interesting analysis of American anti-intellectualism: “Some intellectuals, however, have continued to invite resentment by the way in which they hold their learning.” Curti could have said the same thing, as far as I can tell, by writing “… continued to invite resentment by the way that they hold their learning,” or even “continued to invite resentment by the way they hold their learning.” Admittedly, it’s less formal if we omit the relative pronoun, but then, questioning formal language is precisely what we’re here to do.

From Gregory Price’s interesting-looking “The Idea of a Black University,” on my list of stuff to read: “The reduced likelihood of a typical HBCU [historically black college or university] producing a cultivated intellect that Martin Luther King, Jr. represented underscores the way in which the typical HBCU, with its nonliberal emphasis, catalyzes the decline of black America.” Here he really could have written “the way that” without any change in meaning.

From Jeffrey Williams’ 2008 “Teach the University“: “While Graff prescribed a plan for education overall, he was responding to the particular development of literary studies and the way in which the literary curriculum had morphed over the past thirty years, split into the fiefdoms of theory, such as structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and so on.” Williams is a known advocate of plain, clear scholarly writing, and one can only conclude from his use of this deeply scholarly phrasing that it has seeped into our collective unconscious, becoming something we scholars can say without thinking about. Here too, I think Williams could just as well have omitted the “in which” altogether, writing “the way the literary curriculum had morphed,” without doing much harm to the sense of his sentence.

It’s striking that even scholars like Williams or Curti, who are trying to write against spurious divides between scholars and everyone else, use this phrasing. So we have to ask: what are we doing, we scholars, when we say “the way in which”? A number of hypotheses come to my mind. We may be:

• Creating a spurious sense of precision. In some ironically vague way, “the way in which x” just sounds a lot more precise than “the way that x,” at least according to my scholarly intuition. (My scholarly intuition is itself a social product.)
• Establishing that we scholars are different and better than ordinary people.
• Establishing that we speakers (or writers) are members of the in-group. By implication, by using this phrasing, we are also blessing our audiences as group insiders, people worthy enough to dignify with good prose. (Would you say “the way in which” if you were talking to your bartender?)
• Taking longer to say, thus showing that we scholars possess leisure time to waste on communicative niceties. (See Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of scholarly language as a form of conspicuous waste.)
• Showing that we value decorum and formality for their own sake.
• Inserting a normally written register into the realm of spoken language (at least, when we are speaking and not writing). This kind of transposition of the most formal written register into less formal or oral discourse is, I think, characteristic of many scholarly circles.

Needless to say, every professional milieu has its own professional jargon, its own professional vocabulary, its own professional lexicon. I’m wondering, though, if all professions have their own syntax? Or is that the special province of academics? Maybe other professions use specialized vocabulary without trying to distinguish themselves in terms of gratuitously elaborate grammar…

It’s hard not to be struck by the way (that/in which) academics inflate their language into something more than language, into a realm of self-congratulation that ultimately obscures, that ultimately divides them from any non-academic group that might have been their public. Is “in which” an expression that, by itself, does anything so terrible? No; it merely contributes to a larger linguistic world that academics inhabit and which separates them from others. Williams writes at one point: “we should have a better ear for the freight of the words we wield and estrange them from their commonplace usage.” To which one can only add: it’s not only the words we use, but also the way we connect them to each other, that estranges us from the laity.

* A few additional points of data: Interestingly, if we strike the definite article “the” from my search queries on Google Scholar, we find 3.25 million results for “way in which,” as opposed to 3.68 million for “way that.” So while “the way that” is much less common than “the way in which” in the scholarship searched by Google, “way that” is actually slightly more common than “way in which.” When we add the definite object, in other words, we get much more differentiated results. I surmise that “the way in which” is the full form of the specifically scholarly expression.

As a second point of data, I find that in my personal cache of academic articles (about 2800 PDFs), “way in which” produces 589 results, vs “way that,” which produces 755. “The way in which” produces 454, vs. 255 for “the way that.” This roughly corroborates the findings from Google Scholar.

