Here’s how my paper summarized itself:

When social actors find themselves at an impasse, perceiving their futures as threatened, how can they respond? If their futures can get broken or interrupted, can they subsequently be reconnected or repaired? If yes, how? Here, I consider an ethnographic case of reconnected futurity drawn from French protest politics: the 2009–2010 Ronde Infinie des Obstinés, or “Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn.” Opposing Sarkozy-era neoliberal university reforms, the Ronde sought to instrumentalize its temporal and political impasse, shifting its relation to the future out from the register of subjectivity and into the register of ritual motion. By situating the Ronde within the fabric of Parisian political space, I show how it synthesized the politics of occupation with the politics of marching, hopelessness with stubborn endurance, the negation of state temporality with the prefiguration of an alternative future. I conclude by reflecting on the place of temporal repair in relation to recent forms of prefigurative radicalism.

I hadn’t actually read the paper for a couple of years, so it was strange to re-read it.

In hindsight, I think the paper really wanted to emphasize three points.

1. Futures are plural and in conflict with each other: my future might well be incompatible with yours.
2. Any given future can get broken down. But when a future gets broken, it can be fixed. (Or at least, you can try to fix it.)
3. Fixing a future does not require that you feel hopeful about it. Sometimes you can be in despair about a future and still be trying to fix it. (As in the case the article talks about: “stubbornness.”)

Anyways, having read the paper, the students (and Les) asked me a bunch of neat questions. But I didn’t have time to answer them all, so I thought I’d write a little in response.

1. Most researchers who write about protests have some sort of relationship to the things they’re writing about. What was your study’s impact on its participants? Or the protest’s own impact on its participants?

Like I was saying in class, I think my relationship to the protest was that of a sympathizer who participated. And people liked that — they were predisposed to like fellow participants, whatever their motives!

As far as the impact of the protest in general, I think it may have given people a chance to make friends, or just to talk, in a university environment where people don’t always get much of a chance for that. It’s nice just to have unstructured social time, which was what you got while you were walking in this circular march.

When I finally published the paper six years after the protest, I think my closer friends in the field were happy that someone had kept alive the memory of their action: had preserved a trace of it. Since otherwise it would largely now be forgotten. That’s one thing you can do as a researcher — give people a trace of their own history.

2. I’m a little skeptical about activism. How does everyone who’s involved know what they’re doing? Are they just there for bad reasons, like just wanting not to go to class?

Firstly, I do think a characteristic of any good social form is that you can participate successfully without completely understanding what you’re doing. That’s what puts the collectivity in social action!

In the case of a protest, I especially think that political significance and personal motivation are two radically different things. Sometimes, for any given social occasion, good intentions yield bad outcomes. And sometimes bad intentions yield good outcomes. Especially in a large protest situation, there is nothing — other than the possible force of shared experience itself — that regulates what everyone is thinking, feeling, or expecting. And yet the protest’s effects are generally going to be judged in aggregate, as a collective social fact. If a political leader resigns in the face of protest, for instance, that has to do with how much collective pressure the protest can muster, not with the specific motivations of any individual protesters.

So again, this decoupling is OK.

That being said, in the specific case I wrote about, the participants were largely professors (as well as some university staff and students). And I think they largely were motivated by political motivations. If they had been tired, they could have just stayed home, since classes were cancelled already during the strike. I think for the most part people were there to try to send a message to the French government, and secondarily, perhaps out of loyalty to the organizers who had encouraged them to come.

3. Graeber talks about prefiguration in radical politics. How does that apply here?

Research (some cited in the conclusion of the paper) shows that lot of “radical politics” doesn’t exactly look like prefiguration, as Graeber described it. In the standard Graeberian image of prefiguration, as I understand it, the means are the ends: you act as if you were already free, prefiguring the freedom you wish you had in the world. In your protest action itself you go outside state frameworks or market frameworks, occupying land or redistributing goods or whatever, and meanwhile the aim of your protest is perhaps also to abolish the form of capitalist exchange or ownership, or whatever.

The nice thing about prefiguration is that it gets away from this glum, instrumentalist image of protest where any means are justified in the pursuit of a higher cause. It tells you that you should not have to be miserable now as you pursue a better world that may never actually come into existence. It opposes political expediency as well as political boredom.

And in a sense, that image of prefiguration does fit the case I wrote about. French protesters were protesting market-oriented, competitive higher education, and then in their protest they also enacted egalitarian, horizontal social relations. (There’s a section of the paper that talks about this in more detail: “Stubbornness as compensatory form and prefigurative content.”)

Yet Graeber tends to give “prefiguration” a particular affective tone. He pictures it as joyful. But in the protest I studied, people were basically ambivalent. They were incapable of feeling too much joy or optimism, since they were after all in the process of being politically defeated. They described their feelings as “stubborn,” which is almost like a way of avoiding your feelings, rather than living them intensely.

I ended up thinking that stubbornness was less a way of living out a future in advance, but rather was a way of fixing a future that had been broken.

And my more general thought is that, of course some activists do seek to act “prefiguratively,” but that is only one possible approach among many possible political temporalities. Sometimes you are acting “reparatively,” which seems like a different temporal stance.

4. What was the process of your research? Do you speak French? How did people respond to being your being an American, a foreigner? And if a foreclosed future motivated the protest, what was that like?

I definitely speak French. And since I was studying mostly fellow academics, everyone understood pretty clearly already what it meant to do research. There are tons of foreign academics in Paris, so I was not a Martian; I was just a stranger. People were generally more or less comfortable with that. Of course, some are more interested in you than others. Sometimes you become useful (a useful idiot, perhaps)…

On the other topic, I think “stubborn” and “ambivalent” is what it feels like to encounter a foreclosed future!

5. What were the immediate difficulties of participating in the protest?

Well, I think it was physically a bit intense to have to walk outside for sustained periods of time. So the main challenges were probably inclement weather, fatigue, sore muscles, maybe thirst or hunger, and boredom. The challenges of everyday life, more or less.

6. How did people feel about your presence? Were they aware of your being a researcher?

As a point of protocol, the current American ethical standards say that you can observe “public behavior” (without interacting with anyone) without having to get consent, but that once you start to talk to someone, or do anything that could identify someone, or pose any risks to them, then you have a pretty standard informed consent process.

So basically, if I was just taking some notes on the general scene of the protest, which was in a public square in Paris, I wouldn’t have needed to discuss my project with anyone.

But as soon as I started talking to anyone, I obviously explained that I was a researcher, etc, etc. They made me write a script for “oral consent” in advance. In practice, it was a very relaxed process, since people were expecting to talk to strangers in a protest, or even to talk to journalists.

Meanwhile, after I had been coming for a while, word got around about who I was, so it was easier to introduce myself to new people because people were already familiar with my presence.

7. Can you talk more about activism and temporality? We usually think of activism as creating a better future, but that’s challenged by your case, where activists are facing this foreclosed future. And can you say more about Graeber’s opposition to ideology [in the sense of an explicit doctrine that organizes direct action]?

Well, on the doctrine front, I think it’s important that, in Paris, not all activist causes are very “doctrine-driven.” Some activist causes are more “issue-driven,” as in my case, the university politics case. And with issue-driven causes, it’s usually understood that the participants will show up with a range of political ideologies. While some participants might be attached to a particular ideology or doctrine, others might only have vaguer or more situational commitments. Thus, acceptance of ideological diversity tended to become a practical requirement.

My experience in the French university world was that it was very rare to hear activists — or more broadly, politically engaged people — talk about any specific doctrine or ideology. They tended instead to talk about their analyses of situations, about their coalitions or allies, about the “balance of power” (rapports de force), about shared values or points of tension, or even about specific personal relationships that had become politically salient.

The big question then becomes, how does this sort of down-to-earth politics actually fit together with some larger theory of the future? I don’t think there is any single answer to this question; different activists try to answer it differently, depending on circumstance.

8. Everyone else already asked what I was going to talk about! But can you talk more about democratic administration in French universities?

Hey, actually I wrote a different paper about this, and it just came out officially this month: “A Campus Fractured: Neoliberalization and the Clash of Academic Democracies in France.” It goes into lots of detail about how this works and how it breaks down in the face of neoliberal policy.

9. Arguably revolution became impossible after 68, in part in the face of social constructivist doctrines. Is revolutionism dead, in your view?

There’s a lot to say about this, and I tend to think it has less to do with constructivist theory than it does with 20th century geopolitics. There aren’t the same sorts of anticolonial revolutions now because we aren’t in the same colonial conjuncture that obtained in the mid-20th century. The old colonial empires are gone, or radically transformed into economic-cultural modes of domination that rely on more punctual military interventions. (France still intervenes militarily in West Africa, while the United States currently maintains about 500 overseas military outposts…) And the Eastern Bloc has collapsed, which removes the big strategic ally of would-be left revolutionaries, even though Russia and China continue to be involved in militarized conflicts around the borders of their spheres of power, as in Ukraine or the South China Sea.

