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.

The actual experience of sitting on the platform was surprisingly unstructured. We were far enough from the audience that people chatted to each other a good deal, often in low voices to avoid disturbing the proceedings. Everyone was provisioned with a water bottle and a program, and arranged into three long rows of seats facing the audience, behind the higher-ups. There was an amusing hierarchy of chairs, such that the Trustees had brown wooden chairs, while the faculty had white plastic ones. Longtime attendees seemed to have strong views on where to sit, and arranged themselves in the faculty marching lineup with an eye to ending up in their preferred seat. The front row had a better view, but were conversely more on display; whereas the back row was somewhat shaded from the harsh sun by a backdrop. Individuals’ seating strategies sometimes led them to depart from their place in the official lineup, which was supposed to be in rank order.

In a sign of the times, a lot of faculty people were on their smartphones during the ceremony. Most people didn’t use their phones the entire time, but did consult them at least every few minutes. If you look carefully at the above picture, the professor with the pink hood has her phone out, possibly taking a photo of the audience.

The ceremony had previously been represented to me as “the most required faculty event of the year,” and I received numerous emails over the course of the Spring semester reminding me that my presence was obligatory, informing me that absences had to be approved by the Dean, and so on. The reality was much more casual: no one seemed to keep track of who actually showed up or how they presented themselves. “Can’t you stand in a straight line?” the Dean shouted out to us mock-seriously as we stood in a ragged file to greet the students. I also noticed that many faculty opted for sun hats rather than the official academic caps.

As the phone usage suggests, not everyone was completely attentive the whole time. “Is it done?” I heard someone ask plaintively during the lengthy presentation of diplomas. At the same time, though, many faculty carefully watched the graduating students going by, often clapping enthusiastically for students they knew personally. There was an obvious social hierarchy encoded in the amount of applause from the audience — the more popular students received more cheers (sometimes supported by their fraternities or sororities). Meanwhile, some relative “outcasts” (often male) received practically no applause.

Where I went to college, the graduating class was far too large to hand out diplomas individually during the ceremony; instead the diplomas were handed out separately at small per-department functions. I must say that handing out hundreds of diplomas individually in front of a huge crowd is an inefficient process, in spite of the obvious efforts at efficiency by the diploma presenters. The graduates were arranged in a queue at stage right and, when their names were called out by the Dean, they walked across the stage, were handed their diploma, shook hands with the President, and exited stage left. A crew of senior faculty was responsible for making sure the diplomas were handed out in the correct order, and they did their task with nearly machinic efficiency. (The process presumed that the graduates had been correctly lined up in a pre-given order, matching the order of diplomas in piles.)

It struck me, watching the process, that the distribution of diplomas was a perfect icon of “education as pipeline.” Everyone has their place in the queue; they all go through the same physical motions; they all end up with the same ritual result (being socially recognized as graduates).

Yet within this visual representation of the education pipeline, there was also this odd, evanescent moment of individuality. You get to have your name read out ritually to a huge audience. Some of the students strutted or struck poses for the audience. Others tripped or dropped their hats as they traversed the stage. This added a minor degree of drama.

Meanwhile, the faculty on stage followed along by reading the alphabetical list of graduates in the program. Alas, a typo appeared over and over at the bottom of almost every page of the program, under the graduates’ names. “Academic Disctinction” somehow slipped past the copyeditor.

This didn’t surprise me too much, because only a few days earlier, a sad email from the campus bookstore had apologized profusely for having stocked a t-shirt where “Whittier” was misspelled. At least one faculty person at graduation pointed out that this shirt would probably have become a collectors’ item if they had decided to keep selling it.

There was in any event something poignant about having the graduation become, in effect, the “firing hall” for faculty whose contracts are up. One normally thinks of graduation as being about the departures of the students, but at places like Whittier where there are plenty of temporary faculty, it’s also a scene of the departure of precarious faculty. (Adjuncts aren’t required to attend, but visiting faculty and postdocs — everyone technically on the “faculty” list — do have to.) “It’s a lot of people’s last day,” one tenured faculty member told me. Behind every ritual, there’s a labor politics.

As I left the ceremony, I decided to walk home through the nature trail that goes uphill from the Whittier football stadium. The parking lot rapidly dies down into dust; you can see the dots of the crowd through the fence at right.

