I was not surprised to find out that in the 1970s, sexism and rape culture were major problems among the male-dominated French far left. They remain issues on French campuses today.

But I was nevertheless dismayed by men’s grotesque responses to an early feminist meeting at Vincennes. Men were asked to leave a women-only meeting (accounts differ as to when this request was made). But the men balked at leaving the room, instead attacking the women, insulting their intellects, their politics, their credibility, their sexuality, and their legitimacy.

The male insults were recorded in a subsequent feminist tract, “Verbal abuse at Vincennes,” which was reproduced in Jean-Michel Djian’s Vincennes: Une aventure de la pensée critique.

The context, according to the tract: “On Wednesday June 4 1970 (and not 1870), thirty girls had announced their intention to meet among themselves to talk about their problems.”

I’ve translated many of the insults that emerged.

• There’s no woman problem
• I don’t see anyone I know, no little girl activists
• What group are you with?
• You speak in whose name? In the name of sex?
• The catharsis of lady intellectuals
• They don’t have what it takes to get psychoanalyzed
• You’re little girls with complexes and that’s all you are
• It’s petty bourgeois problems
• It’s no good to compare us to the bourgeois
• Big dicks, big dicks [des grosses bittes]
  
• You want to get taken seriously? It’s unreal
• Believe me, your movement won’t get taken seriously, given the attitude you had tonight (silence)
• We’ll leave once you give us a political reason. [Why?] We want to make sure you don’t screw up.
• A woman’s catharsis can only come from a man
• If we don’t support you, your movement is bound to fail
• Big dicks, big dicks
  
• I propose that you remove us by force
• They’re sex-starved, we’ll give them a good lay [C’est des mal baisées, on va bien les baiser]
  
• If you want your equality, let’s screw
• But who’s going to clean up after you?
• Big dicks, big dicks [des grosses bittes]
• Lesbians
• She’s naughty
• Just seeing you grouped together pisses me off
• I’m more scared of girls than of riot cops
• You’re a cunt (he gets a slap in the face)
• Big dicks, etc

I’m not sure I have the words to comment right now on what this says about the sexist culture of the French far left in the 1970s. It’s more than depressing, more than awful, more than politically outrageous. Also it’s beyond arrogant and beyond juvenile in its practices of sexist objectification.

The month after this, a feminist statement was published, called “Against male terrorism.” I haven’t been able to find the document, but according to Joëlle Guimier’s new analysis of “The difficult life of women at Vincennes,” the text declared that “In our liberation, men have nothing to lose but their alienation.” That seems like a surprisingly generous reading under the circumstances.

Edit: I originally wrote in this post that the meeting had been advertised as a women-only meeting. One French interlocutor reports that it was initially not unspecified, and only announced as women-only (“non-mixte”) as a result of men’s masculinist conduct during it. I have not been able to resolve the conflicting accounts of this point.

So here is a little excerpt from the preface that explores the relationship between French Theory and the recent controversy over the HAU journal in my field.

It seems retro to appeal to French Theory as a source for the utopian imagination. From the point of cultural anthropology, French Theory now seems outmoded, since the 1960s are long since “past,” and nothing now seems less novel than its Great Men, Foucault or Deleuze. What is the point of an ethnography of an outmoded moment of intellectual production? Ironically, though, the very rejection of French Theory lies at the heart of anthropology’s latest crisis of coloniality: a coloniality founded on new pedestals for old men (and, it must be said, some women). It is worth exploring this in some detail, to show how French Theory remains key to reflexive struggles within Anglophone anthropology.

In June 2018, six months after #MeToo, a more specific conflict erupted in anthropology, centering on the journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. The journal’s namesake category, hau, had been extracted by Marcel Mauss from a 1909 ethnography of Māori “forest lore” and repurposed in his 1923-24 “Essay on the Gift,” where it became an increasingly decontextualized concept of the “spirit of the gift.”[1] In 2011, HAU’s founders, Giovanni da Col and David Graeber, inaugurated their project by drawing on Mauss. His essay, they said, was “the quintessence of everything that is equivocal, everything that is inadequate, but also, everything that is nonetheless endlessly productive and enlightening in the project of translating alien concepts” (Da Col and Graeber 2011:vii). But it was the journal itself that ultimately became an equivocal, inadequate and productive symbol of the violence of theory.

The insider critiques of the journal chiefly took the form of #MeToo-style public testimony about an abusive workplace. Anonymous letters from the journal’s staff testified that da Col, who was Editor in Chief, had systematically mistreated them. They described financial mismanagement, wage theft, “daily vitriolic reprimands,” “overwork, exhaustion, and de-moralization,” and “inappropriate sexual comments,” and they argued that the journal’s open access mission had been betrayed by transferring its operations to the University of Chicago.[2] Graeber publicly disowned the project, writing an apology for the failed “realization” of what he still called the project’s “brilliant concept.”[3] The journal’s continued defenders, preoccupied by internal reorganizations, declared that the allegations amounted to a smear campaign by disgruntled egotists, confused outsiders and misguided radicals making “destabilizing efforts.”[4] (The phrase became infamous.) It seemed to me that the journal’s defenders never made a very persuasive public case for themselves, while the alleged labor abuses struck me as depressingly common features of precarious academic workplaces.

But the ensuing debates, which circulated on numerous blogs and on Twitter under the hashtag #HauTalk, rightly made HAU into a broader site for critiquing coloniality and elitism in contemporary anthropology.[5] Just as #MeToo had insisted that we not deny our coevalness with sexism, #HauTalk reiterated that colonial structures in anthropology were not a matter of the past, but were an ongoing crisis in the present, as Zoe Todd particularly emphasized (2018). It was commonly observed that HAU was a product of the elite Northern centers of the field: it was based largely on social networks from the University of Cambridge and the University of Chicago (my own alma mater). The Mahi Tahi collective wrote pointedly from New Zealand to ask, “How well have the journal’s recent practices, decisions and approaches lived up to the Māori concept of hau, a concept that the journal has continually stated is its central ethos?”[6] Adia Benton’s comments from 2017 were picked up again; she had been one of the first to say publicly what minoritized anthopologists had been saying privately, that HAU had fixated on “a rather old-fashioned model of canonizing the oldies,” and that these “select few ‘theorists’… skew[ed] white, old and male.”[7] Takami S. Delisle summed up the “core problem” as “white colonial elite masculinity.”[8] Was it a coincidence that the editorial board foregrounded representatives of “old school” anthropology, while the journal seemed to reject contemporary theories of identity, coloniality, race, gender, sexuality, and the intersections of all these?

Let us turn here to re-examine HAU’s founding statement, which turns out to center on a specific melodrama of masculine recognition. For Da Col and Graeber, the widespread influence of French Theory in cultural anthropology had left us a “discipline spiraling into parochial irrelevance” (Da Col and Graeber 2011:xii). Instead of borrowing ideas from Foucault or Deleuze, they argued, we should take refuge in the heartlands of our discipline, distilling concepts from ethnographic data instead of borrowing them from others. “It’s only by returning to the past, and drawing on our own hoariest traditions, that we can revive the radical promise of anthropology” (xxix). Doubling down on territoriality, the HAU founders also pictured the discipline in Leninist terms, declaring that “anthropology has been since its inception a battle-ground between imperialists and anti-imperialists, just as it remains today” (2011:xi). I have nothing against critiquing imperialism, but unlike Lenin, Graeber and Da Col did not link their radical rhetoric to any collective labor politics or political project. On the contrary, the rhetoric of anti-imperialism worked to downplay the journal’s own elite position in the academic field. In theory, Da Col and Graeber sought to diversify anthropology, promising to “promote intellectual diversity across different traditions… outside the North Atlantic and Anglo-Saxon academic juggernauts.” Yet these were the very juggernauts that had seeded their project with its initial academic capital — a contradiction which the authors proved incapable of working through.[9]

Thus if the radical promise of anthropology was ever “revived” at HAU, it was buried alive again the same day. The obvious detachment from contemporary Māori culture—however much it was valorized as a source of ethnographic concepts—was only matched by an equal and opposite disengagement with its French counterpart. As an ethnographer of French academic life, I was struck by how HAU’s founders unwittingly replicated the form of shallow, ahistorical engagement with France that they deplored in others. They treated “French Theory,” “European thinkers,” “Continental philosophy,” and the “Western philosophical tradition” as synonyms for each other, reproducing an essentialized, undifferentiated image of Europe. And instead of seriously analyzing theoretical production in the Cold War moment of decolonization and Western Marxism, they invoked a bizarre analogy with Classic Rock, dismissing “French theorists from the period of roughly 1968 to 1983” as “the intellectual equivalents of Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin” (Da Col and Graeber 2011:xii).

If “Classic Rock” was passé to HAU’s founders, the funny thing is that then they got nostalgic for theory from the era of Dixieland jazz, Tin Pan Alley showtunes and Frank Sinatra. In the first half of the 20th century, they declared plaintively, anthropology had produced “concepts that everyone, philosophers included, had to take seriously” (2011:x). They noted excitedly that Jean-Paul Sartre had written about the potlatch and that Sigmund Freud had written about totems. Yet their casual expression “everyone, philosophers included” was really a misnomer for a narrow Franco-German sphere of white, male, overwhelmingly bourgeois intellectuals. In 1949, which HAU cast as the end of anthropology’s glory days, 68% of French university students were children of the bourgeoisie or of civil servants, while less than 2% emerged from the industrial working class.[10] Meanwhile, in France, anthropology hardly even existed as a discipline.[11] The Big Men of French social theory — Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu — were all initially credentialed to teach philosophy, via a French certifying exam called the agrégation. This philosophical legitimacy, not (contra HAU) some inherent draw of early anthropology, was key to why French philosophers took ethnology “seriously.”

