Category: france

La Manifestation: a fictitious political collectivity

Posted on Posted in france, photos, politics

Une manifestation is the French term for a protest march in the street. It’s a pretty standard local political ritual, mocked and memorialized by local jokes and international stereotypes alike. “Don’t bother going today if you don’t feel like it,” an  American grad student tells me one day when I feel lazy, “there will always be another one.”

The “manif,” as it’s called, strikes me as a paradoxical social form: imagined as a massively, even paradigmatically collective event, its collectivity nonetheless has a somewhat fictive quality. Most marchers stick to little groups of their friends, paying attention mainly to the people immediately around them. Phenomenologically, a manif is fractured and disorganized, with people leaving and showing up, wandering back and forth, stopping perhaps to take a leaflet or a snapshot. For a marcher, the crowd is a visual jumble of strangers’ bodies crisscrossing. As if to make sense of the constant random motion, a curiously quantitative consciousness descends at times even on the defenders of the most radical causes. The march’s success gets perceived as proportional to the apparent size of the crowd; it can become almost actuarial. People take note of who shows up and of who didn’t make it.

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Nonexistent academic neighborhoods

Posted on Posted in france, space1 Comment

There have been a bunch of articles on the borders of campus spaces. One thing they all have in common is an insistence that universities in some way manage their boundaries, and usually the surrounding neighborhoods too. People have chronicled how universities put up fences to keep out the poor, how they tinker in urban redevelopment, how they build science parks and sometimes fail, how they create low-income college slums and low-budget small businesses like copy shops, and so on.

But when I was visiting Aix-en-Provence last month — its iconic mountain is shown above — I was struck by the sense that the university just didn’t have a neighborhood. Sure, there were a couple of little sandwich shops and a café where the faculty ate lunch. There was a complex of dormitories on a hilltop and a nearby park where it looked like a lot of students were enjoying the sunshine. There were streets where you could see students and even a few teachers hurrying towards class. Nonetheless, in some directions you only had to walk a dozen yards from the campus gate before the university was entirely forgotten in the quiet streets.

Here, then, as a supplement to the scholarly research that has demonstrated the existence of campus boundary zones, I want to write about a few photos I took that illustrate the relative nonexistence of the campus neighborhood.

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Heterosexuality, the opiate of the people

Posted on Posted in france, gender, translationTagged , 4 Comments

Yesterday was the big day of student elections at Paris-8, just as there were elections in Aix that I covered a few weeks ago. But in the thick of the afternoon I was delighted to see that not all the groups were handing out election fliers, for right at the campus entrance was a new feminist collective. Such groups seem somewhat less common in France than in the US, where gender-based activism, while far from mainstream, is quite usual. And their flier, when I sat down later to look at it, turned out to be a good one:

Questionnaire on Sexuality

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

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Religion at Paris-8: Djinn and the Evil Eye

Posted on Posted in france, translationTagged ,

This is the last installment of my translation of some preliminary results from Charles Soulié’s study of religion among Paris-8 students, and this is going to be the post where I out myself as some kind of rationalist and modernist… Or at any rate where I express surprise at the non-negligible rates of magical and supernatural belief within the Paris-8 student body. I’ll sum things up: about 1 in 3 students believe in the Evil Eye (or at least they checked “yes” on the questionnaire), about 1 in 5 believe in djinn, and about 1 in 5 believe in astrology. These are minority views, in all cases, certainly, and are no doubt products of the radically transcultural space of Paris-8, where normative French national beliefs are often not in effect. A couple of these seem to be characteristically Islamic beliefs, others more diffuse across religions. To be honest, I can’t say I really understand what it’s like to believe in the Evil Eye, though I do have some idea what it means to believe in astrology (I give the astrologers credit for their acceptance that our lives are determined from the outside, though I strongly disagree that star positions are the most important node in this process of determination). For a devoutly secular person like me… there’s something always just slightly disquieting in reading over the substantial rates of non-secularism in the world.