So it’s a different geopolitical conjuncture now, and within that conjuncture, I suppose it’s true that “revolutionism” meaning the armed overthrow of governments has declined somewhat as a recognized strategy for political change. Nevertheless, it must be said that in our generation there are still plenty of armed conflicts and insurrections, some of which probably deserve to be called embryonic or potential revolutions. ISIS in Iraq comes to mind. There’s an armed truce in Gaza. Maoists fought a civil war in Nepal that ended last decade. There’s a Maoist/Naxalite armed insurrection in India that Arundhati Roy wrote about. In Libya, the Arab Spring culminated in a civil war and a splintered state. So the pursuit of politics “by other means” continues, if those means are arms, and I presume that this image is at the heart of the stock image of a revolution, à la the American Revolution.

What does seem to have dwindled since the mid-20th-century is a more utopian image of specifically left-wing revolution. At least, this loss of revolutionary hope is what happened in the French left, and surely in the American left too. (The Weather Underground are no longer even thinkable, it would seem.) There used to be a moment when Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria (and in the background, the Russian and Chinese revolutions) seemed to be key models of anti-imperial revolutionary action, giving us this romance of the revolution which Fanon theorized in The Wretched of the Earth (deeply based on Cuba). That model used to echo even in the “Global North”; it no longer does so.

A few more factors besides the geohistorical ones come to mind.

1) We’ve seen plenty of right-wing revolutions lately, which puts a dent in any expectation that armed revolution is an intrinsically “progressive” strategy. The Taliban are revolutionaries of a kind too, right?

2) This is hard to quantify, but I do suspect that it makes some difference that lots of 20th century revolutions ended badly, especially in the long term. At best, the results have been profoundly ambivalent. Utopia has not yet been realized on earth. (This isn’t saying that revolutions produced nothing of value — obviously it is easy to understand why an Algerian would wish to abolish French rule.)

3) Meanwhile, the coercive powers of states have probably amplified since the mid-20th century. Surveillance is much easier; weapons technology is more advanced; repressive police tactics have been further elaborated. Thus, armed overthrow of the state may now be logistically much less plausible than it used to be, especially in the more functional nation-states.

4) At the same time, we’ve seen a series of non-revolutionary strategies for pursuing utopian dreams. These include alternative social institutions; altermondialisation; solidarity economies/”fair trade”; free schools; back-to-the-land projects; new forms of kinship, love, gender and sexuality; ecopolitics and animal rights politics; communes and co-operatives; radical art, music and culture; some forms of direct action… Such projects testify to a new optimism that flourishes in the face of pessimism about seizing state power. Implicitly, they dwell on questions like: Do you have to seize the state to create a utopian society? What if you don’t want a state at all, as we currently picture it? Which gets back to the Graeberian means-ends question — can a nonviolent society be created by force, or a utopian world emerge from war?

What’s interesting is that even though these questions remain radically unanswered, the notion of revolution still has some lingering purchase. If only as metaphor.

My first summer in France I had a sublet for eight weeks. It wasn’t a place that made a lasting impression on me, but I just came across a list of rules and guidelines that I sent to an American grad student who needed a place to stay for a week.

I wasn’t in town at the time, so I sent him a comically long list of instructions. I guess I was trying to put down everything I knew in writing. It turns out to be a good reminder of all the details of everyday life.

The first problem was getting my friend the key.

OK, so it turns out that Duff [our mutual friend] is in Paris for a couple weeks, visiting his parents, and I think I’m going to leave my key with him. It should be a little easier for you to pick it up that way, even if you show up at some odd hour or whatever.

Then I gave a long list of considerations.

Here’s a list of practical stuff to know about the apartment:

Getting here

• Roommates’ names: Christophe (cell: 06 xx xx xx xx), Siegfried (cell: 06 xx xx xx xx), Ann (from Luxembourg). Not sure of their schedules — Christophe at least is coming home sometime next Tues or Weds. I don’t know how their English is but they probably speak at least a little!
• Address: 1xx Blvd de Magenta. Nearest metro stop: Barbès-Rochechouart. (From the metro, go straight south on Blvd de Magenta and it’s on yr left in like 30m.)
• To enter the apartment: you enter a code to open the outside door (which is large and wooden — it is also the egress for a garage). The code: B5048. The lock will click open (this is standard procedure for Paris, i don’t know if you’re familiar). Once inside, you take a right into the stairwell, hit the light switch if it’s off, climb two flights of musky-smelling stairs to the second floor (in America it would be called the third floor, but in France the ground floor is called 0, as you probably also know). You’ll see two apartments. Ours is the one directly across from the elevator, and you’ll recognize it by the “rêve général” sticker on it.
• The latch on our front door takes a wee bit of getting used to. The key only goes in one way up (it will not enter the lock if it’s upside down). Then, counterintuitively, you must you be pushing the key in while you turn it. Sometimes you have to pull the door towards you with the handle, also. Don’t worry, this will all makes sense when you try it, I think.

It’s like I was trying to provide just enough information about French culture and urban geography to help someone navigate the environment.

Once inside the apartment

• In case you get here and there is no one to show you around… my room is the one at the far end of the hall, across from the kitchen and next to the bathroom! I’ll leave some bedding. Try not to be too loud on the floor late at night — apparently it creaks like mad in the apartment below ours.
• Kitchen is all yours — my allotted shelf in the fridge was second from the top and my cupboard was the top one in the left-hand cabinet, in case you wanted to store food. Stove and dishes are pretty straightforward, and people share the usual spices, oil, a few dry goods like flour, etc. Basically if it’s near the stove or sink it’s cool to use.
• There’s an ethernet cable for internet on the desk. Not sure about wifi.
• Small supermarket (‘monop’) is just outside the house, two doors down. Open late if you’re hungry. Bad selection but quick. Also if you want takeout, I happen to be partial to sandwich grec (ie, gyros), and you can find a million Turkish restaurants just north-west of the house on Rue de Clignancourt. Finally, if you go down near the gare du nord, a bunch of shops and restaurants are open at all hours, even sunday when most stuff is closed.
• To EXIT the apartment: if someone else has locked the door, you have to unlock it from the inside with the key. (This confused me the first day i lived here.) Then to latch the door, you have to open the latch with your key while you shut it. (It’s apparently really bad for the lock to shut the door without holding the latch open.) Obviously, you should also lock up if no one else is home!
• Washing machine by the sink. Drying racks in bathroom and living room. Detergent in my room if you need it!
• You should shut the bedroom window if you go out — it can rain and even if it doesn’t, the kitchen window is often open, which creates powerful cross-currents that will probably slam the doors in between.
• The shared agreement of the apartment is that if something runs out (toilet paper, whatever) you should take your turn replacing it. Don’t sweat this too much, you won’t be there long.
• It’s good to take out the trash though if you think of it… trash can’s in to the courtyard (through the double inner doors across from the outer door of the building).
• In case of some type of emergency… the water shutoff is in the kitchen by the sink; hot water heater above the sink; electricity cutoff in the back closet of Christophe’s bedroom, which is across from the living room.

You can see a whole domestic order starting to take place, with rules for sharing, rules for using appliances, rules for how to make noise, rules for how to shut the windows… None of these were like legal strictures. They were just shared understandings.

Incidentally, here’s what my subleased room looked like. Most of the stuff wasn’t mine.

This was the kitchen.

I ended my instructions with a little bit of tourist information.

The bedroom’s balcony is awesome for watching the street, with a good view of Sacré Coeur at night. I recommend the view from the top of Sacré Coeur if you haven’t been up there, in spite of the throngs of tourists. Other places I highly recommend in Paris: Parc de Belleville also has a stupendous view of town and no tourists; Parc de St-Cloud, near the end of metro 9 and 10 and technically outside the city limits, is beautiful and quiet and you can walk for hours in the woods. And basically everywhere without tourists is a much more interesting place to walk around on the street (19th and 20th arrondissements are good for that). Across the street from our house is the beginning of the Rue de Faubourg Poisonnière, which is a good little street to walk south on.

If you read all this, you get the idea that it wasn’t a bad place to live.

But when I remember living in this place, what I remember is mostly the extreme solitude of early fieldwork. I liked my roommates, especially Christophe, but they were never home. It was summer, so my research sites in French universities were closed down, and I didn’t have much to do. I remember staying up until the middle of the night and cooking greasy food by myself. I obviously liked going for walks, which evoked this whole tradition of exploring Paris by foot. But then, there are so many racial, class, and gender politics on the Paris streets. To explore Paris without being hassled by the police for your skin color is already a form of white privilege, I would have to say.

The seminar was taught by Jeff Williams, an English professor who I’ve been in touch with for fifteen years. We’re in pretty different fields, and a generation apart in age, but we’ve shared this odd interest in writing critically about academic culture. It’s a weird, great feeling to be around like-minded academics, and to get reminded that there’s solidarity in specialization. After you work on your tiny specialized research project for a long time, you can start to feel increasingly closed in on yourself. Then it’s nice to be reminded that solitude is just one moment in a thought process.