Even from among the leaves, you could still hear the brass band playing exit music.

Here’s what Whittier College looks like this time of year.

I confess I avoided a handful of passers-by in taking these photographs, but the sense of momentary social emptiness is very real nevertheless, as if emptiness was one moment at the far end of a swinging pendulum of social motion.

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.

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

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

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

As the more suburban areas continued to expand, the downtown began to decline as larger retail development spread to the outskirts of the City. By the 1980s larger retail stores and a regional mall were constructed near Interstate 55, further negatively impacting the market viability and tenancy of the downtown core area. The continued decline in downtown commerce has led to the significant ongoing efforts to preserve the City’s history and certain landmarks that add to the colorful past of Cape Girardeau. [2-5]

Seen in long-term historical perspective, the city appears to be a classic — even stereotypical — illustration of how shifts in the dominant mode of transportation determine the patterns of economic and urban development: the city reoriented from river to rail, and later from rail to highway. Seen from closer up, we find out that the city has, nevertheless, tried to preserve its “history” and “colorful past,” whose value is, of course, simultaneously cultural and economic.

(This mural depicts town history.)

On one hand, its “history” offers a cultural identity to a city that otherwise might have no choice but to surrender to reigning forms of social and economic homogeneity in America: to have a “colorful past” is to claim to be different — or at least, to have been different once — from every other city of the same size and approximate shape. On the other hand, of course, having a history is an economic strategy: it helps to bring tourists, giving them something to look at, and something to purchase in the city’s antique shops, which line the semi-revitalized downtown.

(Semi-revitalized downtown, in a traditional American style.)

If you believe the population statistics on Wikipedia, it is a city that has never been larger than it is now, but one which has essentially ceased to grow. And in such a place, again for simultaneously economic and cultural reasons, it matters that this is a college town: the home of Southeast Missouri State University.

It was a gray day when I went past the main entrance to campus. The buildings looked modern, generic, designed for access mainly by automobile, the campus name adorned with flowers.

Across the street, things looked pretty empty. Those are two pizza restaurants off to the right.

There was, of course, a campus stadium.

I wouldn’t have guessed that the (largely homogeneously white) neighborhood had tremendously high crime rates. As it turns out, according to the campus police, in 2010, there were 0 murders, 0 manslaughters, 0 robberies, 0 assaults, and 0 arsons on campus. On the other hand, in the same year, there were 9 burglaries, 2 car thefts, and 2 sexual assaults. Not to mention 9 arrests for liquor law violations and 6 for drugs. So apparently they do need an emergency telephone. Plus, in America, it’s part of the cultural and institutional norms for a college campus these days: what good is a campus with a stadium and pizza restaurants, if you can’t also rapidly summon law enforcement?

However, closer investigation shows the existence of some problems that law enforcement can’t prevent. Such as the flooding of the Mississippi River and the corresponding inundation of nearby neighborhoods. (This scene was just across the bridge to Illinois; the town levee tries to prevent such situations.)

The campus law enforcement also seems unable to prevent the growth of empty lots and bleak student housing with tattered lawns. This is not an exceptionally wealthy town: in 2000, the median household income was $32,452, about 14% less than the Missouri state average, and 15.2% of the population was below the poverty line. According to the college, a majority of students don’t graduate. In terms of family incomes, 26.9% of students report family incomes below $30,000, while 28% report incomes above $75,000. Class may play a role in who gets to go to college here.

In terms of local eating options, there’s always Stevie’s Steakburger.

And that building in the middle there is, as far as I could tell, the sole local coffeeshop. It was quite modern inside.

“Apocalypse Now,” said the silver graffiti on a wall nearby.

Out in near the highway, the cars rolled by.

I was pretty fascinated by this town, I have to say. I won’t pretend my acquaintance is anything more than superficial. But I was surprised, especially, by the tiny coffeeshop culture: it was populated by a set of local intellectuals who wanted to import coffee habits from California, talk about medieval theology and haeccities, recount life as a soldier in the Iraq War (in one case), compare the local music scene to nearby Carbondale in Illinois, look down on “hicks” in the country, and dream about becoming writers. Intellectual life doesn’t always depend on institutional status and urban location.