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

So without further ado…

Table 2: Belief in the Evil Eye by religion

Yes No No Response Total
Muslims 68.90% 24.41% 6.69% 100%
Christians 47.83% 44.93% 7.25% 100%
Other religions 44.57% 46.74% 8.70% 100%
Greek Orthodox 38.46% 53.85% 7.69% 100%
Jews 36.36% 54.55% 9.09% 100%
Catholics 35.62% 59.59% 4.79% 100%
None / NR 13.77% 82.32% 3.91% 100%
Buddhists 11.76% 88.24% 0.00% 100%
Protestants 7.69% 89.74% 2.56% 100%
Total 31.48% 63.44% 5.08% 100%
n 403 812 65 1,280

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Religion at Paris-8, Part 2

Posted on Posted in france, translationTagged , ,

I see that Mike has already inquired as to the methodology of the report on student religion that I began posting yesterday. Most of his methodological queries are settled by the below section, which was actually the introduction in the original French version, but which I’m posting second because I wanted to start with some of the substantive conclusions.

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

The framework of inquiry

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

(…)

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

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

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

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Religion at Paris-8, Part 1

Posted on Posted in france, translationTagged , 3 Comments

The main point of this post is as follows: One of the most left-wing universities in France is composed of a majority — a very slight majority, mind you, but still a majority — of religious believers.

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

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

None* Muslims Catholics Other Christians Other Religions
Cinema 71,43% 8,16% 9,18% 0,00% 11,22%
Arts 64,93% 5,69% 10,43% 8,06% 10,90%
Psychology 56,15% 15,57% 9,43% 9,43% 9,43%
Anthropology 54,72% 14,15% 10,38% 9,43% 11,32%
Communication 48,31% 14,98% 17,87% 9,18% 9,66%
History 46,07% 25,84% 13,48% 6,74% 7,87%
Others 42,37% 25,42% 10,17% 10,17% 11,86%
French Lit 36,84% 31,58% 5,26% 19,30% 7,02%
Computer Sci 26,39% 45,83% 8,33% 9,72% 9,72%
Economics 22,63% 44,53% 12,41% 16,06% 4,38%
Total 49,92% 19,84% 11,41% 9,45% 9,38%
N (total 1,280) 639 254 146 121 120

* None designates no religion, atheist or no response.
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“Everything is going great”: the official lie of campus newsletters

Posted on Posted in france, neoliberalism, translationTagged , 1 Comment

As someone who’s young, as someone who hasn’t known the academic world for decades and decades and decades, this hadn’t occurred to me, but it turns out that something as seemingly innocuous as the campus newsletter may have a political history. At least that’s what I infer from this fairly bitter critique of campus newsletters on French campuses that I’ll excerpt and translate from Christian de Montlibert‘s 2004 book, Knowledge for Sale: Higher Education and Research in Danger (Savoir à Vendre : L’enseignement et la recherche en danger). My guess, though he doesn’t give any real detail, is that the very existence of a campus newsletter on French public universities is a fairly recent development.

Management at the University

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

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

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

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

(pp. 46-47).

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Student elections in Aix-en-Provence

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Last week I went to visit Aix, which might become one of my major fieldsites next year. The university building itself was falling apart; as it turns out, it was the one featured in last year’s complaint about the physical decrepitude of French universities. In spite of the physical decay, it was all lush with plant life.

Now as it happened, the week I arrived they were in the last days of campaigning for student elections to various university administrative councils, primarily the Administration Council (Conseil d’Administration, which is the major decision-making body) and University Life and Study Council (Conseil des Etudes de la Vie Universitaire, which handles pedagogical matters). Graduate students are also eligible to sit on the Scientific Council (Conseil Scientifique), which sets research policy.

This was the courtyard by the main entrance. In the center of the photo you can see the little group of people handing out leaflets, in what became practically a competitive sport to reach the maximum number of potential voters.