To the university community,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-The university administration

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

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

Anyway, I’ve been working on an essay about precarious work in French universities, and I came across a passage that I think is a great starting point for any analysis of academics’ class status. It’s in an essay, “Smart,” by Jeffrey Williams, a literary critic; it’s one of the best essays about academic culture that I know. In this passage, Williams is trying to teach us that academics’ class status is ambiguous: definitely not working class in the traditional sense, but distanced, often, from the conventional markers of professional success.

Class is not just a question of what money you have or don’t have, nor solely a question of status conferred by cultural capital, but that it marks your body. If you look at most fellow academics’ hands, you’ll rarely see calluses.

I start with this… to broach both the visibility and invisibility of our class position. As academics, especially in the humanities, we have a vexed relation to class. On the one hand, by normal markers such as educational level (only about 10% of Americans have grad degrees, not to mention doctorates), the kind of work we do (white collar, with some autonomy, setting our own hours, etc.), salaries (which, while we might complain of how low they are, are much above the national mean, and certainly higher than, say, school teachers), as well as by tastes (what kind of magazines we have on our coffee tables—if you’ve ever tabulated the survey at the end of Paul Fussell’s Class), we are of the cultivated classes. Attaining our position through educational credentials, we are quintessential denizens of the professional-managerial class.

On the other hand, we often eschew or deny our class position, projecting a distance from the normal parameters of class in America. There are several ways that we do this: sometimes by projecting a kind of bohemian position on the peripheries of, if not antagonistic to, normative culture (we’re not like sharkskin suited lawyers, but wear jeans and open collars, and proclaim our queerity); sometimes by asserting a clerical position set against mainstream capitalism (we are not profit-seeking businesspeople, instead working in the non-quantifiable realm of culture, whether conservatively sanctifying its lineage or progressively opening it); sometimes by celebrating our uselessness (we fumble at basic tasks like filling out forms, because we reside in the higher realm of the mind); and sometimes by proclaiming our political resistance (as intellectuals, we stand outside capitalist society to criticize and resist it). Thus we are the class that somehow stands outside class.

In some ways this plays out a characteristic attitude toward class in America, that, because we are all in the great middle class, we do not experience the class distinctions of the old world. This affects what the German sociologist Hans Speier calls the “masked class membership” of the middle classes. But it also has specific permutations in academe, and we experience and enact class in distinctive ways. This holds true especially in the humanities, that have a traditional bearing set apart from business and little commercial crossover. In the post-welfare state university, some of the sciences, technological programs, and practical disciplines, like business, are oriented toward paying their own way, through grants, business “partnerships,” and patentable results, so do not oppose the world of commerce. Rather, they embrace it. (If you look at the cars in the parking lots around the quad, you’re more likely to see Mercedes, BMWs, and Lexuses near their buildings, instead of the Hondas near ours.) Members of those disciplines might give up some of the humanistic aura of the university, but they express less ambivalence about their class position.

Many of our codes and practices play out our peculiar relation to class. Most academic measures purport a structural neutrality, beyond class, but they also carry with them, and inculcate, a distinctive range of affects designating our class. While we are not marked with the striations of class in the visible ways that a stooped factory worker might be after twenty years at a drill press, we are nonetheless marked by the ways that we feel, experience, and act out professional life. Some of the difficulty of talking about this realm of feeling or affect is that it is more amorphous than visible marks, but it is not any the less tangible—tangible when the ticket agent acts deferentially to us when it says “Dr.” on our itinerary, or when at the faculty meeting the full professor frowns at the tentative assistant professor and adjuncts aren’t even allowed, or when the persistent student expects us to be in our office 9-5, by his or her lights seeing us as the clerk behind the counter of the educational department store, by our lights misrecognizing our true position. Or tangible, as Stanley Fish has pointed out, when we drive sensible cars. Affect is how we embody our class position, and in a sense generates our class position.