Meanwhile, it is hard to idealize this intellectual epoch, since it was also a factory for vicious colonial and racist ideologies, as Aimé Césaire documented in his Discourse on Colonialism (2000 [1950]). The very French institutions that produced Mauss were themselves organs of structural racism, in a way that HAU never acknowledged. In 1952, Frantz Fanon described the agrégation as sufficiently racist that black men would simply not bother with it. “When an Antillean philosophy graduate says he won’t bother to take the agrégation, citing his color, I say that philosophy has never saved anyone.”[12] I find it disturbing that these seminal critiques of colonialism mark the ending of HAU’s preferred era of social theory.

In any case, when HAU went on to call contemporary anthropology an “intellectual suicide,” what they were lamenting was not a failure of political engagement with the communities where we do research, but a failure of renewed recognition from present-day academic elites. This is why I say that HAU was founded on a melodrama of masculine recognition. Its founding mood was embattled woundedness, and its founding relation was the fear of not finding legitimacy in the eyes of the Other — this obscure “everyone” that still seemed to focus on European philosophers. Da Col and Graeber went on to fantasize about creating a “different mode of engaging” with philosophy, but they did not imagine studying philosophers ethnographically (which, of course, is the project here). Instead, invoking a game of competitive one-upmanship, they liked to envision ethnographers showing that Deleuze and Guattari had been wrong about one concept or another (2011:xiv).

I have long appreciated Graeber’s contributions to anarchist anthropology and his activism. But he has never sufficiently processed his own investments in the elite section of the discipline, and I must disagree strongly with his conclusion that HAU was founded on a “brilliant concept” that was poorly realized. On the contrary, the project was always compromised by its basically affirmative stance towards anthropology itself, by its indifference to intersectional critiques of the field, and by its inability to move beyond the elitism and structural violence of its institutional origins. It was sometimes said during #HauTalk that HAU had renounced one locus of white masculinity, French Theory, only to enshrine another instead. Yet if we look at the social institutions of French Theory, it turns they are not only the institutions of pure white radicality that they seem to be. Like contemporary anthropology, they too are sites of struggle with coloniality and masculine domination. One reason for an ethnography of French Theory, then, is to learn from a set of French struggles that most of us are not even aware of.

Césaire, Aimé. 2000 [1950]. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Chimisso, Cristina. 2005. “Constructing narratives and reading texts: approaches to history and power struggles between philosophy and emergent disciplines in inter-war France.” History of the Human Sciences no. 18 (3):83-107.

—. 2000. “The mind and the faculties: the controversy over ‘primitive mentality’ and the struggle for disciplinary space at the inter-war Sorbonne.” History of the Human Sciences no. 13 (3):47-68.

da Col, Giovanni, and David Graeber. 2011. “The return of ethnographic theory.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory no. 1 (1):vi-xxxv.

Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil.

—. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.

Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton.

Sauvy, Alfred. 1960. “L’origine sociale et géographique des étudiants français.” Population no. 15 (5):869-871.

Todd, Zoe. The Decolonial Turn 2.0: the reckoning. Anthrodendum, 15 June 2018. https://anthrodendum.org/2018/06/15/the-decolonial-turn-2-0-the-reckoning/.

Notes

[1] See Mauss 1990:114n24-25.
[2] “Former and current HAU staff letter”, June 14, 2018, https://haustaffletter.wordpress.com/; ”An Open Letter from the Former HAU Staff 7”, June 13, 2018, https://footnotesblog.com/2018/06/13/guest-post-an-open-letter-from-the-former-hau-staff-7/
[3] “HAU Apology,” David Graeber, https://davidgraeber.industries/sundries/hau-apology.
[4] ”Letter from the new Board of Trustees,” HAU Journal website, June 11, 2018, https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/announcement/view/17
[5] An overview of these debates is at “HAU Mess,” https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSHK7oM8jxF9ppg_oVnX2VjWofn0VrH3Hf7GMqvlygYSDcuJ3-rSlGVQNEyKeHXLNVjabGBfJnL1Mnx/pub
[6] ”An Open Letter to the HAU Journal’s Board of Trustees,” June 18, 2018, https://www.asaanz.org/blog/2018/6/18/an-open-letter-to-the-hau-journals-board-of-trustees
[7] Tweets by Adia Benton, https://twitter.com/Ethnography911/status/908799037889024000, https://twitter.com/Ethnography911/status/908799682637389824
[8] Tweets by Takami S. Delisle, https://twitter.com/tsd1888/status/1009592747588714502
[9] To be clear, I also got my academic capital from this juggernaut, and I too oppose it in theory while benefitting from it in practice.
[10] See 1949 data in Sauvy 1960:869. I counted as “bourgeois or civil servants” the categories professions libérales, chefs d’entreprise, fonctionnaires, and propriétaires-rentiers.
[11] On French disciplinary recomposition in this period, see especially Chimisso (2000, 2005).
[12] “Lorsqu’un Antillais licencié en philosophie déclare ne pas présenter l’agrégation, alléguant sa couleur, je dis que la philo­sophie n’a jamais sauvé personne” (Fanon 1952:22). I have modified the English translation somewhat from Markman’s recent version (Fanon 2008:17).

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 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.

I hope to write more about that essay in the near future, and its remarkable comments on pedagogical erotics and transference.

But in the meantime, as a sort of tiny case study, it’s also useful to consider specific cases of philosophical or theoretical masculinism. I recently wrote a bit about Derrida and a bit about latter-day Marxist theory. Today I have a few tidbits that I found in David Macey’s 2004 biography of Michel Foucault:

•  While teaching in Clerment-Ferrand in the early 1960s, Foucault “cause[d] a scandal when he appointed [his partner Daniel] Defert to an assistantship in preference to a better-qualified woman candidate” (p. 64).
• When Foucault travelled abroad in 1973, “he was not happy when he had to attend formal receptions where he had to be polite to women in long evening gowns” (109). (I presume that Macey is trying to voice his subject’s own attitude, and not merely showing his own biases.)
• Describing Foucault’s general outlook in the early 1970s: “Feminism was of little interest to Foucault and had little impact on him, although he did publicly support the right to abortion and contraception. He has often [been] criticized for his masculinist stance and it is true that neither the book on madness nor that of prisons looks at gender or takes account of the fact that women and men tend to be committed to both prisons and psychiatric hospitals for very different reasons” (103).

I wouldn’t have expected the more specific anecdotes to be widespread knowledge, but I find it strange that although several of my teachers last decade liked to assign Foucault (especially History of Sexuality), I don’t recall the question of his general relationship to feminism or to women ever coming up. Partly that’s because many of my “theory” teachers were male. Not unrelatedly, that’s also because Foucault is so often read “as theory,” that is, as a decontextualized author removed from his social and biographical context.

Some might attribute this to a generic, timeless “masculine gaze” at work in what we call theory. But that masculine gaze is itself an evolving product of history; Le Doeuff singles out Rousseau’s awful comments about women as a turning point for the worse. So while I do think there’s a lot to be said about the generic or detemporalizing quality of theoretical masculinism, it’s equally important not to dehistoricize Foucault’s attitude towards women, and rather to situate it as carefully as possible in the specific forms of masculinism that characterized his institutional world.

Along these lines, Le Doeuff points out that homosociality among philosophers is partly the product of a pedagogical dynamic that leads teachers to have a fantasmatic desire to produce “heirs”.

One often sees the ‘masters’ (teaching either in a preparatory class or in a university) choosing ‘followers’, that is to say transmitting a flattering image of themselves to some of their pupils. This attitude is part of an important process of over-stimulations which organise the future take-over, and which indicate, often precociously, those who are going to feel ‘called’ (and in fact are) to play a so-called leading role in the philosophical enterprise. The teachers’ sexist and socio-cultural prejudices take on a considerable importance in this period of philosophical apprenticeship. Many women are aware of the unconscious injustice of numerous teachers; young men who have been selected ‘followers’, often, moreover, for obscure reasons, while women constantly have to fight for recognition. Incidentally, the personal involvement of teachers in this search for an heir apparent needs to be analysed. Perhaps this too is a question of an avatar, this time ‘from man to man’, of lack which torments the master and which, in the ‘man to woman’ case leads to a search for female admirers. This sexist distribution of favouritism certainly has to be denounced, but the mere existence of this type of behaviour must be criticised first. Besides, it would be useful to investigate the precise moment in the school or university course at which the teachers’ sexist prejudices are at their most effective as an instrument of selection. My impression is that it occurs later than the selection based on socio-cultural criteria. [English trans., p.9]

I wonder if anyone has ever done the study that Le Doeuff proposes — a study of the moment of sexism’s maximum efficacy in a larger sequence of social exclusions.

She was born in Morocco (and has had to think plenty about eluding the “diversity” pigeonhole); I’ve long been struck by her charisma as a public speaker (which isn’t to say that her political projects have always been unproblematic, needless to say).

In any case, I came across a recent interview in which she makes an interesting comment on the cultural value of education in France:

I’ll transcribe:

— Vous êtes la première femme ministre nationale de l’Education dans la République. On a un problème avec les femmes en politique!