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Edward Sapir on French culture

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Sapir wrote in 1924 in a splendidly titled article, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious“:

The whole terrain through which we are now struggling is a hotbed of subjectivism, a splendid terrain for the airing of national conceits. For all that, there are a large number of international agreements in opinion as to the salient cultural characteristics of various peoples. No one who has even superficially concerned himself with French culture can have failed to be impressed by the qualities of clarity, lucid systematization, balance, care in choice of means, and good taste, that permeate so many aspects of the national civilization. These qualities have their weaker side. We are familiar with the overmechanization, the emotional timidity or shallowness (quite a different thing from emotional restraint), the exaggeration of manner at the expense of content, that are revealed in some of the manifestations of the French spirit. Those elements of French civilization that give characteristic evidence of the qualities of its genius may be said, in our present limited sense [of culture not as high culture nor as all of a people’s traditions but as the practiced ‘genius’ of a civilization], to constitute the culture of France; or, to put it somewhat differently, the cultural significance of any element in the civilization of France is the light it sheds on the French genius.

From this standpoint we can evaluate culturally such traits in French civilization as the formalism of French classical drama,  the insistence in French education on the study of the mother-tongue and of its classics, the prevalcence of epigram in French life and letters, the intellectualist cast so often given to aesthetic movements in France, the lack of turgidity in modern French music, the relative absence of the ecstatic note in religion, the strong tendency to bureaucracy in French administration. Each and all of these and hundreds of other traits could be readily paralleled from the civilization of England. Nonetheless their relative cultural significance, I venture to think, is a lesser one in England  than in France. In France they seem to lie more deeply in the grooves of the cultural mold of its civilization. Their study would yield something like a rapid bird’s-eye view of the spirit of French culture.

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The most American of French universities

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In this winter’s exhibition on the history of Paris-8 at Vincennes (the university’s first site in the 70s), I was particularly interested in a text that discusses the relationship between Paris-8 and U.S. academia. The exhibit was separated into panels each starting with one letter of the alphabet, and this was one of the last of them: “W – Go West.” François Noudelmann, the author, kindly gave me permission to post a translation. So without further ado:

W — Go West

And if Paris 8 was the most American of French universities?

Just kidding, of course: that would be forgetting all the isms (anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, …), forgetting that Vincennes’ breath comes instead from the East, or even the far East where the Cultural Revolution rose up. 1969: East Wind by Jean-Luc Godard, co-written with the future Dany the Red. Today the compass would be set South instead, towards that pole that defines non-rich countries in terms of the North. And as for the West? The response from the dictionary of received ideas would be: turn your back on it!

But the West may thus have taken advantage of us without our knowing it. While here new ideas [la pensée vivante] are forced to settle in the margins on the outskirts of the Sorbonne, in the United States they have grown so far they have their own label, French theory. Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard and so many other children of Paris-8 have inspired American campuses for the past forty years. And the contemporary minds of Saint-Denis are exporting themselves faster than foie gras: Badiou brings Mao to the far west in California. “Rancière is so cool!” New York galleries announce. And Obama’s America creolizes itself with the thought of Glissant.

In the flux of transatlantic import and export, Paris-8 too plays its part. The United States no doubt produces the best and the worst, and one wonders why the world always chooses the latter: the reality shows, the industrial food, the world music, the quantitative ideology, the drive towards security… but the worst does not always come to pass, and when it comes to academic matters, Saint-Denis is the place where people study gender, queer, cultural,  post-colonial studies and theories, which are still distrusted by the mainstream French [franco-française] academy.

Are they products made in the USA? No, because they bring with them India, Africa, Australia, the Caribbean… these others of a Europe encircled by its borders. Walls always end up crumbling and ships always come to birth.

The University-World doesn’t have a statue, but it does have an address: liberty.

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Occupied “free space” at Paris-8

Posted on Posted in france, photos, politics, space5 Comments

For about two weeks this month, a large space by the entrance to Paris-8 was occupied by students. It had formerly been a coffeeshop operated by a private company, but had been closed months or years ago.

To enter after hours when the campus was supposed to be closed, you had to climb up on that chair and through the window and down a little stepladder on the far side.

One of the occupants’ favorite activities was decorating the walls of adjacent university buildings. This wall was, as far as I recall, pretty much blank before the occupation began; the slogans now read “Bureaucrats outside!” “McDonald’s, we’ll burn you.” “State Rabble.” “Screw the government’s cleansing system before it screws you.” “Riot!” “Fuck may 68, fight now!” “Anti-France” (I have no idea what this one means, by the way). “Drops of sunshine in the city of ghosts.” “Long live the canteen and worker’s self-management” [this refers to a recent campus event I can only describe as student-organized Food Not Bombs for undocumented workers]. “Popes, popes, popes, yes. But nazi and pedophile popes?” “Burn the prisons, destroy the immigration detention centers.”