Anyway, in Jeff’s seminar, I tried to explain how I came to work in France. I explained that a lot of French “theory” had actually produced by this particular Philosophy Department (at Paris 8), and I explained that I’d come to write about it as an institution permeated by utopianism and ambivalence (not to mention disciplinary masculinism and a complex relation to the postcolonial world).

After I had gone on extemporaneously for a while, the room felt a little hushed, because it was eight at night. So I asked if we could go around and have each person ask a question. (I was afraid that not everyone would speak if we didn’t have something structured.) And people asked such great questions, it turned out, that I wanted to write them up here, to remember them, and honor them a little.

Here they are:

• How do you collect your data? Who did you talk to?
• Coming back to this country from France, what’s your opinion of the U.S. system?
• What did you teach in South Africa?
• How does anthropology relate to literary studies?
• What’s the connection between philosophy in France and theory in the USA?
• You do ethnography — what do you make of how ethnography fits into cultural studies?
• What’s your writing process for your book?
• We heard a lot about your ambivalence. Where’s your hope and positive investments?
• You’ve been in three very different higher education systems — France, USA, South Africa — what are French and South African universities like?
• What do you still idealize?
• How do you position yourself in academic space? Where do you fit in?
• Who is your audience? Do you intend to suggest a remedy to ambivalence?
• What surprised you in South Africa? In France?
• You criticize the places that you inhabit in academia. What happens when you’re negative about your own institutions? What are the implications of that for you?

(All these are paraphrased from my notes.)

Some of these are just really interesting comparative questions that I wouldn’t have thought of. Some bring up points that have a lot of existential stakes for me. And some just remind me that any time you try to talk outside of your field, you partly need to explain the basics of your field. (What is ethnography anyway?)

I couldn’t really answer all these questions (without writing another book probably), so I felt like I had been given a gift I couldn’t entirely reciprocate.

At the same time, there were more questions I had wanted to ask the class — questions about the feelings that go with theory and academic life, mostly. They were things like:

• What are things about academic life that surprise you? What seems logical or illogical about university institutions?
• What’s it like to be a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon? What do you make of “theory” in literary studies?
• Have you ever had a thought you couldn’t express? Or (conversely) have you encountered academic texts you couldn’t make sense of?
• What’s your experience of the relationship between academic texts and everyday life? When does academic writing speak to your life and when does it feel disconnected?

Next time I do something like this, I’ll have to leave more time for more discussion of this sort of theoretical consciousness…

* What is a career but a debatable interpretation of a series of biographical accidents?

What is a vignette? Vigne is vine (in French) and vignette is thus “little vine,” which is certainly an evocative image. But what does a little vine do for ethnographers?

The dictionary is useful here, helping us connect dots of history. Merriam-Webster distinguishes three modern senses of the term:

1. “A picture (such as an engraving or photograph) that shades off gradually into the surrounding paper; the pictorial part of a postage stamp design as distinguished from the frame and lettering.“
2. “a short descriptive literary sketch; a brief incident or scene.”
3. “a running ornament (as of vine leaves, tendrils, and grapes) put on or just before a title page or at the beginning or end of a chapter; also : a small decorative design or picture so placed.”

Of course what ethnographers have in mind is always sense (2), “a short descriptive literary sketch.” But my view is that the way we actually use and refer to vignettes ends up reproducing some real epistemological problems. And these problems emerge, it seems, from the very etymology of the term, or at least they resonate awfully harmoniously with its semantic history. Everything happens as if we were haunted by these other illustrative senses of this term: the “running ornament of vine leaves” that beautifies a text, the “pictorial part” of a stamp that is distinguished from its frame.

We are not positivists, right? We do not subscribe to an impermeable distinction between theory and data, do we? And we would like to overcome the historically gendered, historically colonial hierarchies that grounded this distinction, would we not? Yet the notion of a vignette tends to reproduce them.

In ethnographic practice, the vignette is a text within a text, a marked text that implicitly sets the ethnographic “data” (the non-positivist term is “experience”) apart from the ensuing “theory” or “analysis.” In vignettes — and too often only in vignettes — we feel allowed to be vivid. Allowed to be writers and storytellers, not merely analysts or theorists. Allowed to feel enmeshed in a scene, allowed to bring our readers along to vicariously experience places they have not been, allowed to allude to our human relations with our ethnographic subjects, allowed to present the world as unstructured and historical.

But it never gets to stay that way. Because the vignette is put to work within a larger text. Here are some examples of how ethnographers use the word vignette in their writing (taken randomly from PDFs on my computer):

• “Another brief vignette will help clarify this point.”
• “All three vignettes point to the fact that…”
• “The weighty tokens of durability noted in the opening vignette…”
• “The essay then provides three ethnographic vignettes from the author’s work in Indonesia…”

The vignette commonly has a double function. It “backs up” someone’s claims, providing “evidence” that is construed as having a sort of weight or force by virtue of its mere existence in the text. In this sense, vignettes provide “proof” or “warrant” — like admissible evidence in a court case. On the other hand, vignettes are full of meanings that are then mined or extracted in the text that follows. It is common to pause after a vignette and say something like, “So just what does this mean?” “What does this tell us?” And then to say something complex that is likely not very obvious to anyone but the author… Like a myth or sacred book, the vignette is prone to invoke a hermeneutic project, crying out for interpretation.

There is a normative discipline around how we use vignettes. Many anthropologists believe that vignettes must exist in a certain proportion: not too much, not too little. I’ve been told more than once, by editors or reviewers, that “this paper needs an opening vignette.” But too many vignettes — that’s a problem too. One time I saw someone give a talk at my graduate program at the University of Chicago, a notoriously theory-focused place. The speaker mainly wanted to tell some stories, but he started out instead by saying: “I wrote a page of theory to introduce my talk, because I thought people wouldn’t be able to accept just stories on their own terms.”

The discipline around vignettes is very weird, though. You can get in trouble for not having enough vignettes, but once you’re in the middle of one, you are in a little zone of freedom. It is easy to write vignettes, in my experience, because they are much less heavily policed than “theoretical” writing. People will attack you for the way you cite other scholars. They rarely dispute the way you describe your field experience.

* * *

In the end, the fact that people like talking about “vignettes” is a sign of their ambivalence, of their inner slippage or incoherence. I think the vignette operates on the logic of what Derrida used to call a “supplement”: it seems optional, at first, but actually is supposed to add some essential piece without which the original thing, claim, point, theory, idea, etc, would somehow fall flat. It never gets to be central — when you’re telling stories, they’re usually not about you, you just become the medium for some sequence of events — but its seeming marginality is sort of a ruse.

But it manages to trivialize the flux of empirical reality at the same time, insisting on the primary of theory by denigrating storytelling. It’s a flat genre of empiricism that lets life happen while keeping it in a cage. It makes phenomenology, experience, and history into decoration. The little vines that decorate the long streams of colorless, authoritative prose.

The “vignette” — this is really what bugs me about it so much — is a story that feels guilty about being a story. No vignette ever graduated from its embryonic state of narrative insufficiency. It is little by nature, born little, destined to remain little. But storytelling need not be marked as little. That every story is finite and non-total is a sign that history is unfinished, not grounds for epistemic guilt.

In its littleness, the vignette is a genre all too well suited for our era. We have short attention spans, we produce too much (and what we write is not well read if it is ever read), and our discipline itself is full of crisis. There is a crisis of gendered violence, as MeToo insists; there is a crisis of coloniality, as #HauTalk insists; there is a crisis of labor, as groups like PrecAnthro observe. And these crises also suggest that we might ask if the notion of vignette does not also have some unexplored gender connotations.

If “theory” is marked masculine (as Lutz famously argued in The Gender of Theory), and if our more “serious” or “academic” writing is the part where we want to be recognized as serious scholars with authority, then the vignette seems to enter that textual economy as the site where our feminine part can come out. The things that vignettes do are historically marked feminine: they decorate; they care about moods; they talk about relationships and process incidents; they provide pleasure and comfort to tired readers; and sooner or later (ugh), they get interrupted by male voices…

I begin to wonder if the notion of the vignette does not work in contemporary ethnography to denigrate the feminine.

I think we could do without it.

Of course our writing does need stories. It needs moods. It needs to process incidents. It needs to provide pleasure and transmit experience.

But it does not need to have a category that sets these functions apart from the rest of our texts and makes them into marked moments, set out against the unmarked, uncomfortable, authoritative, and potentially masculinist prose of theory and analysis.

The business consisted in a white van kitted out as a crêpe-making stand. The side of the van folded up into an awning, exposing a window through which food and money were flowing swiftly, in opposite directions. I hesitated before committing myself to the queue, which was quite long, but there was no other obvious place to eat at the entrance to the campus, and I suspected that the truck’s popularity was a promising sign.