— Ça va mieux quand même! Non mais je commence toujours par faire un diagnostique qui se veut relativement positif, parce que sinon, c’est déprimant et jsuis pas là (?) pour être décliniste. Je fais pas partie des gens — et il y en a plein dans le paysage politique actuel — qui croient que c’était mieux autrefois. Euh non. Par exemple sur la question que vous m’êtes posée, autrefois, les femmes, elles étaient nulle part. Le fait qu’il a fallu attendre 2014 pour avoir une femme Ministre de l’Education, ce sur quoi ça en dit long, c’est en fait comment dans notre pays on perçoit l’éducation. On perçoit l’éducation comme un vrai levier de pouvoir. Et c’est pour ça qu’on n’y a pas mis de femmes. Parce que, malgré tout, on continue à donner le vrai pouvoir aux hommes.

— Vous pensez que c’est pour ça ? Vraiment ?

— Ouais, oui fondamentalement je pense que c’est ça. Même si je pense que parfois ça s’est joué inconsciemment.

In English this comes out to:

— You are the first woman National Minister of Education in the Republic. We have a problem with women in politics!

— Oh, but it’s getting better. No I mean, I always start out with a relatively positive assessment, because otherwise, it’s depressing, and I’m not here to be a defeatist. I’m not one of those people — and there are lots of them in the current political landscape — who believe that formerly it was better. Uh no. For example, with the question you’ve asked me, formerly, women, they were nowhere. And the fact that we had to wait until 2014 to have a woman Minister of Education, it speaks volumes about how our country perceives education. We perceive education as a real instrument of power. And that’s why they didn’t put women there. Because, in spite of everything, they continue to give the real power to the men.

— You think that’s what it is? Really?

— Yeah, yes, basically I think it’s that. Even if I think that sometimes it works unconsciously.

So basically, Vallaud-Belkacem’s view is that it’s because we respect the power of education that we haven’t had a woman minister of education before. Within the familiar patriarchal logic that she evokes, women are by definition low-status, so they must be kept out of roles that are high-status; masculine exclusivity thereby becomes a sign of societal esteem.

The comparative question that immediately comes to my mind is: What’s the gender history of the U.S. equivalent role, the federal Secretary of Education? It turns out (I didn’t know this) that the U.S. Department of Education was created by Carter in 1979-80, and that the very first Secretary of Education was a woman, Shirley Hufstedler. The job was then monopolized by men from 1981-2005; after which there have been two women in office, Margaret Spellings in George W. Bush’s second term and Betsy DeVos under Trump. Nevertheless, neither GWB nor Trump put education at the center of their political or ideological projects (though No Child Left Behind was admittedly a large educational intervention early in GWB’s term).

In short, a cursory comparison seems to confirm Vallaud-Belkacem’s intuition. The United States has had several women Secretaries of Education and simultaneously it values education less as a zone of national politics than France does. This value difference is, however, also partly an organizational artifact, since in France but not in the U.S., public education is directly part of the state apparatus. It seems to make sense that since public education is somewhat decentralized in the U.S. context, the national education bureaucracy would be diminished in symbolic value.

The actual data (from 2011) is quite revealing as well: women are 57.6% of French public university undergraduates and Master’s students, 48% of doctoral students, 42.4% of junior faculty (maîtres.ses de conférences), only 22.5% of senior faculty (professeur.es des universités), and only 14.8% of university presidents. (French University presidents are elected from among the permanent faculty, so it makes more sense to put them on this scale than you might think.)

I’m fond of this form of demographic analysis. By themselves, gender ratios (and other relative demographics) don’t always tell you that much, but when you can show that there is a clear trend across a hierarchy (e.g., women are progressively filtered out at higher levels), a series of gender balances suddenly becomes a clear illustration of a much broader process of gendered discrimination.

Incidentally, the page in question is generally devoted to anti-sexist “advice for academic men” (borrowed loosely from this English original text), some of which is so painfully obvious as to make one despair that it actually needs saying. For instance, “don’t reduce women to their appearance,” “share the administrative work,” and “listen to women.”

• A License of 3 years is approximately analogous to an American Bachelor’s.
• A 2-year Master, similar to an American Master’s, can be either a “Research Master” or a “Professional Master.”
• The Doctorat (Ph.D.) theoretically takes 3 years, but often more, after which one gets to be called Docteur. (The doctorate in French had a great deal of institutional complexity over the years which I won’t go into here.)
• The Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches is derived from the German Habilitation: it’s a post-PhD degree usually given mid-career and required to supervise doctoral students. (Fortunately, this has no equivalent in Anglophone academia — though overproduction of PhDs is such that one might venture that something like it would logically have to be created as a new form of status differentiation.)

Thus the most advanced degree types are both named after German precursors; the License is strictly a French invention; and the intermediate degree, the Master, borrows its name from English. If this was a hierarchy and not a historical accident, one would see that the academic system put Germany at the top, Anglo-America in the middle, and France at the bottom. (German and American universities have been the dominant foreign references in modern French academia, as Christophe Charle has shown.)

That’s not the funny part, though.

What’s funny is that when the Master was first introduced in 1999, it was spelled in weirdly Frenchified form as mastaire. I imagine this was partly to make the spelling more pronounceable in French (since “er” in French is typically pronounced “ay,” and moreover usually signals a verb, not a noun). But also it indicated a minor attempt to “nationalize” the foreign loan word.

Yet as you see from my table, it’s not called a mastaire any more. Three years later, presumably to cohere with the international norm (and perhaps with the Bologna Process standards), the degree was renamed to just use the English spelling, Master. Since the names of degrees are spelled out in national statutes, this required statutory action to correct. An amusing official decree of April 2002 thus reads:

Article 1 – Dans le titre et dans toutes les dispositions du décret du 30 août 1999 susvisé, le mot : “mastaire” est remplacé par le mot : “master”.
Article 2 – À l’article 8 du décret du 4 avril 2001 susvisé, le mot : “mastaire” est remplacé par le mot : “master”.

(Essentially that says: “In official documents from 1999 and 2001, the word ‘mastaire’ is replaced by the word ‘master’.”)

And while the revised spelling was no longer very consistent with standard French orthography/pronunciation, I found in my field research that that made no difference. There are lots of borrowed English words in French already; I never saw anyone have problems pronouncing them. Le master ended up sort of halfway between French and English, usually getting pronounced something like “luh masterre,” with a standard French r sound.

It’s interesting, though, that the possessive part of the English “Master’s” has vanished in the French borrowing, as has the disciplinary marker we append to the formal degree name (“Master of Arts” or “of Sciences”). Translations are always messy, never more so than when they involve institutional and juridical categories. Le master ends up being English and yet not English, French and yet not French.

Camarades, merci de votre accueil, c’était sympa, on a bien ri, ici, il fait beau, pour une fois!

Votre fac c’est joli (si on regarde Bron) mais c’est un peu mort quand même. C’est vrai qu’on peut pas tout avoir. Si vous venez pas le 14, je sais où vous habitez.

Je n’oublierais pas de vous inscrire sur le ML de XYZ.

Voilà. Je me casse et je rentre à ma maison. Gros Bisous. 

Which one could translate loosely as:

Comrades, thanks for having us, it was chill, we laughed a lot here, for once it was nice out.

Your campus is pretty (if you look at Bron) but there’s not much going on here. I guess you can’t have everything. If you don’t show up on the 14th, I know where you live.

I won’t forget to add you to XYZ’s mailing list.

Voilà. I’m out of here and I’m going home now. Big hugs.

This text is more or less straightforward, though there are always a few references that are hard to figure out from a distance. For instance, I think the comparison to Bron must be referring to the Université de Lyon 2’s campus in Bron (a suburb of Lyon); I haven’t seen that university, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was indeed less pretty than the Dijon campus. In any event, details aside, I like this text because of the obvious affection and warmth it shows among French student activists.

But there’s another part of it that I find more puzzling: the huge red writing overlaid on the letter that says DIJON VOUS CRAIGNEZ.

Craindre is the French equivalent of the English verb to fear. Normally it’s a transitive verb, and if it were conjugated in the third person here (Dijon vous craint), the sentiment would be something like “Dijon fears you,” that is, “Dijon is afraid of you, the protesters.” But here it’s conjugated in the second person plural, craignez, so vous has to be the subject rather than the object. Apparently there is a more colloquial sense of craindre that’s intransitive — Larousse glosses this as “ne pas être à la hauteur de la situation, être nul, mauvais, détestable,” which comes to “not being up to a situation, being good for nothing, detestable.”

So maybe if Dijon is being weirdly addressed in the second person as vous, we could understand this as something like “Dijon, you’re no good,” or even “Dijon, you suck.”

Which might indeed be a fitting sentiment for someone who had just been to a disappointing, heavily-policed protest.

But I wonder if any Francophones can shed more light on this?

Viz:

• In August’s American Ethnologist, I had a paper on French academic labor and the ways that French mobilizations against “precarity” ended up masking certain other social phenomena (race, class, status, political delegation).
• In this month’s Cultural Anthropology, I have a paper on the “infinite stubbornness” of a French faculty protest against the former Sarkozy administration’s university reforms.
• In the Autumn issue of Critical Inquiry, I have a little book review of “Why there is no poststructuralism in France.”

I have to say, not having done much mainstream disciplinary publishing before, I found myself agreeing with the received wisdom that scholarly publishing is a tremendously long process. The first paper went through at least eleven drafts and two journals. For the second paper, which has some nifty animated diagrams, I had something like sixty email exchanges over the past six months with the journal staff who organized and realized the animations.  Not all these steps were time-intensive, but cumulatively they added up to quite a bit of work.