We can deduce from this photo that someone had invested in numerous colors of spraypaint.

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Urban surrealisms in the metro

Posted on Posted in absurdity, ethnography, france, photosTagged ,

There are times when I feel like ethnography should be less about seeing the local point of view and more about prying free all those sights, events, phenomena that are locally invisible. For everyday life, in my fieldsite at least, is full of little absurdities and small surrealisms that seem to pass without notice.

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

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

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The walk home from the field (is still the field)

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After nights of fieldwork, ethnographers have to make their way home. For me, after I get off the metro, the walk looks like this:

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

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

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Is the university burning?

Posted on Posted in absurdity, france, photos, politicsTagged , , , 3 Comments

Last month I went to a debate organized at the Sorbonne, “Is the  university burning?” (L’Université brûle-t-elle ?) Appropriately, it ended in chaos; but  midway through, there was a bit of performance art.

Actors in masks, some with stockings over their heads, made a pretend argument for burning the university. For the foreigners in the audience, a disjointed translation of their performance was projected on a screen like so:

We want Godard, Proust, the Princess of Cleves, not commercial trash culture

Let us burn the university! No! The University is not for profit! It is there to create more freedom, more riches (that are not material), “Latin is useless and that’s why it’s beautiful!” against the death of “dead languages”, let us burn the university! In the name of all erasmus students, I would like to say I had no time to write a speech, because I work to pay my way and so we say “let us burn the university”!

[They shouted their discourse from the stage.]

Experiment time! First we will build a fire, the first spark. Take your sheet of paper, fold it over, then again, and cut it, and lick it and keep your strip of paper (etc),

[The actors circled back into the aisles of the large lecture hall with sheets of paper, with which they mimed an effort to create fire.]

It doesn’t work!!!!!

[—they said as they pretended to discover that rubbing two pieces of paper together doesn’t make a spark.]

It would be crazy; it would be like killing oneself; like putting one’s head in the freezer, like throwing oneself under a car, like…

[As if they were delighted to discover that they didn’t need to burn the university after all… but the translation trailed off and the actors came through the aisles hugging the audience. Even including the ethnographer, yours truly.]

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Philosophy classroom art

Posted on Posted in france, pedagogy, philosophy, photos2 Comments

In the Philosophy Department at Paris-8, the biggest philosophy classroom is located just beside the department offices. It has a variety of curious things on its walls.

A painted character hangs from a coat rack. He appears striped. Bald. Stretched out by the neck. Striped shoulderbag too.

My friend Emmanuel proposes that we translate this as, “At Paris VIII in the philosophy department, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by LMD.” Alternatively, “had our minds blown by LMD”… the Law LMD being one of the first university reforms of the last decade (2003). I’m not sure who’s represented by this skeletal face: the government? the philosophers? But I note the little hint of Greek architecture in the broken columns: classical Greece often seems to be iconic of philosophy in France (more, I think, than in philosophical circles I’ve come across in the U.S.).

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Testimonials of precarity in French universities, part 2

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Here we have a second testimonial of precarious life in French universities, one that comes not from a temporary worker but from a doctoral student struggling to finish her thesis. This one has to be filed under the genre of the public lament: a political genre which, it comes to mind in passing, deserves further cultural analysis. More specifically, this was an open letter sent to Minister Pécresse by a parisian PhD candidate.

Paris, February 22, 2010

Madame Minister,

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

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Testimonials of precarity in French universities

Posted on Posted in france, ordinary life, translationTagged , , ,

When the report on precarity in higher education was first publicly released, the presentation was followed by a number of panel discussions. Here I’m going to try to translate a few people’s personal tales of precarity. Today we’ll start with that of Aurélie Legrand.