The truck was the occasion for two overlapping social situations: the students waiting in line and the actual scene of crêpe-purchasing transactions. The student clientele struck me as fairly representative of Paris-area humanities-and-social-sciences: majority women, quite racially diverse, and dressed largely in long black coats, which have been the normative cold-weather apparel as long as I have been acquainted with the Paris region.

There seemed to be some gender dynamics at work. Sociability seemed to cluster around groups of women students (two or three or four at a time), while solitude seemed a more masculine performance (I saw more male students waiting by themselves). I was reminded, overhearing students’ conversations, that it’s not just the ethnographers who are outsiders on university campuses: I heard two students having a long discussion about which building was which, as if not everyone had a clear knowledge of campus geography. Meanwhile, student sociability didn’t seem too affected by ethnoracial differences, on any level that I could immediately observe.

(I don’t, incidentally, know absolutely for sure that these people were students; I didn’t ask. But their fashion choices, their markers of social class, their youth, their backpacks, their casual socializing, and their proximity to the campus seemed conclusive. Ethnography demands leaps of interpretation.)

The customers who were there with friends were obliged (normatively) to bid them farewell as they left the site with their food. This entailed standard French departure rituals, which could hypothetically have entailed la bise, the ritual kiss, which is common in friendship contexts involving women. Presumably it takes a bit of effort to faire la bise [kiss], and I noticed a shortcut: one woman announced to her friends “bises!” [kisses] instead of actually making the gesture in question. Standard French practice when you’re in a group, I suppose, but it also reminds me of the way you would sign a letter to a friend. In that sense, the verbal exclamation “kisses!” seems to hint at a takeover of physical interaction by writing. The becoming-prose of the world.

On the other hand, perhaps one should say instead that these little moments of sociability were a sort of “found poetry,” secreted within the lines of an otherwise pretty hasty commercial exchange. You had to pay before you got your food: the staff would tell you what you owed when they had a moment of downtime, as your crêpe was cooking. There were two cooks, each making three crepes at once. Curiously, the place billed itself as being dedicated to sweet crêpes (“Le P’tit sucré”) but in reality almost everyone (80%+) wanted savory food. Lunchtime.

More to say about commercial exchange in this site, but for now, I’ll just leave a few other images of the scene.

To the left, a large plaza leading towards campus.

Twenty minutes later the scene by the truck was very empty, as lunchtime died down.

But new waves of people were regularly disgorged from the suburban train station.

For example, since I finished my doctoral dissertation in 2014, I’ve published (or am in the middle of publishing) five papers about French university politics. But I’ve published nothing about French philosophers’ daily lives, even though something like half of my ethnographic fieldwork was about that topic.

The fact is that political activism comes to me, for the most part, pre-packaged. It divides itself up into little groups (or big groups) that usually have names and mission statements. It produces political events that have fairly clear forms, boundaries, starting and ending times. This is most obvious when you write about something like a single protest event (like my paper on the Ronde infinie des obstinés), but it’s true too for my paper about precarity politics, for instance, since precarious work is not just a social phenomenon, but a defined political cause.

In contrast, in spite of a considerable body of research on everyday life, I find it harder to write about. These spaces where people are bored. Where nothing happens. People chatting casually. Going to and fro. Eating sandwiches. Consuming, producing, exchanging. All the spaces of capitalist ordinariness — and universities are also spaces of capitalist ordinariness — are hard for me to write about ethnographically.

Now, one might object that ethnographic observers have a lot of latitude in how to construct their objects of inquiry. One isn’t given an object: one makes the object. As if everyone just had the power to make an object! But OK, it’s true: objects only become objects under inspection, subject to a conceptual grid that you bring with you as a perceiving subject. Objects aren’t accessible all by themselves, they are actively posited.

But without denying the role of conceptual activity in object construction, the fact is that the world already comes to us in a series of pre-given forms, which are never purely individual constructs. It’s not just ethnographers who create form by objectifying the world. “The locals” do that too, and their forms are often more durable, more institutionally viable, more solid, than ours. Natural processes create form too: the flow of wind or water erodes the rocks and soil and gives the landscape its form.

Of course it’s fair to say that anthropologists, collectively, have created some durable forms too. The very idea of “culture,” for instance. But I don’t think most of us are doing that when we do our own research. (Alas, much social research is not participatory action research — which at least supposedly leads to more durably institutionalized outcomes.) And as an individual, lone researcher, I don’t think my own research activity has created any very durable social forms.

So once you get past all the caveats, the interesting question becomes: how is one’s thinking, one’s research, affected by the fact that some parts of the world come to you pre-formed, as if pre-made for analysis, and others come to you messily, vaguely, or not at all?

Here we rejoin a standard topic of professional discussion, since lots of anthropologists have tried to find “new objects” the past twenty or thirty years. Kathleen Stewart suggested recently that precarity is a key condition of new forms:

“Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) cleared a field for an attention to emergent forms. A new object of analysis became legible, took on qualities, trajectories, aesthetics. Writing followed it, pulled into alignment with it, becoming tactile and compositional. Culture was reconceived as an assemblage of disparate and incommensurate things throwing themselves together in scenes, acts, encounters, performances, and situations. Writing became an attunement, a response, a vigilant protection of a worlding. Both writing and culture became potentially generative and capacious. A writing might skid over the surface of something throwing itself together or it might pause on a strand as it moved with other strands or fell out of sync, becoming an anomaly or a problem. Writing could be a way of thinking. What follows here is a brief composition of precarity. I take precarity to be one register of the singularity of emergent phenomena—their plurality, movement, imperfection, immanence, incommensurateness, the way that they accrete, accrue and wear out…”

But this raises a new question. Under what conditions are new objects possible? When can one perceive emergent phenomena and when are they illegible? (I have a very different view from Stewart about how to analyze precarity, but let’s leave that aside.) And why privilege emergent phenomena in the first place (aside from reasons of disciplinary strategy)?

Or rather: Isn’t the question of how to apprehend an “emergent object” secondary to the question of how the spectrum of possible objects already organizes us as researchers? The work of social form precedes us (as Stewart would no doubt agree), and for me, doing self-conscious social research involves trying to become conscious of all the unconscious forces that predetermine our work.

I’ve started to tell them they can call me “Eli,” as a sign of… a sign of what? Familiarity? Informality? Friendliness? Being easygoing? Not wanting to reinforce the old-school hierarchies? Some combination of these. But it also occurs to me that telling my students what to call me is still a way of inhabiting authority, even if I ask them to call me something less-hierarchical. So instead of requesting that they call me “Eli,” I just frame it as giving them the option of calling me by [firstname]. They can exercise it as they choose.

I’m less invested in what my students call me, per se, than in the forms of knowledge and eloquence that we’re able to create together, and the broader institutional structures that make that possible. In that sense, forms of address seem like a relatively ornamental part of classroom culture, while the deeper forms of learning, bureaucracy and institutional power seem more fundamental. At the end of the day, I’m grading their work, and not vice versa, however we may address each other.

That said, ethnographically speaking, there’s something quite interesting about these moments where shifting to an informal speech register doesn’t really change the academic hierarchy. Maybe it does shift the atmosphere a bit, or pushes classroom culture in a certain direction; maybe it differentiates you from your more old-school colleagues. But even this obviously has a lot to do with the teacher’s social characteristics; many women academics — who get subjected to casual but structural forms of gendered disrespect in the classroom — have good reasons for preferring more traditional forms of address. I’m not convinced that familiarity necessarily breeds disrespect, but clearly formality can discourage it, as if one kind of hierarchy could help undo the bad effects of another.

I started out here wondering if classroom informality really matters. Yes, perhaps, but it doesn’t always accomplish what you want it to.

It’s a strange, intense experience to relive conversations that took place five, six or seven years ago. All the anxieties of fieldwork come back to me; I’m annoyed by my own vague, poorly structured questions, and by the imperfections in my French accent. Often I’m amazed by the richness of my interlocutors’ experience, and their impressive ability to recount things to me, in spite of my limits as an interviewer.

One thing that becomes inescapably clear from these interviews is that the structure of a narrative is a shared accomplishment. I was quite entertained today by a moment where my interviewer took more responsibility for narrative continuity than I did:

Student: [after a long, fast-paced narrative] I dunno if I answered your question.
Me: Uh…
Me: What was my question?
Person: [partly concealed laughsmiles] Uh, the question was about my political history [parcours politique].
Me: Oh yeah.
Person: Voilà.

It’s a bit embarrassing to see that I had forgotten my own question, but what I liked was that, with a bit of smiling at my expense, my incompetence was quickly patched up. In essence, my interlocutor took over my role, established agreement with me (“Oh yeah!”) and then ratified the whole exchange as finished. (“Voilà” is a standard end-of-sequence discourse marker, like English “there you are.”)

Ethnographers are always so dependent on the small kindnesses of others.

