Category: france

Sexist anti-feminism in the French Left, 1970

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I’ve been reading lately about the French Women’s Liberation Movement, which had its first public event in 1970, at the University of Paris 8, which would become my primary French fieldsite. In its early days, the university was called the Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes (Experimental University Center at Vincennes). It was located east of Paris amidst the woods of a major city park. It was notorious for overcrowding. It was notorious for far-left activist “frenzy,” which stemmed from the political movements of 1968.

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.

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The politics of HAU and French Theory

Posted on Posted in america, france, professional life, theory

The book project that I’m working on, Disappointed Utopia: Radical Philosophy in Postcolonial France, is basically an ethnographic study of “French Theory.” The book’s preface tries to explain why, at this point in history, we would still be interested in an ethnography of that. And the answer, in short, is that the historical problems of “French Theory” are not so different from our own (in Anglophone anthropology, if that who “we” is here).

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.

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Questions about the Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn

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Last week I was really delighted to get to talk about a paper I wrote, “The Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn: Reparative futures at a French political protest.” It was at Oberlin College, where my friend Les Beldo is teaching a class on Culture and Activism.

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.

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Life in a shared Parisian apartment

Posted on Posted in ethnography, france, ordinary life

The places where we live during fieldwork can be so strange. Even in the best of circumstances.

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.

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The Crêperie at Nanterre

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The University of Paris-X at Nanterre is now just called Université Paris Nanterre. I went there this week to poke around in the archives of my fieldsite. On the way to the library I stopped to find something to eat, and it turned out that the nearest campus eating establishment was an ethnographically useful site. Admittedly, I am getting somewhat out of practice as a campus ethnographer, but I still noticed a few things.

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Michel Foucault’s attitude towards women

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One could write numerous things about masculine domination in French philosophy, and many have done so. Right now, for instance, I’m engrossed in Michèle Le Doeuff’s programmatic 1977 essay on this question, “Cheveux longs, idées courtes (les femmes et la philosophie),” which appeared in Le Doctrinal de Sapience (n° 3) and was translated in Radical Philosophy 17 (pdf). 

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Women as national education chiefs

Posted on Posted in america, france, gender

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is the first woman Minister of Education in France, in office since 2014 in the second half of François Hollande’s presidency. (Before becoming Minister of Education she was also the Minister for Women’s Rights and subsequently also Minister for Youth, Sports and of Urban Affairs; it turns out she isn’t the first French Minister of Education to use Twitter.)

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Language politics and the French “Master” degree

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I’m planning on writing more about French higher education policy in the next few years, since even after my dissertation there’s a lot to learn. For instance, there’s something curious about the national origins of the French system of diplomas. Here are the standard types of university degrees in France:

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Dijon vous craignez

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I’ve been working on a paper about the failure of left-wing internationalism at the “European counter-summits” (at least the two that I was able to observe in 2010 and 2011), and I’ve gotten interested in this love letter to the organizers of the 2011 Dijon counter-G8 university summit. A student left it on the ground in marker as they left the event, which was politically pretty unsuccessful, as my paper explains.
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Derrida on complacency and vulgarity

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In Benoît Peeters’ biography of Jacques Derrida, there is an intriguing interview with Derrida that was never published. Peeters writes:

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.”

He doesn’t hold back his criticism

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I was looking at one of my interviews with philosophy professors and was struck by this little explanation of why he had not picked someone as his dissertation supervisor (directeur in French):

– 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.)

Revisiting field interviews

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I’ve been going back lately to my interviews with French philosophy teachers and students. I just never had time to transcribe or work on most of them during my dissertation, so I have a backlog of dozens of taped interviews, most of which are quite long and rich. I’d like to transcribe all of them, since I’m under less pressure to finish a manuscript right now, and I think they may have some documentary value in their own right.

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:

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American representations of French social movements

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So over in France these days there’s a pretty major protest movement against efforts by François Hollande’s Socialist Party government, and its current Minister of Labor Myriam El Khomri, to reform French labor laws. These reforms go in the general direction of “fewer protections for labor, more flexibility for employers,” and the details are still being negotiated, in the face of substantial public pressure. The reforms, however, have not received a great deal of coverage in the English-language media, and what there is seems to be more about reproducing worthless stereotypes about French culture than about any actual analysis. I was going to actually write about the protest movement today, but instead I got distracted by an embarrassingly bad article in today’s New York Times, which begins with the following attempt at comedy:

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.

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Philosophers without infrastructure, Part 2

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Following up on my last post (and indirectly on a couple of older posts), I came across an interesting interview extract that comments in a bit more detail on the lived experience of being a philosopher with practically no work infrastructure. Here’s a philosopher from Paris 8 commenting on his workspace:

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—“

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Philosophical lab infrastructure

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The short version of this post: Philosophers have practically no lab infrastructure.

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.

Last day in Paris (2011)

Posted on Posted in france, ordinary life, space

I’m not sure whether this little descriptive passage from my fieldnotes will ever have much use in academic discourse, but it does remind me quite vividly of urban space in my fieldsite.

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.

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On real problems

Posted on Posted in ethnography, france, pedagogy, philosophy, translationTagged , 1 Comment

I came across a confrontational moment in one of my interview transcripts. We had been talking about philosophers’ metanarratives about “truth.” But my interlocutor found my questions a bit too oblique.

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—

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Modernity isn’t philosophical

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Here’s a tidbit from before Sarkozy was President that gives a certain sense of how his administration was likely to regard philosophy, and the humanities in general:

« 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…

International traces of France in the American South

Posted on Posted in absurdity, america, france

I’ve been reading up a bit on the international circulation in ideas of the university. It’s not hard to find documentation of how France has for a long time been at the center of this intellectual commerce. I am particularly fond of this little fragment from an 1888 book by one Herbert B. Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia (now freely available through Google 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.

The world war of the intellect

Posted on Posted in france, neoliberalism, politics

A snippet from my dissertation chapter on the French university strike of 2009.

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 25th 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.

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What is utopia?

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I’ve been thinking about what counts as utopian in my research site, and happened to come across a handy definition by René Schérer, now an emeritus professor. It’s from an interview, “Utopia as a way of living“, that appeared in in l’Humanité in 2007.

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.

Dissertation writing scene

Posted on Posted in france, photos, politics

mansueto

 

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.

In an era where higher education in the United States is largely dominated by economistic impulses and further dominated by the husks of an unrealizable humanistic project that generally aims to produce at best more “cultivated” or “critical” liberal subjects, it’s a bit jarring to be exposed to this blunt piece of French left universalism: the university is emancipatory and emancipation must be available to all. That’s a thought that just wouldn’t be thinkable in most American contexts I’ve encountered. (To be fair, this is a fringe view in the French case too.)

Between Crisis and New Public Management

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A while ago I wrote a book review in LATISS of an interesting 2010 essay collection that appeared in France, Higher Education between New Public Management and Systemic Crisis (L’enseignement supérieur entre nouvelle gestion publique et crise systémique), edited by Annie Vinokur and Carole Sigman. I thought I’d post the text of my review here in case anyone’s interested in a little glimpse of some of the French critical literature on university reforms. I rather like writing book reviews, as a genre, and it’s sort of the traditional way for people finishing their dissertations to dip their toes in the publishing water, as it were.

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.

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