At the same time, the college has a purely economic function that no doubt far outweighs its role in fostering tiny intellectual subcultures. According to the city’s Comprehensive Plan, the university is among the four largest employers in town, and is seen as an ongoing source of new jobs, a tool of neighborhood revitalization, an organ of general economic development. Apparently it has a “pivotal location situated between the downtown district and [a] proposed redevelopment area at William Street and Kingshighway intersection” (8-81), and, elsewhere in town, was planning a “research park.” It is, however, unclear whether this research park was ever built, as far as I can tell from the college website.

One wonders how and whether the narrative of an “evolving college town” fits together with the narrative of a “historical Mississippi River port.” Both narratives are, I suppose, economically effective, serving to orient official images of the city and to facilitate the sale of goods, services and experiences to locals and visitors. But they seem to conjure up very different senses of history. Very different architectures, even, if you look at the campus buildings and then back at the renovated downtown. What role does a college play in a nostalgic tale about an earlier era when almost no one went to college?

Here I just want to show you a little of what the house looked like.

Seen from the quiet back street where it sat, the house looked conventional enough, with a solid stone façade, high windows with the obligatory shutters, a witch’s hat of a gable.

If we look in through the garden gate, though, we can see that the garden is decidedly non-Cartesian, the path is narrow, the entrance bowed over with branches. The garden is a protected space, walled off, the plants preserving the boundaries of private life.

If we go farther into the garden (these next few pictures were from the next day, which was cloudy) we see that the space doesn’t open up into a large open lawn, but rather is divided into little areas with different things, the bush that shelters the bicycle trailer, the path that’s edged by a long clothesline, a brushpile higher than your head.

At the very back of the yard, a workshop was under construction. Building materials and tools piled everywhere. On the windowsill of the unfinished building was a curious row of wooden shoes, and inside there was a bass drum waiting to be played.

The yard was patrolled by a cat.

If we go back towards the street, we can see the dramatic difference between the front and back sides of the house. The front was decorated with a façade and full of windows. The back side was largely windowless and bare, the staircase being set against the blank wall at left. The main entrance to the house was unused, and the kitchen entrance through that glass porch became the main entry.

The little motorbike used for errands is just visible at left, its round mirrors like insect eyes.

From inside the house, we can look back out through the kitchen door, the long rows of pots and pans barely visible in the reflected daylight.

In our first real look at the kitchen, we immediately see what to me was the most fascinating phenomenon in this house: the incredible density and diversity of physical objects. Every horizontal surface is occupied. There are pots and pans of all types and styles. There are ladles and clothespins over the stove, an intestinal string of dangling garlic, a silver cylinder of an electric kettle. Bottled water in a plastic can with a handle, crowds of orange-tipped spices parading on the shelf, various kinds of pottery that I don’t have the vocabulary to classify. Dishes waiting to be washed, dishes waiting to be used. Beans in a jar, a bottle of Pepsi, a mortar used for grinding up grain. It was a space of managed chaos.

Facing the street was a big room that served for eating, for storing, for collecting objects, for sitting in armchairs. It was a room that had an even more astounding diversity of objects: objects of culture, of art (in unclassifiably many styles), of music (a piano and a radio), of business (on a desk with papers), of children (a toy train). Let me show you some of the things that were to be found in the corners of this room.

The table under the window had metal tools, a bowl full of collected rocks, a small watering can, a small lamp, a roll of twine, a black shovel, a tiny model lighthouse in checkered black and white, a big hollow tube of a black candle melted to a round stone that served as its base.

On the other side of the dining table, an immense sideboard held little art objects, family photos, tiny dolls, animals in plastic, a kid’s drawing, a watch, some empty bottles, a thermometer, a feather, a little clock, a folded bandanna, a silver pail, a toy rooster, beads, an antelope figure, a little green tree, a lavender rock…

I agreed with my host that my glass of juice on the dining table was beautiful in the light.

The other end of the room was equally complicated to look at. Mix of antique furniture with a scattering of mundane things, an ornate mirror beside a child’s blue globe, a carved cabinet beside a cardboard box, a fancy brimmed hat beside a mass-produced red backpack. This scene, like the others, was not particularly arranged to be seen; it was more like the accidental result of a rising tide of inherited and found objects, overflowing in every corner.