I’m imagining here that other social researchers are like me: they have a lot of ideas for research projects, but only some of them come to fruition. Here are some of mine:

• Interview project on the personal experience of people applying to graduate school in English and Physics. (It got started, but didn’t have a successful strategy for subject recruitment.)
• Interview project on student representatives to university Boards of Trustees in the Chicago area. (I got started with this, but didn’t have the time to continue.)
• Historical research project on what I hypothesized was a long-term decline of organized campus labor at the University of Chicago. (I only ever did some preliminary archival poking around.)
• Project on faculty homes in the Paris region. (I only had fragmentary data about this, and it was too hard to collect more, and never the main focus of my work.)
• Discourse analysis project on “bad writing” in the U.S. humanities. (I did write my MA thesis about this topic, but it needed a lot more work to continue, and for now it just sits there, half-dead.)

One might even argue that my dissertation research project in France was a sort of “failure,” in the sense that I never really did what I set out to do, methodologically. The original project was going to be a multi-sited, comparative ethnography of French philosophy departments. But it took a long time to really get accustomed to the first department where I did research (at Paris 8); and although I did preliminary research at a couple of other departments, after 18 months I was just too worn out to throw myself into them. So I made my dissertation into a study of a single department instead. Most ethnographers wouldn’t call that a failure, exactly — it felt more like pragmatism in the face of fieldwork. But at some level, it wasn’t what I originally wanted to do.

This reminds me that failure is one of those ambiguous, retroactively assigned states. How do you know something failed? Because it never “succeeded”, so eventually you did something else, or stopped trying. You don’t have to classify as “failure” everything that doesn’t succeed; my dissertation research evolved into something different and more doable, and its very criteria of success shifted along the way. Some things are neither success nor failure, they just morph. Or sit in limbo, somewhere between failure and success. Maybe I’ll revive some of my failed projects someday.

But failure’s ambiguity doesn’t entail that there is no such thing as failure. And my point here is that, even though academics live in a world where they are supposed to constantly project success, it would be better if failure was treated more openly. I suspect a lot of us have failed projects. I think they should be something you can list on your CV. They’re a barometer of your ambitions, a diary of how you became a better researcher, a set of unfinished paths that someone else might want to follow. In short, failed projects are a kind of (negative) knowledge. As such, it strikes me that they ought to have a more dignified existence.

Philosopher: But I don’t know — you aren’t interested in the solutions to problems?

Ethnographer: The solutions to philosophical problems for example?

Philosopher: Problems! Real ones! For example do you consider that the word “being” has several senses? Or not? Fundamental ontological question. Do you accept that there are several senses or one? It changes everything. And what are your arguments one way or the other?

Ethnographer: Well me personally I’m not an expert—

Philosopher: But it’s a really important question. Do you accept a category like for instance the possible?

Ethnographer: Yes OK—

Philosopher: Between non-being and being? Do you grant an ontological existence to the notion of the possible? Me, no. Others, yes. And one tries to say why and why not. If you grant something like human dispositions, do you grant a distinction between for instance what one calls the faculties— understanding, imagining, dreaming, are these the same things or not? Do you grant something like freedom? Do you not know how to answer these questions? And do you say yes or no or something else? The response to these questions isn’t of the order of metanarratives. It’s of the order of the truth, pure and simple.

Ethnographer: Sure, I can agree.

Philosopher: But it’s really important. This is what philosophy is!

Ethnographer: Well I’d say that what interests me as an ethnographer is that, being able to ask these sorts of questions, not everyone asks them in the same way, and what interests me as an ethnographer is the different ways of situating these questions, of raising them.

Philosopher: You’re not interested in the truth of the answer?

This was a relatively traditional philosopher who was invested, as you can see, in a fairly standard view of philosophy as “solving problems.” Here, he pressed me quite hard to express interest in that project. But I felt obliged to insist that adjudicating local truths is not what ethnographers are usually interested in!

It’s interesting to me that he found my refusal baffling. It’s as if at heart it was hard to imagine that other disciplines worked on profoundly different questions from those of the traditional philosophical canon.

But what goes unsaid in this interview is that I, the ethnographer, was not the only person who wasn’t trying to “solve problems.” In fact, many of the radical philosophers I studied in Saint-Denis were also quite uninterested in this problem-solving approach to philosophy. More often than not, they sought to produce new concepts, to re-reading classic texts, to reflect on the present, to “intervene” critically in debates — and all of this could happen without necessarily solving any of the classic philosophical questions.

I expect my interlocutor here would have dismissed some of his colleagues, as well, as not being interested in real philosophy.

But if I learned anything in my research on philosophers, it’s that there can be interesting disputes over what philosophy is. (Every orthodoxy involves heterodoxy, after all.) To claim that philosophy is a well-defined field would seem, in that light, somewhat fraught.

Nancy Abelmann’s The Intimate University is at heart a study of the relationship between a university and a social group. The university is the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; the group is that of Korean American students hailing from the Chicago area; and the relationship between them, as Abelmann effectively demonstrates, is tangled up in contradictions. Foremost among these is the matter of race; the Korean Americans she studies are caught in the bind of being an American model minority. They are not white enough to comfortably enact the American fantasy script of a universalist (but implicitly white and affluent), liberal, liberating and “fun” higher education, of a kind that would license “the luxury of ‘experience'” or a freedom from immediate vocational concerns (10-11). But they are “too white” and too affluent, from the point of view of national ideology, to comfortably identify with the nation’s oppressed racial groups. This implies a fraught relationship with other groups — one student describes her “bad impression” of “weird,” implicitly African American break dancing in one Chicago suburb (28) — but also a powerful “compunction to dissociate” from stereotypes of Koreanness, particularly with the Korean instrumentalism and “materialism” they associate with their petty-bourgeois immigrant parents (161, 7). This disidentification with their own group — or at least with its more problematic typifications — is, as Abelmann emphasizes, the product of a malicious American norm that identifies full individuality with whiteness, and ethnicity with groupness (161-2).

But Abelmann’s intervention, in spite of her subtitle (“the problems of segregation”), is in my view ultimately less about American racial dynamics per se than about the social and ideological uses of the university for one particular group, the Korean Americans. Although her conclusions emphasize race, her rich materials — drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and follow-up interviews in the late 1990s and early 2000s — lead her into a dense, hybrid analysis of a deeply overdetermined situation. She traces out a series of fault lines that divide up the Korean American world by class, gender, cultural capital and religious identity, showing how these fractures evolve along with views of the university. For instance Julie, an observant Christian student, explains with disdain that “When I’m in one of my [college] classes, I don’t feel like I’m learning about life. I’m not learning about who I am and who I should be” — which she contrasts with the more existentially significant sermons she attended at an evangelical church (52). Mary, a student from a poorer family, in turn trashes Julie’s church as “using this artificial [Christian] identity that they’ve made for themselves to exclude others” (81). For her own part, Mary longs to become a college professor, and thus to transcend “the contingencies of birth, bearing, or even education” (67). Yet she is deeply critical of her college education’s failure to live up to its own liberal ideals, eventually suffers a mental breakdown in the face of her family’s “[having] absolutely no monetary power to do anything,” quits college, and moves to Seoul (67).

We learn here how the university can fuel the fantasy of escaping one’s class origins, but also how it can discipline the children of the working class, encouraging students like Mary to accept a place on the margins. In Mary’s case, at least, this process of resignation corresponds to a progressive renunciation of criticality about the university. Paradoxically, Abelmann’s analysis suggests that Mary is most critical of her education when she is most attached to becoming a professor. Initially denouncing her undergraduate classes as “high-schoolish” and “random,” she asks “what’s the point of calling it ‘higher learning’ when it’s not higher?” (71). But as Mary becomes more depressed and leaves college, her doubts seem to shift away from her institution towards herself and her own future: “I’m never sure what’s going to happen, what I’m going to do. There are so many things I want to do, scared to do, I don’t know” (77).

The theoretical contribution of Abelmann’s project to an anthropology of the American university is thus to emphasize the significance, and the deeply unstable and evolving natures, of students’ “university imaginaries.” Abelmann reminds us of the complexity of students’ affective, moral, existential and symbolic investments in university education; she rightly emphasizes their (partial) attachment to the ideals of “liberal” education, and their recurring disappointments with the impossibility of its realization. Although Abelmann calls her book “the intimate university,” institutional intimacy for these students is largely an unrealized aspiration rather than a reality. One informant, Jim, emphasizes his disappointment with the university’s bureaucratic self-presentation, explaining that, after describing its programs and welcoming you to campus, the university rapidly dismisses you with a banal pleasantry: “Have a nice day!” (12). In spite of their alienating institutional environment, Abelmann finds that students generally have access to other domains of intimacy, particularly family spaces (ch. 5-7). But these other domains of intimacy seem somehow insufficient and partial, and it would seem helpful in future research to look comparatively and historically at these students’ fantasies of unalienated intimacy and fulfillment. Do they aspire, paradoxically, to a simultaneously more totalizing and more intimate university experience?