One of the inevitable results of the slow publishing process is that some of the work is born dated. For example, one of my claims in the paper on precarity is that a lot of anti-precarity organizing isn’t actually by precarious academic staff themselves, but is rather handled by a set of union delegates who themselves are not precarious. I also suggested that precarious academics tend to avoid identifying personally as precarious. If I were writing the paper this year, I might have changed those claims a bit, because a new “Collective of precarious workers of Higher Education and Research” emerged in France last spring. It seems to be getting a lot of the attention that the traditional union apparatus used to get, and it does speak more in the first person (albeit plural, not singular).

As far as the other paper, it turns out that I slipped in an unwarranted assumption that Sarkozy was only the past President of France:

The Ronde had initially been launched by French activist academics in March 2009, during Nicolas Sarkozy’s five-year term as president of the French Republic…

In 1992, Jacques Derrida gave Osvaldo Muñoz an interview which concluded with a traditional ‘Proust questionnaire’. If this text, meant for the daily El País, was in the end not published, this is perhaps because Derrida deemed it a bit too revealing:

What are the depths of misery for you?: To lose my memory.

Where would you like to live?: In a place to which I can always return, in other words from which I can leave.

For what fault do you have the most indulgence?: Keeping a secret which one should not keep.

Favourite hero in a novel: Bartleby.

Your favourite heroines in real life?: I’m keeping that a secret.

Your favourite quality in a man?: To be able to confess that he is afraid.

Your favourite quality in a woman?: Thought.

Your favourite virtue?: Faithfulness.

Your favourite occupation: Listening.

Who would you like to have been?: Another who would remember me a bit.

My main character trait?: A certain lack of seriousness.

My dream of happiness?: To continue dreaming.

What would be my greatest misfortune?: Dying after the people I love.

What I would like to be: A poet.

What I hate more than anything?: Complacency and vulgarity.

The reform I most admire: Everything to do with the difference between the sexes.

The natural gift I would like to have: Musical genius.

How I would like to die: Taken completely by surprise.

My motto: Prefer to say yes.

[From Derrida: A Biography, p. 418]

One could say many things about this. But for now, I mainly want to observe that I am struck by the open sexism of admiring “thought” as a woman’s virtue while singling out “vulnerability” (in essence) as his preferred “quality in a man.” Of course, one of Peeters’ interviewees remarks that “In spite of his love of women and his closeness to feminism, he still had a bit of a misogynistic side, like many men of his generation.”

– Normalement j’aurais dû faire ma thèse avec XYZ, car c’était lui qui m’avait le plus inspiré, mais je connaissais suffisamment XYZ pour savoir que je ne réussirais jamais à faire une thèse avec XYZ.

– C’est-à-dire ?

– C’est-à-dire que c’est quelqu’un dont la moindre remarque m’aurait blessé au profond, et comme c’est quelqu’un qui ne menage pas ses critiques, je pense que, euh, j’aurais pas pu, quoi. Bon, je vais pas raconter ça, parce que c’est un peu intime, mais c’était pas possible, quoi. Voilà.

In English, here’s how that comes out:

“Normally I should have done my thesis with XYZ, because he was the person who had inspired me the most. But I knew him well enough to be sure that I would never manage to do a thesis with him.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that he’s someone whose tiniest comment would have hurt me so deeply, and as he’s someone who doesn’t hold back his criticism, I think that, uh, I couldn’t do it. Well, I’m not going to tell you about that, because it’s sort of personal. But it wasn’t possible, eh? Voilà.”

The cruelty of criticism can shape an academic career,  we see. Personal acquaintance with academics can trigger revulsion. And pure intellectual commonality (“inspiration”) is no guarantee of human solidarity.

That’s what I learn from this little moment. That, and the sheer sense of blockage that can set in when academics stop to retell their lives. You’re reminded of moments of impossibility, of those structural dead ends that are as much subjective as institutional. “It wasn’t possible, eh?” he summed up. As if that was the whole story (even though he also told me he wasn’t going to tell me the whole story).

(On a more positive note, this interview does remind me of one piece of practical advice. If you are interviewing in French, and are otherwise at a loss for words, c’est-à-dire? — “meaning?” — is almost always a good way to get people to keep talking.)

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.

It was published several years ago, but a cartoon on the front page of the French newspaper Le Monde roughly summed up the situation across the country last Thursday when several hundred thousand public employees and students went on strike.

“What if we went on strike for nothing,” asks one demonstrator in the cartoon, which appeared in 2010 during one of France’s periodic strikes. “Ah! Not a bad idea,” another answers.

OK, so the premise of the article is that this is a strike that is basically “for nothing.” The title, incidentally, was “Crippling Strike in France May Have Been About More Than Labor Law,” in case you were in any danger of taking seriously the political issues at stake here. The journalist — Celestine Bohlen, apparently a former European bureau chief for the Times — thereby makes clear from the first that the article is going to be organized around a smug, dismissive, and depoliticizing interpretation of French politics, as if strikes were simply a sort of periodic, dysfunctional gag reflex in the body politic.

One might think that such a dismissive interpretation was better suited for a 160-character tweet than for a 20-paragraph article. But the author is nothing if not dedicated to driving her point home; practically every paragraph is designed to reinforce this nonsensical thesis that French protest is not about politics, but is some sort of affective or cultural symptom.

Thus after the introduction, Bohlen proceeds to remark that “the strike had less to do with the intricacies of the labor law than with a deepening disaffection, particularly among young people, with Mr. Hollande’s government.”  This is patently false, given that the protesters have, in fact, produced a quite detailed item-by-item analysis of the proposed law (at the amusingly titled site loitravail.lol), even tagging various proposals according to their current political status (the “withdrawn” proposals are presumably cause for celebration). I also saw a handy 5-minute YouTube synthesis of the issues making the rounds, which is, albeit quite enthusiastic, also decidedly interested in the substantive details. But Bohlen, seemingly indifferent to any of this, gives her readers the impression that it is all a matter of “disaffection” — i.e., an affective state — rather than any substantive critique.

Bohlen goes on to deploy an impressive apparatus of trivialization, calling the strike only “nominally in protest” against the labor reforms, arguing that students and public employees are not appropriate political subjects, complaining that the demonstrators’ protest signs only “sort of” explained their arguments, denouncing the supposedly small size of the demonstrations, calling the message “confused,” and reducing the strikes to a purely symbolic “show of force.” Let’s look at a couple of these points in more detail:

“The demonstrations hardly stack up against some of Paris’s famous protests, which have drawn crowds of a million or more,” comments Bohlen, citing the police estimate of 28,000 protesters in Paris on March 31st. Such a diminutive analysis is altogether tendentious, given that the police figures are always a lower bound; that protests have been going on for weeks; that occupations of universities and public space are ongoing, along with social media campaigns; and that significant police violence has been inflicted on protesters. In the university system, it is the largest protest movement since 2009.

Bohlen also remarks, in the service of discrediting the political subjects in question: “Those who took to the streets… were mostly public employees and students, two groups with the least to lose if the French Parliament adopts the proposed changes to the labor law this spring.” She rapidly adds a quote not from any participant in the movement (indeed, she appears to have not spoken to any participant in the movement), but rather from a random TV viewer:

“In what kind of country do public employees, whose jobs are not affected, take to the streets with high school students, who don’t have jobs but are worried about their retirement?” asked one viewer in a text message sent to the televised debate Thursday on TV5.

One would have to be entirely clueless about the French labor situation to imagine that students and public-sector workers were set apart from precarious labor regimes. To be sure, French state functionaries have job tenure. But there are tens of thousands of contract workers in higher education alone, often mistreated and irregularly hired; as these precarious employees say in their latest call to action, “We are already the future that the El Khomri law is preparing for us.” It’s not clear to me yet how or whether the El Khomri laws would directly affect contract work in French public education (and this may change, in any event, as the university system is increasingly “autonomized” from the state apparatus, and as its workforce becomes increasingly non-tenured). But what’s obvious is that Bohlen is oblivious to the widely-shared set of French concerns about precarious employment. As for the students — the French term étudiant means university student, incidentally, although high school students, lycéens, are also protesting — it suffices to note that in 2013, 45% of French students were also workers (in some capacity). We might reasonably suppose that many of these students are working in low-wage precarious jobs and might have a material interest in changes to their labor regulations, in spite of Bohlen’s classist assumption that students don’t work.

In any event, after its imprecise and dismissive summary of the protest movement, Bohlen’s New York Times piece concludes by reading the strike in terms of a general hostility towards François Hollande, noting that it “does not augur well for Mr. Hollande’s chances in the 2017 presidential election.” In case you had forgotten, then, the Times is here to remind you that what really matters is not the precarity of some anonymous worker in danger of losing their guaranteed time off when there’s a death in the family, but rather the precarity of great men, or at least of national leaders and their political careers.

One should avoid reading the New York Times’ coverage of French mass politics, I would conclude. It appears to be ideological in the worst sense.

Professor: “I don’t think I’m giving you any scoop in saying that, on the material level, the Philosophy Department is the poorest one in the country. It’s clear — it’s very clear, even. When, for instance, young colleagues were arriving after I got here — at the moment I’m thinking of Renée Duval who sent me a message asking, so, where was her office [Laughter] although she didn’t have an office. And, you know, even at Paris 7, if you want to meet, I don’t know, Frédéric Gauthier, I say Frédéric Gauthier because we know each other pretty well, so, indeed, he will make an appointment with you in his office.”

A department secretary interrupts: “Still, they don’t have their own offices, they have a shared office for teachers.”

Professor: “Non non non non non non non. Gauthier, he has an office, and there are other offices. At most, they’re two to an office. Of course! No, here, it’s on the edge.”

Secretary: “Yes, it’s on the edge.”