There was a huge armoire full of books. All sorts. Plant guides, French-German dictionary, a submarine guide to the Atlantic coast, novels by French writers I’ve never heard of, Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, bird guides, old books whose pages needed to be cut apart with a knife if you were going to read them.

If we climb up the stairs to the landing on the first floor (which Americans would call the second floor; but French floor numbering starts at 0), we come to a pair of mirrors and a table with a new assortment of art objects and a little clock. I decided to leave myself in the picture for once. Wouldn’t want to be one of those ethnographers who effaces themselves from their representations of the field.

Around the corner, we find a bathroom that used to be a bedroom. This wasn’t the kind of house that originally had a shower, I gather, so half of one of the bedrooms had been converted for the purpose. It made for an odd kind of mixed-used space; this half of the room looks like a bathroom, while the other half (off to the right) was a bedroom with fluffy comforter, as if the room were a page from the children’s book Magical Changes where you recombine different images in surreal fashion.

If we climb the stairs to the third floor, the walls get a bit less decorated and it feels a bit more spacious. There was a skylight that seemed more modern than the traditional French windows on the lower floors.

Finally at the top of the house was a long high-ceilinged bedroom where I stayed up under the eaves. A narrow window peeked out under the gable I showed in the first picture above. It looked old, its paint a bit flaked, partly cracked, the shutter trimmed with rust.

Out the window was a view of the town, the pike of the cathedral about to spear the cloud in the distance.

Arabic or Turkish art objects off in the corner, more stored than looked at, but nonetheless making you feel like you had suddenly fallen into a glimpse of a completely non-French world.

Over the low mattress where I slept loomed a little constellation of lamps on the dresser. (I see I hadn’t made the bed.)

I won’t give much of an analysis of this scene for now, since I have other things to write today, but I find it interesting to ponder the domestic history apparent in this thicket of objects. The house was in its third generation in the family, presumably accumulating stuff all the while; probably most of the things there had little histories of their own. I’m not sure that I would even know how to classify all the objects in these photos; it would be impossible to find a neat distinction here, for instance, between “useful” and “aesthetic” objects. Even some of the most utilitarian kitchen objects were aestheticized, stylized; while conversely, even something seemingly decorative like a round stone might end up serving as an impromptu candelabra. I was reminded again that there’s way more to someone’s life than the little fragment of a self that gets presented on a university campus. A professor’s life — or at least this one — has a long history of social relationships that leave little traces of themselves in the form of collected things in the home. And this history (from what I heard of it) no more adds up to a single linear narrative than the mass of things in the living room conformed to a single principle of accumulation.

My host, I have to say, was someone who reminded me enormously of old American hippies of my acquaintance, the kind of person who you’d find at Paris-8 far more often than at more traditional French universities. He seemed to have a strong sense that his house was a non-normative space, a place that needed “cleaning up” to be presentable to company; and indeed, his home was noticeably more cluttered than other faculty homes I’ve glimpsed. At the same time, it was a tremendously lively space, full of projects done and half-done; most faculty don’t build their own workshops in the back of the garden, and that wasn’t even his only construction project. We can see here, it seems to me, that the home can be a space of deep non-normativity, partially liberated from the judgmental attitudes of the neighbors or the public, a space where an alternative order can be created that diverges from French society’s usual obligations of neatness and propriety.

There’s a lesson here for researchers, like me, whose main ethnographic sites are institutional ones. If you only look at what happens in, say, a campus, you’re at risk of forgetting that what you’re looking at is one of the most highly regimented spaces in the society in question, and probably needs to be understood in relationship to the relative spaces of freedom that people have in their domestic life. No one lives their whole life in institutional space, after all. At the same time, on the other hand, a foreigner like me is bound to have limited access to these domestic spaces, especially when they’re not the main focus of the project.

Maybe in some future project I can look into the interface between domestic and professional life in academia. I imagine that for many faculty, this boundary zone is full of painful compromise and fracture, somewhat like a dislocated shoulder.

This gate isn’t normally open to the public. There was something vaguely contradictory about the staff’s relation with the public, like in an art museum where they’re there to smile at you but also to protect the place against you. At this gate, two people stood watch in suits: one of them was radiant and tried to persuade every passing person to come visit; the other (back to the camera) seemed silent and kept watch.