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

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

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

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

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Haiti and the poetry of broken utopias

Posted on Posted in france, philosophy, translationTagged , , ,

And what does it mean when a research project that thought it was about France and about arcane educational questions suddenly finds itself confronted with an event from across the sea? What does it mean when the question of the intellectual production of a single academic department in the Parisian banlieue turns out to be in part about how the university becomes a site for the reception and mediation of mass trauma?

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

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

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

and if…
and then…
but are we still?

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

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

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

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

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

Pécresse, business and the human sciences

Posted on Posted in france, neoliberalism, translationTagged , ,

I started to feel that I’d been over-privileging the protestors in this blog, so I thought I’d translate a recent speech by the Minister of Higher Education and Research, Valérie Pécresse. Pécresse has had a controversial time in the Ministry and is now running for regional offices in Ile-de-France. This week she spoke at a conference at her Ministry, titled “Human Sciences: New Resources for Enterprise?” I couldn’t make the conference because the website said it was full and couldn’t accept further registrations, but I found the text online. Her speech was everything one could wish for — at least if what one wishes for is the best possible integration of universities into the work world.

I’ve been listening to the results of your debates with great interest.

It’s remarkable that we’ve been able to bring students, young graduates, university actors and business representatives together for this debate on the “new resources for enterprise” that the human and social sciences represent.

The question that has been discussed here for the past three-plus hours is essential. It’s at the heart of my activities at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

There was a time when, among employers, the universities had a bad reputation in relation to other establishments of higher learning. This time has passed. For almost three years now I’ve led efforts that aim to restore the universities to their full place in the country’s instructional programs.

Graduates in the human and social sciences deserve to be supported in their search for employment. To be sure, three years after the end of their studies, graduates with a license in classics, languages or history have unemployment rates around 7%, which is actually lower than those with the same degree in physics (8%) or chemistry (12%). But these encouraging statistics should not hide a worrisome reality: these fields also see a process of unacknowledged selection — by failure. This failure extends to as many as 50% of enrolled students, in both the first and in the second years [of the 3-year license].

For too long, we have let things be without reacting.

The fields of social and human sciences have welcomed many of the students coming from the second wave of massification of university enrollments, the one that began in the 80s. But the democratization of access to higher education has remained unfinished. We have too often neglected to support these new high school graduates. They have been driven by the system’s inertia [les pesanteurs] towards the social and human sciences, without really having chosen them.

It was in order to reverse these tendencies that the law of 2007 set disciplinary and professional placement [l’orientation et l’insertion professionnelle] at the heart of the university’s missions. The “License plan” has offered universities the means to bring students up to speed and to better prepare them to enter professional life.

It was not acceptable that many enrolled students never showed up to take their exams, nor that the university had such high exam failure rates. From this point forward, troubled students should be able to leave the university better armed for professional life. And, starting this year, universities should furnish their professional placement indicators.

In other words, students and students’ issues have been brought back to the heart of the university. Henceforth it will be possible to respond to their legitimate needs for disciplinary placement, for training [formation] and for preparation for professional life.

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“Our profession does not easily accommodate resignation”

Posted on Posted in france, politics, translationTagged , , ,

I’ve been spending more time lately with La Ronde Infinie des Obstinés, the Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn, the little group which, in spite of all instrumental considerations, persists in marching every Monday in front of the Ministry. I said in my previous post about them that I was going to translate their tract, so now you (anglophones) can all have another sample of French political rhetoric.

Madame Minister,

For the past two years, we—teachers, researchers, staff and students—have declared our total disagreement with the LRU university law, with the teachers’ education reform, and more generally with the spirit guiding the majority of measures and initiatives that come out of your ministry.

In spite of the longest strike the university world has ever known, you have refused all negotiations on the universities’ status, concerning yourself solely with your career as a politician.

In spite of last year’s general refusal to fill out the auditing forms that inaugurated the teachers’ education reform, this year your government is set to continue every measure that brought us out in the streets last year. You are even adding dangerous, aberrant rules about internships.

Madame Minister, our profession does not easily accommodate resignation.

Research, creativity and the transmission of knowledge all imply a freedom quite at odds with the reforms, these reforms that are turning us into petty administrators of social selection. For us to accept these reforms in silence would amount to renouncing our own idea of what a university should be, a university bolstered by a centuries-long tradition of research, a university engaged in creating a future that cannot be dictated by short-term economic needs.