Professor: “Yes, here, it’s borderline scandalous. Meaning that, for example, we wouldn’t have to be meeting here [in the staff office space].”

Secretary: “Mais non, I agree with you.”

Professor: “Mais oui. And, well, there’ll be an office, we would be in the office, indeed, we could both of us shut the door. So for example, the master’s thesis exams happen here [in the staff office space].”

Me: “Really, they’re here?”

Professor: “Yes, it happens — and so people who show up, we can’t prevent them, it’s the office — where they turn in their homework, where they come for information, but, still, it’s scandalous. The first year, when I came, throughout practically the whole first year, I spent the first twenty minutes of class with the students looking for a room. It’s since been stabilized, but—“

I’m struck by the descriptor “the poorest philosophy department in the country.” And by the massively comparative nature of the moral order at work here. To be scandalous, to be on the edge (“à la limite“): these are, precisely, descriptions of a work environment that contrasts with what one has a right to expect, or with what would be typical of a workplace in one’s profession. The aspiration to a dignified workplace, then, is grounded in an epistemology of comparison. Normative in the most banal sense.

What is more interesting, perhaps, is how moral comparison becomes strategic in some circumstances and not in others, how workplace norms are useful at certain times but inconvenient at others. It’s so typical of academic institutions to want to seem incomparable or sui generis when they need to legitimate themselves, isn’t it?

(N.B.: All the proper names in the interview are pseudonyms.)

The long version:

Coming back to my research about philosophy departments in France, I was recently reading an institutional document describing the (highly-rated) research laboratory for philosophers at the University of Paris-8. Apparently it was a bureaucratic requirement to write a section describing the “infrastructures” available to the laboratory. But since Paris-8 is a typically underfunded public university, operating in cramped quarters on a small campus in the Parisian banlieue, the sad reality is that their infrastructure was quite limited. To the point of comedy.

I quote:

Infrastructures

L’unité dispose d’une salle de 35 m2, équipée d’un téléphone, de deux ordinateurs fixes et d’une connexion par WIFI. Elle est meublée de tables, chaises, et bibliothèques. Elle est située dans un bâtiment neuf de moins de deux ans. La surface disponible par chercheur membre de l’équipe à titre principal est de 1,5 m2.

The unit possesses a room of 35 m², equipped with a telephone, two desktop computers and WiFi access. It is furnished with tables, chairs and bookshelves. It is situated in a new building less than two years old. The available surface per principle laboratory researcher is 1.5 m².

One and a half square meters per researcher is just about enough to cram a chair into, and clearly not enough for any sort of individual workspace. Accordingly, there were none; the room in question was purely used to hold small seminars. The whole laboratory staff would never have fit inside it, and when they did have meetings, they took place elsewhere.

There is, of course, something charming about the plaintive note that at least the tiny room is “situated in a new building less than two years old” (the building pictured above). It’s as if the author felt obliged to put only the most positive spin on a clearly inadequate situation. Nevertheless, there is something to learn here about what counts as infrastructure for philosophers at Parisian public universities: in short, all the productive infrastructure (the books, the libraries, the computers, the desks) is elsewhere, generally at home, and the campus becomes purely a place of knowledge exchange, not of knowledge production. Which is why it it is possible to have a philosophy lab with practically no facilities.

May 4, 2011. Last day in Paris. A man across from me on the metro dangles one hand in his crotch and texts with the other. A woman across the aisle is chewing gum and has flipflops with painted nails. The day is hazy, footsteps tap on the car floor, the train squeals as it accelerates; it picks up speed and the cement panels flash by and the advertising, CHOISISSEZ LE LOOK MALIN it says in orange on blue, hint of a smell of pastries, of sweaters, thrashing of the air through the open windows. I’m aboard the 14 train going to Saint-Denis to see a friend one last time; it sighs, the train, the man across from me now replaced by another, he rises, a woman gathers her purse, staggers a little as she gets off as the train shudders, with its long tube of fluorescent lights, with the grey of the car and the black of the tube that the tube of the train rushes along, rushes through; and I’m elbowed gently, but fortunately it’s not a période de pointe.

Crossing the halls in Saint-Lazare, they’re full of old piss, and a vague smell like supermarkets. The body is adapted to the flow of the crowds, knowing where to turn left, where to skirt the flow of other bodies from one or another staircase spewing and gusting, where to take the shortest path that avoids collision. Minimal eye contact when the body is still; more contact, maybe, when passing people coming the other way down the hall. Then on the 13, the order of the stations is long since memorized. Guy Moquet — that used to be my stop, I used to live there, leans and tinges of rain and familiarity when I went through the neighborhood the other day. Dimly lit tunnel is covered with graffiti, which wouldn’t have been true on the 13, since even metro lines have class politics. A man stands up very straight, his back against the door. The train rumbles and rumbles, not yet at the point of roaring. On a platform we see the manual laborers of the cultural industry, someone installing a new billboard, polishing it, smoothing it down. The man by the door still stands straight, the train continues to hurtle, to fling.

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.

« Nicolas n’est pas quelqu’un qui se complaît dans l’intellect, assure le préfet Claude Guéant, directeur de cabinet place Beauvau, puis à Bercy. J’ai beaucoup côtoyé Jean-Pierre Chevènement. Il lisait de la philosophie jusqu’à 2 heures du matin, c’était toute sa vie, les idées prenant parfois le pas sur l’action. Nicolas, lui, est d’abord un homme d’action. Quand il bavarde avec Lance Armstrong ou avec un jeune de banlieue, il a vraiment le sentiment d’en tirer quelque chose. Dès qu’il monte en voiture, la radio se met en marche. Il aime les choses simples, les variétés, la télévision. En cela, il exprime une certaine modernité. Les Français ne passent pas leur temps à lire de la philosophie… »

“Nicolas isn’t someone who revels in the intellect,” asserted the prefect Claude Guéant, chief of staff at the Ministry of the Interior and then at the Ministry of Finance. “I’ve spent a lot of time with [the Socialist politician] Jean-Pierre Chevènement. He read philosophy until two in the morning, all his life, ideas sometimes took precedence over action. Nicolas, on the other hand, is primarily a man of action. When he chats with Lance Armstrong or with a kid from the slums, he really feels like he’s getting something out of it. As soon as he gets in a car, the radio’s on. He loves simple things, variety, TV. In that, he expresses a certain modernity. The French don’t spend their time reading philosophy…”

A certain modernity is the opposite of time wasted on philosophy books…

Nothing is so enduring, when once established, as forms of culture. If French ideas had really penetrated Virginian society, they would have become as dominant in the South as German ideas are now becoming in the State universities and school systems of the Northwest. French ideas survived in Virginia and in the Carolinas long after the Revolution, and long after the French Government had ceased to interfere in our politics. It was one of the most difficult tasks in Southern educational history to dislodge French philosophy from its academic strongholds in North and South Carolina. It was done by a strong current of Scotch Presbyterianism proceeding from Princeton College southwards. In social forms French culture lingers yet in South Carolina, notably in Charleston.

(pp. 27-28)

I rather like the theory of culture implied here: it’s like a sort of strangling vine that, once taken hold, is quite hard to dislodge. And I am decidedly fascinated to learn that good old Princetonian Presbyterianism played a vital historical role in “dislodging French philosophy from its academic strongholds in North and South Carolina.” Who knew that it was ever lodged there to begin with? Certainly not me, and I dare say not many other people currently alive. As usual, this historical landscape is creased and torn with forgotten, curious details.

Nicholas Sarkozy was elected President of the Republic on May 6, 2007, and took office on May 16. He appointed Valérie Pécresse, a legislator and former UMP spokeswoman, as Minister of Research and Higher Education, and on May 18th, at a meeting of the Conseil des Ministres (Council of Ministers), officially assigned her to lead a reform of university autonomy. Such a reform had already been widely discussed during the presidential campaign, attracting support from Sarkozy, the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, and the centrist MoDem candidate François Bayrou. They differed, of course, on policy details. Royal emphasized a “national framework” that preserved more of a role for the French state, and for permanent institutional funding, particularly for research. Sarkozy, according to Le Monde, “wanted to go faster,” shifting research funding and universities alike towards a contract-based, short-term model. But policy differences and political tempos aside, there was a widespread public discourse on the necessity of university reform. “This [traditional university] system worked in its time, but the world has changed”: such was one fairly typical formulation that had appeared in Le Figaro earlier that year, in an op-ed by Vincent Berger, a French physicist active in university governance who later became president of the University of Paris-7 in 2009. In the face of globalized economic competition, Berger explained, “our country must maintain competitive and triumphant industries,” and he argued for closer links between research and industrial production, along with a better “equation” [adéquation] between economic demand and university supply.

The frequency of such arguments in political discourse would give the Sarkozy administration a powerful naturalizing argument for its university reforms, a chance to ally itself with the spirit of its time. Pécresse, as we will see, would frequently cast her reforms as a matter of obvious, objective necessity. But at the same time, there was a discourse of urgency and immediacy about the process. The Sarkozy administration wanted to put in place a number of major state reforms, dealing with everything from the university to labor regulations and criminal laws; and this multiplicity would be amplified by a very rapid governmental timeline.  “We’ll do all the reforms at the same time, and not one after the other,” Sarkozy remarked at the  May 18th meeting of his Conseil des Ministres. The Sarkozy government was also deeply committed to a particular fiscal policy, one typically called “austerity” by its opponents. State spending was to be cut; 50% of retiring state workers were not supposed to be replaced; and national debt was supposed to decrease. Even in such a moment, though, the university and research sector was slated for budget increases. It was said to be the government’s “primary fiscal priority.”