Farther inside the premises, there were security guards stationed at every corner. I suspect that they don’t patrol that heavily on usual days, since the workers seemed unfamiliar with each other. I overheard one guard asking another, “What was the name of that guy downstairs, again?” “Umm, no idea.”

This, the building where the Minister has her office, is what I would describe as standard French government architecture. Pale stone, French and European flags. Leaping arches, solemn columns. The decoration is more than merely functional, but not ostentatious.

The first room you saw inside was this, apparently a place where they hold press conferences and the like. I noticed that the decor combined very traditional features like a parquet floor and a chandelier with very businesslike, modern features like a tiled ceiling and little spotlights. I guess that’s how you try to be modern while retaining the aura of past forms of architectural dignity.

They were handing out little pamphlet histories of the last thirty years of higher education. I may look at the details of this ministerial history in a later post; it was an odd mix of Big Science accomplishments (particle accelerators and the like) with organizational reforms in French higher ed.

Looking back across the room, we can see that one guy rubs his forehead, one woman yawns, one girl scratches her shin, and a couple seems to be reading the informational display.

Up the staircase to the Minister’s office, a curious piece of art tells us that “nothing is not nothing.”

Abstract art seems to be the theme. This was the Minister’s outer waiting room, complete with a collection of random academic books.

This curious art project involved an army of little figurine soldiers arranged in a skewed, false-perspective grid.

“Liberty or Death!” If that message really does draw on the famous American Revolution speech (“Give me liberty or give me death“) then it might be the most prominent sign of American political inspiration in this whole establishment.

Old glass in the windows lets through droplets of oily sunlight.

The view from this second antechamber looks out over the Panthéon. I’m tempted to guess that this highly symbolically loaded scene was deliberately organized by the architects.

They had installed ropes for crowd control, and to keep you from touching anything important.

Here we have the shiny conference table in Madame Pécresse’s office. Always interesting to observe the prominent ceremonial use of plants, and more specifically of flowers, in these settings.

The Minister’s desk: it has some little stacks of books, some art objects, a few little photographs, a flag in the corner. Certainly fancy but hardly overwhelmingly ostentatious, especially by French standards. I was curious about why there were two telephones, given that either one of them looked able to handle a dozen telephone lines at once.

A ceremonial photo of her boss hung on the wall. To the right was a photo of a rocket launch, a further reminder of the ministerial emphasis on Big Science-esque national accomplishments. That thing at the bottom looks like a statue of dove siamese twins.

Beneath her office window, there was a carefully kept, walled garden. At left you can just make out the vertical figure of a security guard. He had excellent posture.

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s former library was in this room, they were proud to tell us.

Looking out from the back garden, the ministerial lawn mower was stowed away in a corner of a lower courtyard. Off camera to the left, I spotted a security guard sitting on an out-of-the-way bench, staring at nothing in particular.

A war memorial initially seems out of place at an education ministry, but you have to remind yourself that these buildings are the former premises of a prestigious military engineering school, the Ecole Polytechnique.

This sculpture seemed to me to evoke far more agony than the war memorial. The official description read something like this:

Three anthropomorphic sculptures in bronze stand in the garden to the right of the Court of Honor, enclosing the plants. Three characters, one upright, one kneeling, and the third lying down, are set on cement foundations laid in the soil. They have been there since the 1980s.

Giuseppe Penone, the sculptor, is an Italian representative of Arte Povera. Here his gesture sets a constraint on nature without preventing the growth of the tree. The presence of the plant also reveals a certain relation to time, growing with the rhythm of a different lifecycle from our own. The artist explains that the oxidation of the bronze, exposed to the elements, gives the metal an aspect much like that of the leaf or the trunk “as if the plants produced the sculpture”…

If you could see off to the left of the photo, you’d see that a small tree was engulfed by another one of these metal figures. At any rate, we have here a quite different ceremonial use of plants from that visible on the Minister’s conference table bouquet. If you wanted to theorize about it, you could perhaps say something about the way that art and plant life, far from embodying an opposition between “cultured” activity and wild nature, in fact end up serving a similar ornamental function in this setting. They render things solemn. They’re pretty. And in a place as cramped as central Paris, it’s difficult not to see this sort of deliberately unpragmatic space as a form of conspicuous consumption of real estate.