It’s a splendid piece of social observation: it remarks on frowns, on hands, on academics’ titles and their choices of automobile. The observational detail is, perhaps, more sparse than in an ethnographic text; Williams uses his details to illustrate his analysis, rather than using the analysis to try to make sense of the details. But I think he is right to call attention to the fact that American academics participate in larger fantasies about American classlessness. And he’s right to raise the spectre of the Bohemian heritage (a real study of academic bohemianism is long overdue).

One does wonder two things about this analysis. First, of course it’s true that academics’ class status is going to be shaped by the larger class structures of the society where they live. But don’t academics have a peculiar mixed-class status elsewhere as well? In France, for instance? And, relatedly, aren’t academics more socially heterogeneous than Williams makes out? There are plenty of underemployed adjuncts out there — they clearly don’t have the same class position as the Ivy League tenured superstars, even if they share a professional identity. Class and professional identity are not always synonymous.

Monsieur le Président,

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

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

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

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

Please accept, Monsieur le Président, etc.

Henri Audier

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of the same stripe [i.e., belonging to the party of Folly] are those who strive to win eternal fame by publishing books. All of them owe a great deal to me, but especially those who scribble pages of sheer nonsense. As for those who write learnedly for the judgment of a few scholars and would not hesitate to have their books reviewed by such true judges as Persius or Laelius, they seem to me more pitiable than happy because their work is a perpetual torment to them. They add, they alter; they blot something out, they put it back in. They do the work over, they recast it, they show it to friends, they keep it for nine years, and still they are never satisfied. At such a price they buy an empty reward, namely praise, and that only from a handful. They buy it with such an expense of long hours, so much loss of that sweetest of all things, sleep, so much sweat, so much agony. Reckon up also the loss of health, the spoiling of their good looks, weak eyesight (or even blindness), poverty, envy, the denial of pleasures, early death, and other things just as bad, if there are any. Such great suffering your wiseman thinks is fully repaid by the approval of one or two blear-eyed readers.

This book was first published in 1511, which means that the 500th anniversary of its publication was last year. It’s safe to say that European universities in 1511 looked quite different from today’s incarnations thereof. The printing press had only recently been invented; everything was taught in Latin; education was not for the masses, and had not been yoked to post-Enlightenment nation and workforce-building projects. One could go on in this vein, if one were a historian. (I’m not.) But what’s so fascinating about this little bit of Erasmus is that, in spite of the enormous institutional, political, cultural, and intellectual gulfs that separate us from these early universities, something about the experience of academic work seems to have remained constant, along with certain of the work’s basic instruments.

For even today, scholarly work in the humanities is deeply text-centered, just as it was for Erasmus. And the psychological follies that Erasmus describes are quite familiar, for me and I suspect for many grad students in the humanities. Do we not all have friends whose scholarly work is a perpetual torment? Whose work—to use language Erasmus would not have used—is an immense locus of neurosis and barely sublimated anxiety? And is it not obvious to everyone that the coin of scholarly approval remains, precisely, praise, and that praise is still and always, existentially speaking, an empty, ephemeral reward? Do we not all know people—though not ourselves, of course!—or so we say in our better moments—who have slaved for weeks—if not months—or indeed years—striving for infinitesimal dribblings of warm feelings for our work—such warmth being of course craved but always inevitably despised for its inability to entirely satisfy our desire…

And then again, one notes Erasmus’s pithy diagnosis of the material circumstances of the scholar, which one would hope (in vain) to have improved in the interim. Said circumstances have improved for some, to be sure, but hardly for all of us. Poverty, envy, the denial of pleasures, weak eyesight—who has not encountered colleagues in such states? My eyes, to descend for a moment into the lowlands of biographical detail, were in decidedly better shape before I started my ph.d., and I venture to predict that similar things may have afflicted my peers, what with all the reading…

But I digress. Erasmus has more in store for us:

“Among the learned, the lawyers [but surely the following passage applies to others as well] claim the highest rank, nor could anyone be more self-satisfied than they are as they endlessly roll the stone of Sisyphus… piling gloss on gloss and opinion on opinion to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. For they imagine that whatever is most laborious is automatically also preeminent.