In closing, two methodological points. Abelmann’s data is primarily drawn from interviews, and her analysis is largely based on informants’ self-talk, rather than on observation of their practices. One is left wondering what remains to be learned about the inevitable dissonances between students’ accounts of themselves and their everyday activities. And second, what are the institutional conditions of possibility for a courageous reflexive project like Abelmann’s? She makes no effort to hide the fact that she is writing a critical ethnography of her own campus, and criticizing the campus’s structural racism in the process. Very few anthropologists have undertaken such extensive ethnographic research on their own workplaces. What made it possible in this case? If nothing else, knowing more about the making of this project would be instructive for anthropologists pursuing similar projects in other contexts.

A poster for a film that was apparently about the exploitation of women. I saw it across the canal from our interview.

One time I was interviewing a feminist activist, a friend of mine who had been in France a few years, who originally came from Brazil. At one point, we talked about the connection between her relationship with her boyfriend and her politics. It was interesting and sad.

Un des points difficiles était le féminisme, elle dit.
– Il dit que je suis devenue obsédée par l’oppression des femmes, que je la vois partout, que je ne vois que ça, que je ne pense qu’à ça.
– C’est ridicule ça, je dis.
– Enfin, elle continue, je suis de plus en plus deçue qu’il réagit comme ça… L’oppression des femmes est partout.
– Il est militant comme toi ?
– Ben il n’est pas militant mais il est de gauche et nous sommes d’accords sur plein de questions…

Feminism had become a major issue for them, she told me.
“He says that I’ve become obsessed by the oppression of women, that I say it everywhere, that I can’t see anything else, that I don’t think about anything else.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I say.
“In the end,” she continues, “I’m more and more disappointed that that’s how he reacts… The oppression of women is everywhere.”
“Is he an activist like you?” I ask.
“Well, he’s not an activist, but he’s on the left, and we agree about a lot…”

He had gone back to Brazil before her, and she said she was going to see him, but that she wasn’t sure what would happen. I need to rediscover myself, she said, to be independent. We are absolutely dependent.

We talked a while longer about activism at Paris 8, but she eventually had to hurry to get to an NPA meeting in Paris.

“I’ve had shallow relationships with people,” I lament to one of my closer comrades among the philosophy faculty. “J’aurais voulu pouvoir comprendre les vies des gens, comme un romancier, mais ça a souvent resté superficiel.” I would have wanted to be able to understand peoples’ lives, like a novelist, but it often stayed superficial.

“Mais c’est comme ça que les gens se connaissent eux aussi,” responds M. But that’s exactly the way that people here  know each other. And he adds: “Le seul ami avec qui j’ai des échanges hors départemental, c’est B., avec qui je discute des choses personnelles…” The only friend who I talk about non-departmental stuff is B., we talk about our personal lives…

I’ve written about this moment before, but re-reading my notes, I’m still struck by this testimony of the intensity of academics’ non-relations with each other, of the depths of their superficiality, of the way that friendship can come to seem the exception to the rule. It’s a good reminder that ethnographies of intimacy may in fact not always be a good way of understanding the social reality of a modern institutional world, where even the locals may not know each other that well.

I have a memory of having been in Creteil before, a couple of years ago, and of seeing these reflections of a face, of the chairs in an auditorium, in the blurred window of a decrepit building.

You want to remember these scenes with the colors and shadows, the scarlets and greens and blues, the eye contact that they should have had, rather than the grays, the dirts, the unevenness, the dust that they probably did have.

But maybe it’s a mistake to believe that what you thought your camera recorded there at the time is necessarily more real or more accurate than your later retouching of the same scene.

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.

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.

march 2 – on returning to france

the sky hazed and prongs of sun forked into the railroad cars and the gravel ballast of the tracks. in the tunnel the buckles of the woman across the aisle shine and her hair is a vast mound. near me a man in gray types up his notes on a laptop, palefaced and bespectacled, and i stepped on his toe as i sat down. little whistles of mechanized high hats come from what i hypothesize is someone beside me with headphones; there’s a smell of shit replaced before long with a smell of vinyl seating; the guy across from me, his notebook falls from the seat on my toe, and he picks up his notebook before i can, but he sees my readiness to pick it up for him and says merci. the border guards barely looked at me as i entered. the guard looked african — always contradictory when social norms are enforced by the non-normative social type, though of course this formulation doesn’t do justice to the case at hand. we’re passing sevran, aulnay-sous-bois. it’s noticeably different light and heat from chicago, just as the meteorologists would have led us to expect. my thoughts feel unfocused as i write this. the country is not terribly unfamiliar so far. little houses, signs in french. red-tiled roofs. torn-up hair of the weeds and brush trackside that’s dead brown & unkempt. at least i observe that i have a will to write. as we get closer the tumbleweeds of white buildings rise up into landscape.

If I look at the physical form of what I’ve brought home, I find a reassuring but also daunting quantity of material: three suitcases of books and print matter, several thousand photographs, approximately 300 hours of recorded audio, 1750-odd digital documents in an archive I’ve been maintaining, and some nine field notebooks. Although I plan to make a more thorough inventory of my materials in the near future, my sense is that the data falls into five major categories:

1. The discourses and organizational practices of French university politics: how people have debates, analyze their situations, produce slogans, march or blockade, express political feelings like anger or hope;
2. the public practices of philosophy departments: what happens in classrooms and conferences;
3. the intellectual world of French philosophy: the lexicon of its ‘cosmos,’ the characteristic forms and contents of its texts, the ways people enroll themselves in philosophical genealogies, and a more limited amount of data on local reading and writing practices;
4. the organization and bureaucracy of French universities (which differ considerably from their American counterparts);
5. local social relations: friendships, collegiality, social networks, status and difference marking;
6. local historicities and futurities: how people conceptualize their history, future, and present conjuncture (which varies enormously with social position);
7. finally, and hardest to articulate, a mass of unsystematic data on everyday life, the shapes and smells that serve as half-ignored backdrop to local action.

Looking over this material makes me realize that I have too much material to ever fully analyze, but also, paradoxically, too little material (or the wrong kind) to give an entirely satisfactory description of the days and lives of my informants. Ultimately, my material is based on many fleeting acquaintances and relatively few close field friendships. But when I said as much to one philosopher, he observed that in fact many French academics don’t know each other well, and that superficial, partial relationships are preponderant, which suggests that perhaps having many “superficial” relationships was, in a paradoxical sense, a form of full and typical participation in the world in question, and hence itself more a form of data than an ethnographic weakness.

Leaving aside, at any rate, this unrealizable quasi-novelistic ambition to represent people’s lives, the impossible dream of showing the totality of a cultural space, and descending to the more humble level of what I was surprised by and what I wasn’t surprised by, I suppose we might also divide my material into three main epistemological categories, which we could call confirming or illustrative data, unexpected findings, and theoretically problematic data.

To begin with the most comforting case: it seems to me that I do have a mass of illustrative data that tends to substantiate my own initial methodological expectations, which essentially suggested that we should analyze French philosophical knowledge in terms of its institutional-political context, in terms of its political engagements, in terms of its ideologies of the future. While I think that this initial methodology turned out to be on the right track, I now have materials that are suitable for describing a number of concrete cases, for giving ethnographic “flesh” to the analytical schema, for better narrating institutional history, and for improving on the initial formulations in a number of respects (see below).

Second, I have data on phenomena which were new empirical discoveries for me, unexpected findings. There are, of course, too many to list here. For instance, I hadn’t been aware of the fixation with direct democracy embodied in a local political form called the assemblée générale (general assembly); nor of another local protest form called the “Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn,” which turned out to be central to the organization of a massive university strike in 2009; nor of the political fixation with the person and personality of Valérie Pécresse, the Minister of Higher Education, which deserves its own analysis. Neither had I foreseen the local significance of the physical degradation of campus spaces; nor had I been aware of the movement toward a precarious labor regime in French academia; and so on and so forth… Like any piece of qualitative research, there’s a lot that wasn’t predicted.

Finally, I would say that I faced a certain number of field situations that forced me to revisit some initial assumptions, moments that involved “theoretical” or analytical (and not merely empirical or ethnographic) discoveries. For instance, I had initially thought about futures through an essentially Sartrean model that viewed futurity as the horizon of agentive action, as a target that animates individual or collective projects; this model turned out to fit my informants very poorly, since they spent as much time resisting unwanted futures or just surviving the present as they did pursuing clearly defined projects of their own. Or for another major example, I hadn’t realized that university politics would involve debates over the very nature of the university; I discovered that actors had local theories of the university and that these theories were themselves contested via what I would term local “epistemologies of university models”; this has prompted me to attribute much more analytical significance to local forms of political reflexivity. And finally, I originally imagined that the French case would serve as a case study in academics’ political agency, of their relatively successful resistance to university reforms that might be termed neoliberal. But the collapse and defeat of the university protest movement of 2009, and the relative weakness of academics’ political organization since then, has forced my analysis towards the forms of political defeat and political failure that have pervaded faculty activist discourse the last year or two.