Still, it was generally understood that university reforms, whatever their fiscal and political priority, were a fraught topic. “Even if the chosen moment seems favorable,” remarked an editorialist in Le Figaro, “Valérie Pécresse will have to show great conviction and determination to succeed in such a sensitive subject. Numerous projects, for decades, have been abandoned or emptied of their content, so tenacious are the resistances, so much are they nourished by dogmatism.” In an initial effort to prevent discord, Prime Minister Fillon initially gave assurances that the two most controversial topics, selective admissions (termed “sélection”) and tuition hikes, would not be included in the reform. In spite of this, as Pécresse began official ministerial consultations at the end of the month, however, academic unions were already voicing concerns about the temporality of haste that the government was so attached to.

Thus on May 25^th Bruno Julliard, the president of UNEF (the largest student union), would “deplore the short time allowed for negotiations.” The Prime Minister, nevertheless, announced that the university reform would be taken up by Parliament that July. Soon thereafter, the Intersyndicale issued an official communiqué attacking the speed of the reform: “The chosen calendar permits neither a debate about the contents and priorities of a university reform, nor a genuine negotiation with the university community. The signatory organizations [of the intersyndicale] solemnly demand that the law not be hastily submitted during the next special session of Parliament this July.” Pécresse nevertheless continued on the official calendar, calling a meeting of the National Council of Research and Higher Education (CNESER) to review her reform proposals on June 22nd. To her surprise, perhaps, after seven hours of debate, her proposed reform was rejected by the assembled representatives of the university community.

The CNESER possessed considerable legitimacy, since it included representatives from all the major academic unions and from the prominent Conference of University Presidents. It made for media drama, therefore, when the presidents of the largest faculty and student unions, SNESup and UNEF, walked out of the room in frustration. The SNESup president called it “rash” (réforme à la hussarde); his UNEF counterpart termed it an “impending crisis — in my opinion serious.” Pécresse managed to smile for the cameras, saying that she remained optimistic and that the CNESER is only a “consultative body” (une instance consultative). Sarkozy, however, rapidly invited the union representatives to private meetings at the Elysée, and the government made rapid, though ultimately not fundamental, concessions. A proposal to introduce selective admissions at the master’s level was withdrawn, and a proposal to cut the size of universities’ administrative councils was scaled back somewhat. UNEF declared victory on these points (selective undergraduate admissions was said to be a “casus belli” for them), and the government, having quelled some of the earliest dissent, introduced the proposed law in the French legislature soon afterwards, on July 4th.

The next day, Sarkozy and Fillon released an official letter to Pécresse that spelled out the parameters of her ministerial reform mission. It stands as the best official statement of Sarkozy’s vision of university temporality.

At an hour when a worldwide battle of the intellect is underway, it is imperative that France should reform its system of research and higher education, to bring it to the highest global level. At the same time, it must put an end to the unacceptable shambles [gâchis] constituted by university dropout rates [l’échec universitaire], and by the inadequacy of many academic programs to the needs of the job market.

As Minister of Research and Higher Education, you are charged with a mission of the absolutely highest importance within the government and for France. Your objective must be to remedy the state of our research and of our system of higher education, and to rapidly lead more high school graduates into higher education, more college students towards degrees, and more college graduates towards employment.

At this summer’s special legislative session, you will present Parliament with a proposed law that will reform university governance, and allow them to secure new capabilities and new responsibilities within a period of five years at most. In every country in the world, academic success depends upon the universities’ broad freedom to recruit their teachers and researchers, to adjust their compensation and improve their situation, to plan their educational programs, to optimize the use of their facilities, to establish institutional partnerships. The universities’ access to these new responsibilities, in the framework of a modernized relationship with the State, will go along with supplementary funding.

…We consider that the mission incumbent upon you is among the most important and the most urgent for the future of our country.

A l’heure où s’engage une bataille mondiale de l’intelligence, il est impératif que la France réforme son système d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche pour le porter au meilleur niveau mondial. Elle doit parallèlement mettre fin à l’inacceptable gâchis que représentent l’échec universitaire et l’inadéquation de nombreuses filières d’enseignement supérieur aux besoins du marché du travail.

En tant que ministre de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche, vous êtes investie d’une mission absolument prioritaire au sein du gouvernement et pour la France. Votre objectif doit être de redresser l’état de notre recherche et de notre système d’enseignement supérieur et de conduire rapidement plus de bacheliers vers l’enseignement supérieur, plus d’étudiants vers le diplôme, plus de diplômés vers l’emploi.

Dès la session extraordinaire de cet été, vous présenterez au Parlement un projet de loi réformant la gouvernance des universités et leur permettant d’accéder à de nouvelles compétences et à de nouvelles responsabilités dans un délai maximum de cinq ans. Dans tous les pays du monde, la réussite universitaire repose sur une plus grande liberté des universités pour recruter leurs enseignants et leurs chercheurs, moduler leurs rémunérations et revaloriser leur situation, choisir leurs filières d’enseignement, optimiser l’utilisation de leurs locaux, nouer des partenariats. L’accès des universités à ces nouvelles responsabilités s’accompagnera, dans le cadre d’une relation modernisée avec l’Etat, de moyens supplémentaires.

…Nous considérons que la mission qui vous incombe est parmi les plus importantes et les plus urgentes pour l’avenir de notre pays.

The letter would also enumerate a number of concrete policy objectives, including a shift to contract-based research funding, the pursuit of “excellence” and world rankings for a select number of campuses, the improvement of student life, and the general Sarkozyist project of scrutinizing state budgets. It even proposed a curious incarnation of audit culture at the summit of the state apparatus: the Minister was asked to propose indicators by which the success of her own policies would be measured and assessed (cf. Strathern 2000). But what is important for our understanding of the protest movement that followed is the government’s striking image of the threatened, yet urgent future of the nation, which gave the proposed reforms the broadest possible ideological rationale.

A worldwide battle of the intellect is under way. Such was the premise of this neoliberal futurism. It upended the placid ideological image of a “knowledge society,” so familiar from European policy rhetoric (cf. French and Anglophone sources), and recast it in the form of a military confrontation between opposed, competitive, competing “intelligences.” While for Vincent Berger, universities and research were necessary inputs in France’s economic performance on the world market, for Sarkozy and Fillon, the images of world battle and international economic warfare were displaced into the interior of the academic world itself. The adduced evidence for the government’s vision of intense international competition was – predictably – largely quantitative. Sarkozy was fond of quoting a statistic that French academics published only half as much as their European counterparts, and policymakers often cited the poor performance of French universities in the Shanghai world university rankings. These classifications were themselves eminently contestable, as critics pointed out (cite), but it was ultimately beside the point to evaluate the empirical evidence for a “worldwide battle of the intellect.” Like any other ideological frame, its function was less to process empirical facts than to assert an a priori vision of the world and to rationalize a political strategy.

In fact, this grandiose discourse had a double ideological function and a double temporality: at once ideological and practical, its affirmative futurity was also a critique of the present. On an ideological level, it worked to establish a set of givens, to set up a framework of institutional perception, and to craft a discourse of historical necessity. Thus we find that Sarkozy’s letter employed a powerful rhetoric of impersonal, almost objective obligation: “It is imperative”; “it must”; “academic success depends upon…” Pécresse’s mission was claimed to be “the most important and the most urgent for the future of our country.” That, in this discourse, seemed to be the highest and most urgent task thing could possibly be envisioned, a sort of absolute summit of ideological projection and compulsion. At the same time, however, this discourse justified a parliamentary maneuver and a policy apparatus that we have begun to describe; it thus coupled its cosmic aspirations to a clear, immediate, and pragmatic function.

This doubleness was further redoubled at a temporal level. On one hand, it was a manifestly affirmative and positive ideology, invoking a glorious future of being among the global victors, conjuring a sense of progress, modernity and improvement, and beckoning towards a victory that would be simultaneously economic, political and social. It often cloaked itself in the language of “modernization,” a term which was seldom explained but which seemed to index some kind of historical motion towards rationality, instrumental effectiveness, and global institutional similarity. Naturally, this generic modernism served to naturalize and harmonize deeper ideological agendas.

One such agenda was nakedly pro-business — indeed, it aimed to equate the success of business with the success of the nation. Pécresse’s task, we recall, was “to rapidly lead more high school graduates into higher education, more college students towards degrees, and more college graduates towards employment.” In this discourse, which again echoes Berger’s, we see that there is an entirely naturalized link between education and wage labor, one further emphasized by the soothing, parallel structure of the  prosody itself. The other agenda, more narrowly focused on public-sector governance, was a claim about how a certain kind of neoliberal “freedom” was both instrumentally rational and necessary. Universities were to become “free” and “autonomous” in hiring their own faculty, managing their own budgets, and developing their own academic specialties, but, through a typical logic of neoliberal self-governance, this freedom was ultimately only supposed to fulfill the French state’s broader policy objectives. Universities were supposed to differentiate as much as possible, pursuing their own specific forms of “excellence”; this differentiation also presupposed an increasingly homogenous global academic field and increasingly homogenous institutional structures, in a typical case of homogenization through difference (Mazzarella 2004).