I went through a grim suburban railroad station in Dublin on my way there. But in the pedestrian bridge over the tracks, there was a pair of grills that produced one of the most intense moiré patterns I’ve seen.

When you got to the campus, though, there was an sense of almost physical relief compared to the tightly enclosed urban campuses where I work in France. This was the enormous lawn just beside the old part of campus.

It even had wildlife.

The old campus itself was stone. Everything there was very quiet. (I think this part of the campus is the seminary, matter of fact.)

Admittedly, the cars and parking lots have risen up between the old buildings like a bituminous tide.

And the rows of dumpsters were somewhat aesthetically out of place, to say the least.

I was surprised to find out that the library was named after Pope John Paul II. Across from its front door was a very… pastoral sculpture.

If we crossed a bridge we came to the new side of campus (it’s the National University of Ireland-Maynooth).

The reflections ran off to a vanishing point.

There was even a creche with a playhouse.

This low building was locally considered the ugliest on campus. It didn’t look that bad to me.

A whole complex of new dormitories had been built in the last couple of years (all those buildings in the far background).

Out in the town, on the other hand, houses were low, tightly packed, a bit glum, barely colored, very similar to architecture I’ve seen elsewhere in the British Isles. One of these had all its windows broken and the rain pouring in, and seemed to have been left that way for some time.

One notices that in the university’s advertisements, they don’t show images of that part of town.

It strikes me, in hindsight, that it’s worth emphasizing that the march bore a diversity of political messages. While an anti-Sarkozy, pro-immigrant message was certainly the predominant message and the one picked up by the media, there were also, for instance, a number of people marching on behalf of higher education and research, attempting to add their own message to the mix and to show political solidarity with the larger project.

To the left was the “Recherche Publique Enseignement Supérieur” (Public Research Higher Education) balloon.

Later on, I found the banner of Sauvons l’Université (“Save the University!”). I asked someone what the political situation was in the universities this fall. “It’s the rentrée [ie, homecoming, the start of the year],” I was told, “so there is no situation yet; it remains to be created.” I rather like that tiny comment as a fragment of local political temporality.

A group I hadn’t heard of: “Education without borders.”

And another one, the Teaching League, who apparently are there to defend secular public education. I asked one of them: haven’t you guys already won? France has had secular education for a century, I’m thinking to myself… Yes, in general, but there’s always something that needs defending, they answered.

This one is even harder to read, but it says: “Let them grow up here” (laissez-les grandir ici). It seems to me based on a very common immigrants’ rights slogan: “We live here, we work here, we’re staying here” (on vit ici, on bosse ici, on reste ici). The strong, poetically repetitive emphasis on being here, a case of what linguists would call spatial deixis, is a key component of this political symbolism. At the same time, there’s a complex invocation of political temporality here too. To begin with, there’s the temporality of exhortation, the temporality of a political demand (let them!…). But at the same time, this sign invokes the whole temporality of living, of growing up, of children in a crowd holding hands, of children being allowed to stay where they are, allowed to eventually become full-fledged French citizens and to fulfill their role in reproducing French society.

What’s poignant about this sign, and what makes it different from the slogan “we live here, we work here, we’re staying here,” is that it’s not the children themselves who are holding it; it’s the adults who are demanding a future on their behalf. At the same time, rather less poignantly, it’s the native-born white French here who are demanding a sort of mercy for immigrants. There’s a whole dimension of concealed group membership in a slogan like this one, a “them” contrasted to a tacit “us.” Most French street politics seem to be mainly about “us” and to involve groups advocating on behalf of themselves, but immigrants rights politics has an unusual orientation towards defending the other, defending the out-group. “Don’t touch my friend” (touche pas à mon pote) is a super common slogan in these contexts, and it has the same rhetorical structure as this sign: an appeal to power on behalf of some powerless third party.

And, of course, it also draws on the imagery of schoolchildrens’ crosswalk signs. Or perhaps those children holding hands are an image of the next generation of street protesters?

Related to the temporal frame of political fragility that I heard evoked by Sauvons l’Université, these people’s t-shirts read: “provisionally at liberty.” As if invoking the spectre of a future in which the government will round them up.