Let us join to them the dialecticians and disputants… fighting to the bitter end over some hair-splitting quibble, and, often enough, missing the truth entirely by fighting too much about it.

[As for the philosophers:] That they have discovered nothing at all is clear enough from this fact alone: on every single point they disagree violently and irreconcilably among themselves. Though they know nothing at all, they profess to know everything; and though they do not know themselves, and sometimes can’t see a ditch or a stone in their path… nevertheless they claim that they can see ideas, universals, separate forms, prime matter, quiddities, ecceities—things so fine-spun that no one, however ‘eagle-eyed,’ would be able, I think, to perceive them.

Contemporary philosophy has changed terminology in the meantime, now calling them “essences” rather than “quiddities,” but it seems to me that even today we can find philosophers who lay claim to intellectual superiority over what Erasmus termed the “unwashed multitude” while simultaneously having irreconcilable, or anyway irreconciled, disagreements about practically “every single point.” And the tendency to overvalorize “difficulty” in scholarship is, notoriously, still present. Just think of how saying “it’s more complicated” is a debating tactic, or look at the defenses of Judith Butler’s prose style that emerged last decade. That book about Butler is also a good illustration of what Erasmus terms “missing the truth entirely by fighting too much about it.” As is a well-known book by Marshall Sahlins which, in my view, is quite aggravating reading on account of its extreme passion for attacking its adversary (Ganath Obeyesekere) in painstaking detail.

No doubt there would be more that could be said about Erasmus and the phenomenology of humanistic research, if one were in the mood for a serious study on the topic. But seriousness would hardly be appropriate in this context, for Erasmus himself is not exactly serious; the text is, obviously, irony and hyperbole incarnate. William Clark, in his charming and ironic book about the origins of research universities, comments that scholarly irony is, precisely, not accidental. Irony “expresses and conceals a love-hate relationship,” he says, going on so far as to claim that irony is “an essential academic attitude about academia, that is, the essence of reflexivity” (20). The essence of academic reflexivity, he should have said, since academics are not the only ones who are reflexive. But it is historically interesting to reflect on the fact that, not only are the existential absurdities of humanistic scholarship still in some ways quite similar to what they were in 1511, so too is the ironic attitude that we use to fend off this absurdity. Irony is what allows us to detach from our milieu in order then to better attach to it. What luck for academia that it has writers like Erasmus to help strengthen our collective resolve!

It’s ok, of course, to not blog. Blogging has a rhythm and a lifecourse. Sometimes it fits in with one’s other obligations, and sometimes it doesn’t. But at the same time, I think there are reasons why more scholars should blog that go beyond the personal. On a personal level, it is certainly good for academics to de-dramatize the act of writing, to get in the habit of writing things that are short, that are concise, that are clear. But on a political level, it seems to me that blogging is a good way to remind ourselves that research (especially in social sciences) should have some public import. If not public benefit. A blog is a way of reminding oneself that scholars at least might speak to the public. A blog is a way of acknowledging that unread scholarship doesn’t have much value. A blog is a way of proclaiming that research can be translated into words that a non-academic could read.

That’s not to say that I am blind to the obvious fact that most academic blogs, including this one, mostly speak to a small audience of fellow academics. But I think we have to distinguish between the sociological reality that blogs tend to be in-group, and the fact that blogs do also encode aspirations to be less in-group. And at a sheer level of institutional access, a blog is accessible to the public around the world: anyone can type in a URL.

I guess, to be a little more precise, there is no essence of what blogs do or don’t do. But this one, at least, is the product of an aspiration to do more than write to a tiny audience of the fellow-minded.

I’m hoping that maybe if I find a better rhythm for blogging — once weekly, maybe — that I can get back to it. There are stories I still want to tell. Coming soon: more on precarious labor, more on international university politics, more on the details of French reform movements, and more photos of little campuses in small-town America…

But if it turns out that I don’t get a chance to write more often in the near future, I will reiterate: that is not a choice, it is a matter of institutional time pressures. And this blog is not going away, no matter how patchy it gets.

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

Or in English:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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