I guess most of this stuff is pretty obvious. It goes without saying that ethnographers are going to be surprised by some of their findings, unsurprised by others, forced occasionally to revise their guiding conceptual frameworks.* But it seemed to me that if I’m going to be writing about my findings over the next few months, it’s not a bad idea to give a rough sense of the materials I’m working with.

* I would note that one is not usually forced to revise one’s conceptual scheme; in spite of the romantic story about “changing one’s mind about everything in the field” that one so often hears, I don’t think most ethnographers are usually entirely surprised by their findings. People are somewhat predictable.

As I left for the airport we drove over the train tracks. I was in a van driven by an Algerian born in Paris (that was his self-description). His cousin turned out to teach at the University of Paris-8, my fieldsite, which reminded me that even a physically vast metropolis can be a socially small world. Do you want his contact info? he asked me. I don’t know, does he have strong feelings about campus politics? I said. I don’t know, we only talk about technology, said my driver. Formerly he had been a middle school (collège) technology teacher, but having not found work he’d decided to switch to the transportation business.

The sunshine dodged through the clouds in shades and patches. (My photograph was horrendously overexposed, so I had to process it to show the light.) Paris banlieue passing like the silhouette of a gigantic rockpile of chimneys and brickframes. Striking how little you ever need to see the highway if you live in Paris, striking how total the dependence on public transit can be. You realize when you leave that you haven’t seen the inside of a car for months at a stretch.

We passed a car accident as we drove. The driver said he’d seen countless accidents. No longer felt any horror or surprise at the sight. See one every day, if you drive for a living. How has Paris changed in your lifetime, I asked? Well, it used to be socially mixed (mélangé), he said. People from different social classes lived there. Now it’s only the rich. The working class pushed out to the banlieue.

And then the other thing, he said, is that France has gotten worse economically, it used to be really good, France used to give more to the EU than it got [n.b.: I haven’t checked this claim], but now it’s not doing well; compare it to England—he said—England was pretty poor in the 50s and 60s, but then they introduced [economically] liberal policies, it was hard but now they’re doing well, they’re rich, and we need to do that here too, libéraliser, he said, it will be hard but we need it, people are out of work…

I’m paraphrasing.

Finally we got to the airport and we shook hands and I told him it was good talking to him. He gave me his card, hoping, no doubt, that I would hire him again on future visits. But here’s a bit of market irony for you: his rate was much higher than his competitors’ (50€ instead of 30€); I only called his company because all the cheaper ones were full; and the very practices of economic rationalization that he advocated, on a national level, will probably preclude me from hiring him again in the future. Anthropologists, too, can practice market logic… at least if by market logic you mean trying to stretch your limited resources as far as possible!

At any rate, I’m hoping to write a lot more here as I work on processing my fieldwork materials. Coming soon: a report on the peculiar events of the Counter-G8 University Summit, and a brief history of the “intellectual proletariat.”

I am not a specialist in the literature on ethnographic methods per se, in spite of being an ethnographer by profession. This, I think, is a common situation for people in cultural anthropology; to judge by the lack of clear methodological discussion in most ethnographic articles, ethnography today doesn’t really demand much explicit methodological reflection. (In contemporary linguistic anthropology, by contrast, research methods are far more clear — though there too, and perhaps this ultimately is true of any empirical science, there is an enormous amount of unspoken choice, often arbitrary, that comes prior to the analysis of any particular object.) There is, of course, an existing literature on qualitative methods, one which in my experience is more often invoked in other social sciences, like sociology, where there is a greater range of possible methods and where method choice may demand more explicit justification. In cultural anthropology, on the other hand, ethnography is the norm and the default, and this literature on qualitative research is seldom invoked. I don’t really know that literature myself; at best I could give you citations of books I haven’t read.

Anyway, here I just wanted to give a little breakdown of ways of using ethnographic data. I won’t try to stipulate what does or doesn’t count as ethnographic data, though I’ll emphasize in passing that, paradigmatically, ethnographic data is what an ethnographer learns by personal observation of some stretch of social life somewhere. It can of course also involve any number of other materials, like photographic images, audio/visual recordings, native texts and artifacts (including genres like journalism that report on other stretches of social life), interviews (which are themselves a form of observed social life), secondary sources like demographic data, and so on.

It seems to me that any particular piece (or form) of ethnographic data can serve one of many epistemological functions, some of which I want here to delineate. Any given piece of ethnographic data can serve as any (or several) of the following:

(1) Historical data: a datum of “what happened” in a particular place and time. Part of the task of ethnography is after all to record events, processes, histories that did take place, and ethnographic data are at one level evidence of what happened. I would emphasize that this kind of “historical” data (for lack of a better word) need not be limited to direct observation, in spite of ethnography’s famous fixation on the concrete. On the contrary, our historical data is frequently quite indirect. My dissertation, for instance, will probably tell a story about French universities that really begins more than ten years ago, which is of course long before my arrival in France, and for which I’m assuming that various secondary sources provide reliable evidence. I will probably end up merging secondary sources and personal observation into one single historical narrative.

(2) Aesthetic data: a datum whose later representation conveys to readers the texture, the feeling, or the sense of a situation. There can, in other words, be ethnographic evidence that helps to create something of the ethnographic “reality-effect,” i.e. the sense of narratively superfluous but aesthetically crucial evidence that, among other things, helps create the impression that the ethnographer “really was there” in their fieldsite. (This is the sort of datum that I take it is central to creating the notorious “ethnographic authority,” but I would note that the employment of aesthetic details does have real epistemological and even emotional or stylistic functions as well as this authority function.)

(3) Exemplary data: a datum that illustrates some larger phenomena, whether an empirical pattern or a more abstract, theoretically defined entity. Here we’re talking about using evidence not to tell a story, nor to give an aesthetic sense of lived reality, but rather to index something else of a different order than the initial piece of data. For instance, earlier today I heard someone at an OECD conference say that it had been “an immense honor to be chair” of the conference. In a historical mode, I could use this tidbit of speech to tell the larger story of the conference. In a more exemplary mode, on the other hand, I might use it to demonstrate certain characteristics of honorific speech genres among academics, as a manifestation of the speaker’s position in a system of status hierarchy, or whatever.

It seems to me we have to distinguish at least two major forms of exemplary evidence: “empirical examples” and “theoretical examples.”

(a) Empirical examples: Data that indicates or reveals some feature of a cultural order, or some other order of empirical generality. I have in mind, for instance, something like using a photograph of a Parisian walking down the sidewalk in black clothes as an example of general norms of bourgeois dress in this city. I know this sounds completely trivial, but I want to emphasize again that we invoke a whole epistemology of “exemplarity” or “indicativeness” whenever we approach some piece of data as illustrative of some larger state of affairs. (Anthropologists, admittedly, are usually quite bad at talking about exactly “how exemplary” their data is.)

(b) Theoretical examples: Data that is made to illustrate, support, disprove, question, etc, some theoretical proposal within the intellectual field of anthropological ideas. So for instance, we could imagine someone using a set of data to question the idea that cultures are unified entities, or to support a semiotic theory of commodity exchange, or whatever. Often, and I think this bears notice, it takes a mental twist, an epistemological leap, to jump from the order of what’s observable to the order of one’s ideas about what one sees. Theoretical examples often have a touch of the arbitrary. because it helps anthropologists to bridge the (usually gigantic) gap between the specificity of their empirical findings and the collective intellectual concerns of the discipline.

(I note in passing that obviously these aren’t all that separable, that any empirical case presupposes some prior theory about the structure of the world, that indeed there is and ought to be lots of interplay between theorization and empirical generalization, and so on.)

(4) Evidence of the possible: data that we read as indicating what had to be the case for it to exist and hence what tacit structure of possibilities must have made it possible. The obvious example is the famous hypothetical scenario (invoked in arguments over God and evolution) where you are on an empty beach, you find a pocketwatch in the sand, and you infer that the necessary condition for the possibility of this watch is the existence of an intelligent designer. Of course, this sort of epistemological move also works with actual data: I have often tried to infer the structure of attitudes towards the future that makes French academic politics possible.

(This is a very abstract point, but I’d note that there’s a contrast here with the logic of “exemplification” that I described previously. Typically, the logic of “exemplification” entails trying to draw a relationship between two actual, existing kinds of things, even if one of them is perhaps more abstract or general than the other. The logic of inferring what had to have been possible for an X to exist, on the other hand, may involve positing more general or abstract phenomena, but more fundamentally involves positing a relationship between an actual X and a larger field (Y) of possible Xs, only some of which will have actually taken place.)

What do you think? What other epistemological relationships to our evidence have I forgotten? This list is avowedly provisional; these categories are basically just drawn from a quick mental inventory of the kinds of knowledge I’ve tried to derive from my own fieldwork experience. I would emphasize that of course these are not mutually exclusive; a little snippet of data can at once convey the texture of a situation, establish “what happened,” show something about a transcontextual empirical pattern, and have ramifications for anthropological theory at large. At the same time, though, these are all quite separable, and probably can’t ever be entirely integrated; it would be impossible to theorize every ethnographic detail that one presents to the reader. Anthropological knowledge, I fear, is unlikely ever to cohere into a nicely bounded whole.