Madame Minister, the university will not understand itself, it will not manage itself, and it will not evaluate itself in terms of productivity and profitability, for it is based on the inherent risk of research. This risk is at the base of the formative gesture that brings students and professors together, and it falls to universities in the public service to keep this risk alive. Yes, the university needs reform—indeed, we know this better than you do, we teachers, researchers, staff and students who ARE the university in all its contradictions, and who are devoted to preserving and restoring a democratic future for the institution.

Madame Minister, on every one of our campuses, we are working to invalidate each one of the measures you hoped to use in your project.

Madame Minister, beyond these points of resistance and days of protest that will mark our defense of public education from nursery school to the university, we believe it is indispensable to show the public that we resist your policy of dismantling the university, to re-establish the truth against your lies, and to remind the world that the university is a common good that should not be open to corruption by politics. This then is the reason why, having already held vigil for a thousand hours last spring in front of the town hall, we are now going to revive this Infinite Round of the Stubborn. You can find us every Monday starting at 6pm, from here until the day when real negotiations over the universities’ status are opened.

Our stubbornness is total because, in wanting to transform our universities into corporations, you have gone past the limit of what is tolerable.

Our stubbornness is total because we are in no respect inclined to renounce the freedom without which there would be neither research nor creativity.

Our stubbornness is total because, whatever the difficulties of battling your policies, we know that the university community is massively hostile to them.

Our stubbornness is total because of the high stakes we defend, stakes which go far beyond any simple categorical reading of this conflict.

[Second Page:]

Why we are stubborn:

-To remind everyone that the university is a common good, one not open to corruption by a political ideology.

-Because we refuse a third-rate teacher’s education brought about by the disappearance of practical training.

-Because we refuse a university conceived as a business, thrown open to competition between campuses, between employees, between students.

-To defend everyone’s access to quality education—freely chosen, secular, and free of tuition.

-To defend independent research.

-Because we refuse the coming rises in tuition fees and loans that logically follow from the reforms.

-Because we refuse the social selection that will become part of the university admissions process, as budgets come to be calculated in proportion to graduation rates.

-To show the public our resistance, in the face of the dismantling of the whole system of public services.

AGAINST THE LRU

The Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn
meets every monday starting at 6pm
in front of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, 1 Rue Descartes

http://rondeinfinie.canalblog.com
[email protected]

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Negative knowledge in the classroom

Posted on Posted in america, france, pedagogyTagged , , 8 Comments

I’m in the middle of shortening an essay for publication (on which more soon, I hope), which means I have the pleasure of excising all the interesting-but-peripheral tidbits. Here’s some text that used to be a footnote (retuned a little to make sense here).

One way of thinking about a classroom is as a place of knowledge transmission. From this perspective, it’s intriguing that classrooms often evoke an intriguing phenomena that involves, not knowledge-display or knowledge-transfer, but precisely their opposite, performances of ignorance or what might be called “negative knowledge.” Karin Knorr-Cetina has written, in examining the fixation on possible causes of error among experimental particle physicists, that “negative knowledge is not nonknowledge, but knowledge of the limits of knowing, of the mistakes we make in trying to know, of the things that interfere with our knowing, that we are not really interested in and do not want to know.”

It’s worth pondering whether this category applies to a sort of anxiety about knowledge that I’ve often seen in American grad school classrooms. What I’m thinking of is the kind of conversation where people drape their statements in a shroud of qualifications, qualifications that communicate no propositional content but nonetheless index the epistemological anxiety and low epistemic rank of the speaker. These phrases are all too familiar: perhaps, it seems, in a sense, it would seem to me, to some degree, kind of, sort of, it appears, arguably, I would argue that, on one level, I could be wrong but, you know, you might say, I’m not an expert but, umm, I don’t know anything about X but, etc., etc. Such awareness of fallibility can also appear as a kind of corporeal knowledge, in posture, gesture, and tone: nervous laughs, pulling at one’s hair, avoiding eye contact, and the like. I can remember times in my first couple of years of grad school when, at the very thought of talking, my voice shook and my heart beat wildly. And it’s often the least authorized, most institutionally peripheral and lowest-ranking participants who feel this way — which is to say, in short, that epistemic hierarchy in the classroom can get written onto academics’ bodies and flung throughout their conversation.