And the smooth, opaque, technocratic futurism of this political discourse, with its seamless vision of a university system becoming more competitive and more modern and more rapid, in turn concealed a second temporality, the temporality of a ruthless critique of the present institutional situation. The present French university is an “unacceptable shambles” (un gâchis); it urgently needs a “remedy.” Such a critique of the present was tacitly apparent as well in many of the more seemingly anodine formulations. If for instance the university needed new “capabilities” and “responsibilities,” then in part this implied that such capabilities and responsibilities were currently sorely lacking. If there will be a “modernized relationship with the state,” then tacitly, the current relationship with the state is traditional and obsolete. If “every country in the world” gives its universities managerial autonomy, then France is unfortunately deviating from global best practices. Technocratic futurism was, in short, a medium, maybe even a ruse, for an attack on the present and on the institutional frameworks of 20th century social democracy.

Media coverage around the same time made it apparent that a (neoliberal?) critique of the traditional public sector was crucial to Sarkozy’s university reforms. One segment about the start of Pécresse’s consultation process, which appeared May 31st on Soir 3 Journal, strategically emphasized one university president’s frustration with traditional state structures:

Jean Charles Pomerol, President of the University of Paris-6, a thin, gray-haired Frenchman, who was one of the most eager adherents to Pécresse’s university reforms, gazes out upon new construction work on his campus in central Paris: “If it’s the state, through the intermediary of a public establishment [like a university], that does the work, it’s fair to say that it goes about twice as slowly as if had been handed over to a private company. As soon as there’s a certain sum to spend in the public-sector market, things don’t really work.”

Pomerol: Si c’est l’état, par l’intermédiare d’un établissement public, qui fait les travaux, l’établissement public, on peut dire qu’il va environ deux fois moins vite que si ça avait été délegué à une entreprise privée. Des qu’il y a une certaine somme à dépenser pour faire un marché public, ça fonctionne mal.

In short, the traditional French state, the traditional bureaucracy, was slow; the new, modern, autonomous university, the university of the future, would be fast, enhanced by greater integration with the private sector. Such themes were elaborated by governmental officials as well. Consider for example an interview with Pécresse in early July, just as the university law was being introduced in Parliament:

The interviewer asked about the SNESup’s opposition to the reform, and about the changing role of nationalized disciplinary review in hiring.

I’d respond that eighteen months to hire a faculty member [un enseignant-chercheur], in the French university, is not tolerable any more. Today we’re in a global battle of the intellect. The universities must be responsive, or they must be able to hire the best researchers, the best teachers, when they show up at the campus door. That is, in a few months, and not in a year and a half. So we have to move, we have to reform teacher hiring protocols, faculty hiring protocols. The entire university community has said this to me — I believe that the forces hostile to change should be able to hear the message. We should move quickly, because if we don’t make progress, soon we’ll face competition not only from the Anglo-Saxon universities, but also from the Indian and Chinese universities.

Later, the interviewer asked about the consequences of Sarkozy’s close personal involvement in the reform process.

I believe it’s a stroke of luck for the university, for the reform, that the President is getting personally involved. First of all because he can guarantee the financial resources that will be given to the reform, and because he can guarantee the political will to make progress [bouger]. You know, the forces hostile to change, they’re very strong. They’re very strong within the university. People have been trying to get this reform for twenty years. For twenty years, it’s failed. All my predecessors left their marks on it; I think for me it’s very important to have the President of the Republic’s support, which perhaps was lacking for my predecessors.

We can see here that the government’s neoliberal futurism served as the vehicle for a political attack on two kinds of slowness. Firstly, there was the slowness of the traditional, inefficient state bureaucracy, the sort of organization that normally took 18 months to hire a new faculty member, that built new buildings “twice as slowly” as the private sector. Elsewhere in the interview, Pécresse would advocate new university foundations and alumni giving, complaining that it would be “ideological” to impose a barrier between public and private sector money, but she also sounded the predictable theme of fiscal discipline, insisting that money given out without an “objective” (objectif) is “going to be lost in the rain, the sands of the beach.” It was as if traditional (and perennially underfinanced) French universities were bound to waste money by their very nature. Pécresse thus pictured the university reform as a means of introducing a modern, vital haste into the university, of introducing new efficiencies and flexibilities that would put an end to wasted money and raise the university to new heights.

But there was also a more agentive, almost malicious force of slowness in this discourse: the “forces hostile to change,” who had apparently managed to prevent reform for the past twenty years. Pécresse would characterize them only in the most nebulous possible terms, but she said enough to set them up as the enemy. Indeed, they were both her personal opponent and the opponent of something like abstract historical necessity itself — the opponents of what what we “have to” do to win the “global battle of the intellect.” If the government thus sought to win the battle of the intellect and thereby to secure a competitive future for the French nation, then this battle would be won against enemies who were not only outside, like China and India, but also within. Inevitably, perhaps, in the face of her abstractly antagonistic framing of the situation, certain concrete groups within the French university would come forth to announce themselves as her enemy. But, as we will now see, the first move of this opposition was to turn the government’s temporality of neoliberal futurism on its head.

Je définis l’utopie comme de l’ordre du non-réalisable mais cela n’empêche pas de la penser et de vouloir la faire être. La pensée utopique est très réaliste car elle s’appuie sur des choses incontestablement réelles, c’est-à-dire les sentiments, les passions, les attractions mais sans se préoccuper des moyens de la faire être. Par exemple, Fourier parle de travail attrayant. À l’heure actuelle, il est peut-être impossible d’avoir un travail attrayant. N’empêche que cette idée doit à tout prix être maintenue. Le fait de donner à chacun des occupations selon ses désirs, de ne pas mobiliser quelqu’un sur une unique activité mais de diversifier toutes ces participations aux travaux, c’est irréalisable. Mais on doit maintenir cette utopie contre vents et marées sous peine de perdre le sens même de la vie. Je ne pense pas que l’utopie soit une projection vers l’avenir mais c’est un mode de vivre. À tout moment, il faut ouvrir dans sa propre vie d’autres possibles. Même si on ne les réalise pas, cela évite d’être bloqué à l’intérieur d’une sorte de fatalité. Il faut résister à une fatalité historique. 

I define utopia as the order of the unrealizable, but that doesn’t prevent thinking it and wanting to bring it into being. Utopian thought is quite realist, since it draws on incontestably real things, that is, feelings, passions, attractions; but without worrying about the means for bringing it into being. For example, Fourier talks about worthwhile [attractive] work. At this point in time, it’s perhaps impossible to have worthwhile work. But this idea must still be maintained at all costs. The fact of giving everyone an occupation corresponding to her desires, of not recruiting someone into one single activity but of diversifying all one’s involvements in labor: it’s unrealizable. But one must maintain this utopia, come what may, or else risk losing life’s very meaning. I don’t think that utopia is a projection towards the future; it’s a way of living. At every moment, one must open up other possibilities within one’s life. Even if one doesn’t realize them, this prevents you from being blocked within a sort of fatalism. Historical fatalism must be resisted.

Two points here are important to stress. 1) Utopianism isn’t necessarily affirmative. Indeed, what makes something utopian is that it rejects something about the present: it is necessarily a critique of the present. 2) It needn’t project a wish for a whole entire “new society,” not be centered around a futurism; it can center around something smaller-scale, something in the here and now. For instance, the desire to have an attractive or worthwhile job.

Alas, even this more modest utopianism isn’t always easy to realize in the course of everyday life.

This is the roof of the library where I’m writing a first draft of the introduction to my dissertation. The sunshine is always encouraging.

In writing the introduction, I’m trying to remember what I find or have found inspiring about my research site. At one point they wrote this:

L’université est riche des espaces et des expériences d’émancipation. Comme telle, elle est publique.

The university is rich in spaces and experiences of emancipation. As such, it is public.

So without any further ado…

As the neoliberal university reforms associated with the Bologna Process have come to France over the last decade, a Francophone wave of critical social research has emerged to analyse and resist them. It tends to be a hybrid genre, mixing traditional social science styles with explicit and implicit political engagements; this particular collection originates in the work of an interdisciplinary, multinational research network called FOREDUC, run by Annie Vinokur and Carole Sigman at the University of Paris-10. The general intellectual orientation here could be termed critical policy studies, with many of the authors coming from political science; the focus is less on neoliberalism as a doctrine than on New Public Management (NPM) as a mode of contract- and incentive-oriented state policy mechanisms. The volume’s underlying analytical problem is to explain how neoliberal university reforms at once converge and diverge across national contexts; as the editors put it, ‘contrasting our experiences shows that, while management principles in higher education and research strongly tend to converge, the doctrine works out differently on the ground depending on the local balance of power between the actors involved, and depending on the intensity of the stakes of international competitiveness in the education industry’ (p. 484). This general process of homogenisation and differentiation, one familiar to anthropologists of globalisation in other spheres (Mazzarella 2004: 349–352), admits of multiple theoretical explanations; and the great merit of this volume is to constitute a virtual laboratory in which the authors’ differing intellectual approaches can be compared and synthesised.

Vinokur’s article takes the most macro perspective here, working in a tradition of critical political economy that seems influenced by Marxism. She gives a historical genealogy of the contemporary ‘knowledge economy’, beginning with medieval guilds’ monopoly on their professional expertise, and proceeding to trace a series of attempts to break the autonomy of labour and appropriate workers’ ‘tacit knowledge’. Higher education today, in her view, has become a key boundary zone between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of labour; she asserts provocatively that the function of post-war university massification has been to afford ‘not the mythical adequation of education to employment, but the production of a surplus of qualified workers on a global scale, necessary – though not sufficient – to put pressure on salaries and working conditions’ (pp. 495–496). And NPM becomes functional within this logic of capital, she argues, when firms find themselves needing a ‘strong political relay to deconstruct the social State’ (p. 497), whose twentieth-century social-welfare institutions could otherwise obstruct the push for a cheap qualified workforce, for newly commodifiable research and for new business opportunities within the higher-education sector.