The logistics of being a temporary visitor to a foreign country continue to frustrate, it has to be said. Here’s the view from the new apartment:

Alas, the place is too expensive to hold onto, and, somewhat against my better judgment, I’m moving into a big dorm complex for the rest of the fall. It’s not going to be the most pleasant place to live, but after all, all the famous ethnographers of universities seem to have lived in a dorm at one time or another. Admittedly, my research isn’t mainly about student domestic life, but I think it may be interesting to have some acquaintance with it.

Luckily, I have some work space to escape to, at the University of Chicago’s building in France.

It’s a bit strange having more office space than most tenured faculty at my fieldsite, which is a commentary in itself on the intense inadequacy of financial and material resources in French public universities.

Anyway, I have a lot of things to write about. More coming soon.

For example, consider the metro station that I was talking about in my previous post.

As the train approaches on the far track, a decent thicket of people accumulate on the facing platform. They face every which way. They form a long line with denser and emptier patches. They jockey for position on the platform or traverse it aimlessly.

The train inevitably pulls into the station.

After which it inevitably leaves.

And after it departs, the crowd is erased as if a rolling eraser had been wiped along the platform leaving nothing but a few stray bodies where formerly there was a horde.

Needless to say, my point here isn’t to be naive and pretend that something magical happens when a bunch of people get on a train. My point, however, is that at a sheerly visual level it’s quite a strange phenomenon. Visually, the people just vanish. Are effaced with the roar of the clattering wheels.

Not to mention that the social situation in the station is transformed in a matter of moments. Suddenly there’s solitude. The initial sense of getting scratched up by the thorns of a thicket of a crowd’s anonymous gazes gets replaced by an almost peaceful loneliness. One feels the absence of that curious mass expectation that always mounts up as a train approaches; all there is, instead, is a handful of plaintive souls hastening to climb back up the stairs to the street level. The large group that formerly waited together for the train in a mass demonstration of collective purpose gets replaced by a cluttered mass of individuals who immediately go off in separate directions.

This phenomenon occurs, repeats, repeats, repeats again. The light shifts on the arched roof of the station and shifts again, as the crowd casts shadows and the train catches the light. But you don’t see that, because your own train has probably arrived before you can observe many trains pass on the opposite track.

On the metro, there are further surrealisms that everyone ignores for the greater glory of the cause of minding their own business. Lights and lost spaces streak by in the tunnel. Hisses and roars and sometimes the smell of anomalous chemicals, like the intense smell of sulphur just north of Carrefour Pleyel in St-Ouen, come and go without comment.

It’s enough to make me feel that there needs to be some sort of theory of mass inattention to the mysterious. A theory of the regimentation and sterilization of urban perception. A theory of the way things become mundane.

Except that the first time I try to take this picture, the camera focuses on the lines in the the bench where I propped my camera. When we correct for this oversight, we see the long view along the street, creeping up to the horizon and out of sight.

This walk home, which extends just past the horizon of this photograph, always seems like a terribly long distance, even though it only takes a few minutes. Someone suggested that my apartment is about as far from a metro stop as you can get within the city limits, even though it’s probably only 600m.

If we turn around, we get a glimpse of the intersection and the other avenues disappearing and the hint in the streetlights of spring leaves on the trees on the left-hand street. You wouldn’t have seen that four weeks ago.

Until recently I wouldn’t have been inclined to count this scene as “part of my fieldsite,” which is normally fairly institutionally limited by the boundaries of the university. But I’ve started to notice people I recognize from the campus getting on and off the metro here. Last night as I got off the metro, I saw a group of people whose faces I recognized from the campus squat I’d just visited. I hadn’t spoken to them before, but as we passed on the platform they looked at me carefully, and I realized I vaguely recognized them and tried to emerge for a second from my usual not-looking-at-every-passing-person-on-the-metro face, and then we had walked by each other towards opposite exits.

There’s a bit of an ethnographic point here. At first my neighborhood (near metro Guy Moquet, if anyone cares) just seemed to me a random place where I’d happened to find an apartment. But as time passes I’m discovering that it’s not as disconnected from campus as I thought, since it’s also the residence of Paris-8 students and faculty. Not that I feel remotely integrated into off-campus social life. But it’s good to at least recognize little pieces of its existence in the anonymity of the urban crowds.

(Diagram generated with lovely charts. Click through for a larger image.)

The point of this diagram is to show how university politics is connected to everyday life in French universities. You could say that it is a diagram of how students and teachers become or don’t become activists in the university system, and how their activism feeds back into the general political and organizational life of this system. So you have here a diagram of a giant feedback loop. It attempts to capture some of the paths of practical entanglement, influence, action, and organizational interconnection that jointly determine how universities are reformed and how academic lives are lived.

On the left, we have the top-down system of policy-making and distribution of resources by the Ministry of Higher Education (and Research). It starts at the top in the Ministry; this Ministry has a guiding policy direction, with which it puts together a regulatory regime and distributes resources; these regulations and resources then constrain local university administrations and other kinds of scholarly organizations (journals, professional associations, and the like); and in turn these more proximate organizations reshape the everyday worlds of ordinary teaching and research. You have here the classical mode of top-down national university governance — which, in spite of the controversial current efforts to decentralize university administration, remains a marvelously Napoleonic institution in comparison to U.S. higher education.

On the right side of the diagram, I’m trying to represent the processes of politicization (and depoliticization) which flow from everyday life in the universities out into a broader world of political debate. This begins with faculty and students who become politicized; they join scholarly associations or unions, organize events or write texts. Sometimes their organization is local on the scale of the campus and sometimes it’s more centered on translocal or national organizations; at any rate they eventually constitute a sort of political sphere of debate over the universities. At the same time, a few teachers and students decide to do research on the university itself, making their institutional context into their research object; I’m particularly interested in the way this plays out among philosophers (e.g. Alain Renaut or Plinio Prado). Finally, of course, there are lots of ordinary academics who aren’t politicized, who just go about their academic business, who have no use for activism or who have withdrawn from it; these people fall off of this diagram, not playing any direct role in the politics of the university system.

Now, the world of political debate over the universities does feed back into the policy process, but it’s only one influence on the policy-making at the Ministry, and not a particularly dominant influence either. It seems to me that French educational policy is probably more influenced by the Sarkozy government’s overall political priorities, or by general trends in European higher education, than by the clamoring of French editorialists and activists outside the official channels. Which is why the diagram has a node to designate “political influence or noninfluence.”

At the same time, I should note an additional channel of feedback that I’ve left off my diagram: there’s also a channel of official consultation and a system of shared governance that connects everyday academic life back up to the policymakers. There are consulting committees and official reports, there’s the Conseil National des Universités which is involved in disciplinary governance and credentialing, there are in short a lot of ways for mundane university actors to be involved in the governance process without resorting to outright political advocacy. But these official channels play little role in my research, for the time being. Perhaps next year I can add them to my agenda.

I’ve been meaning to give a kind of structural overview of the French university situation. The broader picture of demographics, national university distribution, money, and so on remains to be presented here; but for now, perhaps this image can give a sense of the highly interconnected political system that controls universities in this country.

I am waiting for my flight which will bring me back to France and hence to my fieldsite. It leaves in an hour. It seems a bit strange, flying on new year’s eve, but it was, of course, the cheapest flight and I want to be back on monday for classes. I find it hard to say why it’s a little sad to spend a holiday in the nonplace of the airport and the airplane, but that inarticulate sense of missing out maybe owes its inarticulateness to the fact that the sacred is social and comes to us outside like a norm, a norm which one can feel without being able to explain. In one of my first anthropology classes we read about the Sun Dance, a native american ritual for renewing the world (I think; it was a long time ago), and I remember saying to my professor that I couldn’t relate to that, that it seemed weird to endow a dance with any kind of cosmological significance. But my teacher said, We have New Year’s, it’s sort of the same thing, a ritual of renewing the social world (even if not necessarily the physical world, I probably quibbled to myself).

The sense of returning to the field is different from going the first time; the anxieties of beginnings are presumably over, but I have a sense of having far too much to read, far too much to do, to figure out; there’s a (predictable) sense of not having a satisfying order to impose on my data and field experience; there are 1936 items just in my RSS feed of French research-related blogs that I haven’t read; there are 1790 PDFs in my folder of scholarly articles, mostly waiting to be read; the digital moment makes it too easy to acquire too much; it could be called a state of perpetual epistemological excess. The emerging orders of the situation still feel tenuous.

But the flight is boarding soon and the limits of this post are not going to be set by the internal limits of what I could say about going back to my work but rather by the grumpy clock of the airline gate agents. For the time being, I will just post a wordle of the pdfs I haven’t read. The field of article titles I read gives a pretty good sense of my research interests:

But also seems a little predictable really.