The same temporal frame of a fragile and hazardous future comes up in this handmade sign: “Tomorrow it could be you!!” As Moacir’s post notes, the memory of the deportation of the Jews was quite present in this event, and I have an intuition that this slogan here also has a bit of an echo of that famous poem about “first they came for the communists…”

Sarkozy’s government has for some time declined all interest in street protests, but it’s interesting to note that lately, especially with this week’s much larger march against their reforms of the pension system, they seem to be at least pretending to pay a bit of attention to this form of political expression.

The very tiles on the walls are gridded.

The bars and grills of the windows recede along their grid towards an unreached vanishing point.

In a courtyard at Toulouse, the pillars run in rows. The cement beams run in columns. The bench has a predictable railing. The windows are little boxes of crosses. The grass is boxed in. The one curved cement beam in the open ceiling only serves to set off the space’s overall linearity.

The chairs and desks are in alternating rows, their regularity still evident even if we look at them from an angle.

One starts to wonder if the campus was designed to make the individual feel a sense of vertigo in the face of the endlessness of this rectangular tunnel. The plane of the ceiling, broken up into a vast set of cement indentations, mirrors that of the tiled walkway. The sides, admittedly, are less regular, but even there we see regular columns, symmetrical pathways leading off on both sides.

The deeply gridded forms of this campus space make for an even more unexpected contrast with this mural, with all its organic and chaotic lines, with its clashing colors and sense of incongruous corporeality, its bulging green face and stark hair, the folds of its purple robes.

At the same time, not all student decoration breaks with the grid form. Here we can see that even the activists sometimes decide that their posters look better laid out in a neat 3 x 3 square.

If we look inside a lecture hall, we can see down to the vast square of the projection screen, the grid of the ceiling, the grid of the brick walls, the rectangle of the table, the rectangle of the doors, the smaller rectangles of the papers taped up on the walls.

Looking up from the point of view of the professor, we can see the crease where the pattern of the bricks meets the pattern of the desks.

Though if we look closer, we can see that graffiti takes over on a smaller scale, rupturing the longer rectangular patterns of the bolted-down furniture, taking us away from the regimented view towards the professor’s dais that a lecture hall is designed to create.

One has to remind oneself that even if we look close up at the graffiti, even if we try to lose ourselves in its colored snakes and curls, we still see the blurry edges of the long wooden tabletop stretching off again into the distance along parallel lines that appear to meet.

There is long precedent for this kind of Cartesian architecture in French official spaces. This here, for instance, is a gigantic canal built as an ornament to Napoleon’s former palace at Fontainebleau. It too stretches out almost to the apparent horizon, flanked by rows of identically pruned trees.

Even seen from above on maps, the griddy similarities are evident. Here’s Napoleon’s park at Fontainebleau:

And here’s the grid of the Toulouse campus:

Obviously this second map is much denser and more convoluted than the park, but the similar pattern of long avenues remains apparent.

I’m still not really sure what to make of this apparent cultural-architectural pattern. And of course grids are hardly the sole invention of the French. But there’s something to be said for trying to notice patterns and preferences, like this Cartesian pattern, that usually pass without notice, being entirely taken for granted in the course of everyday life.

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.

It would be hasty, no doubt, to conclude that the lack of verbal communication between most members of the march indicates indifference. The manif is an event whose significance derives less from the usual forms of personal interaction than from the sheer effervescence of mass bodily proximity. From the heat of the crowd. From the noise of the crowd. From shouted slogans, even the inaudible ones, and from the shouts of colors of hundreds of signs, and from the hiss of mass motion. From the fact that, for a change, strangers on the street are assumed to share a common purpose.

A manif has a point of departure (often a big Parisian square), a destination (maybe a government ministry), and a route connecting them. It becomes a performance of political linearity, its physical progress iconic of the political progress tacitly demanded by the marchers’ signs and banners. By cultural convention, the crowd becomes iconic of a social group (the homeless, the miners, the students…) and the march itself becomes symbolic of a populist political process where the governing powers are expected to bend to the people’s will, a will manifested in the collective body.