Now, the difficulty with this functionalist analysis of NPM is that it tends to obscure the institutional and cultural autonomies that universities do retain in the face of economic imperatives. It would be helpful for Vinokur to elaborate how she sees the relationship between the global and the local. But the project remains, in my view, a very useful step towards a general analysis of higher education in terms of labour-capital relations. And at times her functionalism is more tempered: in an interesting historical aside, she remarks that NPM’s use of incentives was inspired by a ‘parental technology for managing recalcitrant children’, and hence has a sort of contingent historical origin. One learns from reading Vinokur’s article that while NPM is indeed functional, its (historical) origin and its (structural) function are quite separate things.

This historical contingency of NPM is much further explored in Alexander Mitterle’s stimulating article, ‘An academic socialism?’, which examines university policy in socialist East Germany. GDR universities, though initially organs of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, acquired an increasingly prominent role in research and industrial production during the 1960s and 1970s, as science was officially reclassified as a ‘productive force’ rather than a mere element of society’s ‘superstructure’ (p. 562). The policy instruments of this period, as Mitterle shows, are deeply familiar to analysts of today‘s neoliberalism. GDR research was largely funded by contracts that insisted on direct industrial applications; researchers were incentivised to compete for performance bonuses and symbolic rewards, subject to ‘comparative performance evaluation’ (p. 573), and expected to show individual initiative (while simultaneously being good interdisciplinary teamworkers). The system as a whole was oriented towards regional economic development, pushed towards ‘efficiency’, and perpetually reformed ‘against mediocrity and self-satisfaction’ (p. 565).

As Mitterle acknowledges, his research is based almost exclusively on GDR policy documents, and it would be useful to see further archival or interview research on the way these policies played out in day-to-day academic life. But the article remains a significant contribution to our understanding of the historical portability and ideological promiscuity of these practices: as Mitterle concludes, many of today’s neoliberal policy instruments are in fact ‘not specific to capitalist higher education policy’ (p. 577). This argument, one notices, is directed against a seeming assumption, among critics of academic neoliberalism, that neoliberalism is both fairly homogeneous and particular to contemporary capitalism. ‘It could be’, he remarks, ‘that the “apocalyptic tone” … adopted in critical analyses of current reforms has led to a certain blindness towards prior evolutions’ (p. 560) [my emphasis]. Yet it strikes me that Mitterle does not describe this tone or these critical analyses in any detail. Paradoxically, his analysis of ‘neoliberal’ policies is much more subtle than his depiction of their critics. And indeed, this collection lacks a serious analysis of the critics of neoliberalism, no doubt in part because the authors are themselves part of this critical community. One hopes that future research will offer a more reflexive sociology and intellectual history of these critical voices.

But while the opposition to neoliberalism is never adequately accounted for, the collection does provide a different complement to our analysis of NPM: it offers a set of accounts of how neoliberal university policy comes to appear totalising and naturalised. These accounts appear most clearly in Isabelle Bruno‘s Foucauldian analysis of EU research policy and Alan Scott’s comparison of Austrian and British university reforms. Scott, drawing on a theory of different modes of institutional change, shows how similar reform projects were dramatically successful in Britain but relatively ineffective in Austria. In Britain, he argues, neoliberal projects like the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were successful through institutional logics of ‘displacement’ and ‘conversion’, while in Austria, market-oriented reforms ran up against internal conflict and traditional national ideologies of Bildung, producing processes of ‘layering’, ‘placation’ and ‘reverse effects’. (It would be instructive to see this analysis expanded to a broader set of cases.) The British case affords Scott the occasion to advance an intriguing analysis of the ‘dramaturgy’ of the reforms: ‘Through repetition,’ he argues, ‘the RAE … acquired its sense of inevitability and the power of facticity’. (I quote Scott’s English manuscript here rather than translating from the published French, as the translation is imprecise on this point.) RAE results, for instance, were published months before their ‘financial consequences’ were released, leaving universities ‘in a state of suspense’ that had massive material stakes. Scott thus implicitly advocates a sort of phenomenological theory of naturalisation, wherein neoliberal policy comes to seem real through a process of repetitive stress and tribulation imposed on local actors.

For Bruno, on the other hand, naturalisation is less a matter of reiterated imposition than a feature of neoliberal policy’s own self-confirming logic. Her argument traces various steps in the development of the EU’s Lisbon Strategy, from 1990s discourses on the economic importance of knowledge to later policy imperatives of competition, new protocols of benchmarking, and increased integration of research with the corporate sector. The general picture is of a deeply business-oriented EU policy world, whose gestures towards culture and humanism are basically ornamental. Bruno, herself a prominent French faculty activist, ends by gesturing towards resistance, but to my ear, her analysis of power is more striking than her advocacy of counterpower. Implicitly chiding those social scientists who overestimate reflexivity’s emancipatory virtues, Bruno bases her theory of naturalisation on a form of dominating reflexivity. The Lisbon Process, she argues, is constituted through a ‘reflexive prism’: a governing discourse that organises how things are ‘reasoned … perceived, thought and coded’ (p. 541), refracting actors’ perceptions through its own patterns. The ‘reflexive prism’ in this case centres around the effort to install permanent competition in every sphere of social life, such that infinitely recursive competition becomes an unreachable horizon, ‘an unceasing tension towards an inaccessible goal’ (p. 536). Along with this project comes a self-verifying, hence self-naturalising interpretive schema. As Bruno notes, policy makers refused to interpret the Lisbon Strategy’s empirical failures as stemming from the project itself. Rather, they perceived all failures as contingencies, as ‘a lack of political will’ (p. 546). Though more ethnographic detail would be helpful, the image is one of policy makers fully entranced by the circular logic of their own discourse.

Bruno’s and Scott’s articles suggest two theoretical conclusions. First, an adequate analysis of neoliberal policy must explain how it is at once historically contingent and self-naturalising. Second, this naturalisation works differently in different contexts. Bruno’s European policy makers seem to be cognitive or ideological captives to their own reflexive forms. Scott’s British academics, on the other hand, apparently experience naturalisation as an experiential effect of forced enrolment in repetitive rites of evaluation. And in yet a third possibility, Bruno suggests at one point that neoliberal competition need not even be subjectively apparent to local actors, since neoliberal regimes act ‘not on the game’s players but on the game’s rules’ (p. 555, citing Foucault). The most effective form of naturalisation, we are reminded, is the one that bypasses local consciousness altogether, content to set the conditions of possibility for local action.

Three articles in the collection present case studies in state fiscal disengagement. Christopher Newfield writes in a more polemical style about the inequalities and irrationalities introduced by private funding and loans in the United States, as if trying to persuade fellow Americans that public funding remains urgent. Carole Sigman gives an institutional analysis of Russian university autonomisation, tracing a story of state entrepreneurialism, new rankings and international legibility pressures, new competition and differentiation in funding, and an effacement of the distinction between public and private sectors. The resulting governance regime seems to her unstable: perhaps, she suggests, the Russian state will ‘lose its grip’ (p. 600) on the newly autonomous universities. A yet more drastic university defunding case, that of the U.K., is sketched by Anne West, Eleanor Barham and Anthony West, who emphasise the instabilities introduced by dependence on uncertain private funds. Theirs is the only article in this collection to analyse seriously the effects of global economic crisis on universities, but their analysis unfortunately did not anticipate the 2010 defeat of the British Labour Party and the installation of a Conservative-led government, which has cut funding far beyond anything foreseen by these authors.

The last two articles here, by Sylvie Didou Aupetit and Tupac Soulas, explore the dynamics of international mobility. Didou calls attention to the class politics of student mobility in the Mexican case, showing that as government funding for study abroad falls, the elite tends to benefit at the expense of the underprivileged (p. 647). Soulas looks at universities’ foreign adventures, beginning with the additional revenue available from foreign students (13 per cent of U.K. university revenues in 2008), and moving to foreign university outposts that have opened up in places like Qatar, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. He argues that since these ‘foreign implantations’ are essentially driven by economic opportunity (shutting down, in some cases, for lack of profitability), the balance of power is likely to shift from the exporting countries, or the sponsoring universities, to the host countries which supply the resources for these foreign adventures. There is a useful theoretical reminder here. While articles like Bruno’s chart neoliberal discourse, these latter articles remind us that institutional action is not simply a product of policy ideologies: it is also, and often quite directly, sensitive to immediate variations in material and financial circumstance. A certain basic materialism (call it ‘resource dependency theory’) is still vitally necessary in this field. Indeed, it is probably the folk theory of many policy makers.

The collection ends without reaching final conclusions about the nature of NPM or academic neoliberalism. As in many edited collections, the connections between the articles are largely left for the reader to untangle. And a polemicist might point out that Vinokur’s political economy and Scott’s comparative institutional analysis, for instance, are ultimately at odds with each other on conceptual questions about social theory. But as a matter of improving our substantive understanding of contemporary university systems, the different approaches and levels of analysis tend to complement each other. One does wonder, nonetheless, if there is more to say about the role of theory in this field of research. Is the collective analysis of university neoliberalism, now well underway, bound to become a research paradigm with its own forms of ‘normal science’? What is the sociology of this subfield? The contributors, billed as ‘international’, are in fact mostly a mix of Francophones and Anglophones. And what is the relation between analysis and political intervention in this field? Implicit answers to these questions could be drawn out of this set of texts, but a more explicit discussion remains for the future.

References

Mazzarella, W. (2004) ‘Culture, globalization, mediation’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 345–367.