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French press release: Putting an end to precarity

Posted on Posted in france, politics, translationTagged 2 Comments

Monday afternoon this week there was a big meeting in a fancy auditorium at the CRNS (National Center for Scientific Research). I say it was fancy because the audience’s chairs were padded bright red, a long coat rack held a long row of dark coats, and, unlike the plebian amphitheatres at the public universities, this room had a soft carpet. Everything was semiotically calcuated to make the afternoon’s discussion of precarity take place in an environment of visible luxury.

The occasion marked the results of a major study on precarity in French higher education and research. Precarity, needless to say, can become a contested and complicated concept, and I want to write about this too but first I need to read more of the prior literature. But the funny part, as it turns out, is that the researchers themselves seem to have faced these very same agonies of literature review and conceptual clarification; and, wanting to avoid having to settle on a single definition of precarity, they decided to let precarity be defined by the research subjects. Hence if you considered yourself precarious, you counted as such in this survey, which had 4,409 responses and appears to be a fairly representative sample of French disciplines and institutions. In practice, I venture to add, ‘precarity’ seemed to come down to a fairly straightforward matter of having a temporary, hence unstable, job situation.

The gist of the study is that precarity is rising fairly rapidly in this sector, the non-permanent workforce having for instance increased by 15.5% at the CNRS between 2006 and 2008, and university workforces currently being estimated at about 23% precarious (looking across all categories of university staff). The major findings of the report included a marked feminization of precarious jobs, a notable concentration of precarity in the social and human sciences (which Americans would call “humanities and social sciences”) in relation to the hard sciences, a definite group of young precarious workers (under 30) combined with a significant group of older “perma-temps,” a range of rather low wages (as someone put it rather sarcastically, temporary contracts are not being compensated for by better salaries), and, subjectively, a set of waves of anxiety and uncertainty about the future. As one would guess, there’s also a lot of struggling to make ends meet through multiple jobs (apparently a few even teach under assumed names, to circumvent age restrictions on some teaching assignments), a certain amount of disdain and nonrecognition from the tenured staff, and a set of inferior working conditions coupled to a lack of workplace rights in the face of the organizational hierarchy.

This has to be taken as only a quick provisional summary; the actual research report is 83 pages long, and I’ll write more about it when I’ve read it all the way through. But what I wanted to post for now was a quick translation of the political declaration announced at the end of the afternoon, after the research results were explained, after a panel of precarious workers had testified, after a distinguished roundtable had chewed things over. At the end there was a long line of academic union leaders (100% male, surely not accidentally) who sat in a row and released a joint statement. It reads as follows:

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Empty space in Amphi Orange

Posted on Posted in france, photos1 Comment

Early this monday morning, I happened to be in a lecture hall at Paris-12, down in Créteil about as far as you can possibly get from my apartment and still be on the paris métro. I arrived in the room about 8:03am, an hour before anything was happening there. It was dark and empty. Amphi Orange, it was called, Amphi being short for amphithéâtre, Orange possibly being related to the desks’ hue, which reminded me of some sort of artificial american cheese product.

This post is going to be boring for people who believe that social life can only happen in a crowd. This is a post about the signs of past social action inscribed in architecture and writing.

To see your way around you had to turn on the lights. This switchpanel did the trick. Stop for a second to notice its anti-aesthetic aesthetics, its calculated practicality, the way that its intentionally secondary, instrumental functions are mirrored by the camouflaged design of its switches. Note, too, that the designer has blundered by not making provisions for labels: the users have been obliged to write on labels with black marker.

If we climb up to the back of the room, our gaze falls into the standardized pattern of lecture hall vision, angled down, aimed at the blackboards, aimed at the podiums, aimed down at a desk where, if we were students we could be taking notes. It’s empty. A few people wandered into the room while I was there only to glance at me and wander out. It’s not only events that are scheduled on university calendars; it’s also emptiness and empty space.

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