But not everything about a manif fits into this neat political schema. The manif’s collectivity is partly a product of the mass media: dozens of dozens of photographers record not so much the lived experience of the marchers, which is often mundane and incoherent, but the dramatic banners and spectacular images of the crowd as a whole, often taken from rooftops or cartops (left). The whole collectivity is almost never visible to the marchers themselves at the time; at best they see it afterwards in the papers. But even as collectivity is technically mediated, individuality is effaced: most people carry premade signs and placards with standardized messages (“The university is not a business!”), as if disinclined to think up their own slogans and happy to blend into the crowd. Sidewalk spectators, for their part, tend not to talk to the marchers, usually content to watch the march pass like a spectacle. One person’s corporeal effervescence is someone else’s commodity image.

And even leaving aside these internal paradoxes, the manif is a political ritual that often fails to produce results. In spite of dozens of street marches over a four month period, the Spring 2009 university movement failed to persuade Sarkozy to withdraw his reforms. Today in France, university activists are looking for new tactics.

This fellow was from UNEF. As I asked to take his picture, an older man he was talking to edged back out of the frame, and the activist drew himself up in a sort of pose.

The local leader of the Mouvement Étudiant. I think he was sort of like the boss of the other Mét militants; one of them later stopped talking to me because, he said, he was afraid the boss would be annoyed he wasn’t giving out fliers. I’m struck by the definite posed look here too. I guess you can’t just ask to take people’s photos and then expect them to not pose.

This person sitting at the left-wing Fédération Syndicale Étudiant table was actually from the CGT (a larger labor union). He wanted to know what the labor situation was like in the US. Looks a little more relaxed than the others, perhaps in part because he’s sitting down.

A militant from the Confédération Étudiante.

A trashcan by the student election tables labeled “trashcan for tracts” where you could throw your political fliers once you’d voted. I guess we should applaud their dedication to recycling, but it somehow seemed funny that ten yards from where they gave out the tracts, there was a place for you to throw them away. These tracts have a very short lifecycle and duration of meaningfulness, it would appear.

I have to remind myself at times that an anthropologist’s careful scrutiny of a local artifact like a tract is totally alien to the inattentive, half-bored way that most students seemed to regard them. Very few tracts are actually read, people say here. Some people throw them out immediately, without even looking, as if the only reason they accept them to begin with is to humor the people distributing them. Others refuse them outright — which seems far more honest.

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.

There were also informational tables, such as this one for the Mouvement Etudiant, which is the right-wing student group associated with Sarkozy’s UMP government. As you can see, they didn’t always bother to sit by their table.

Inside these doors under the election banner, there were a series of informational panels, one for each group. From left to right:

UNEF, the National Union of Students in France, is the largest French student union. These signs proclaim that they are “the” student syndicate — the only one present on every French campus, they’ve told me. They’re said to be close to the Socialist Party. Their election platform had a long list of 21 different demands; the more notable were “against competition” (which is a way of opposing the government’s market-oriented university reforms), “quality job placement,” “against selective admissions to master’s programs” (open admission is a traditional university value here, though more and more threatened), for a university daycare center, and for reimbursement of students’ costs who commute to Aix from Marseille. A few of the demands, for instance for recycling on campus, seemed more perfunctory and designed primarily to compete with other groups (the Greens in this case). And the demand for free photocopying on campus seemed like a good bit of pork for their student constituents.

Cé, the Student Confederation, also seemed relatively centrist by student politics standards, defining themselves in opposition to UNEF. The big slogan here is “for the success of working students I vote Cé.” The cartoon has the green character saying: “and for THE SUCCESS OF WORKING STUDENTS, what do we do?” Response (from the yellow-scarfed UNEF militant): “AGAINST WORKING STUDENTS bla bla bla STRONG SIGNAL TO THE GOVERNMENT bla bla if you’re still voting for us promise this time we’ll get something…” — which I guess is saying that UNEF has made campaign promises they haven’t followed through on.

Cé also advocated an alumni network (un réseau des anciens), which is a proposal I haven’t ever heard elsewhere; they demanded that “skills learned from experience” be validated by the university; and they proposed a government supplement to student workers’ salaries. On a more tactical level, they officially opposed UNEF-led (or left) blockades of the university, calling them “sauvage”; these blockades presumably lasted a long time during last year’s strike.

Fac Verte, the equivalent of the Green Party on campus. They explained to me that they are a group of various subgroups — “ecologists, décroissants, disobedients, alter-mondialistes, libertarians, anticapitalists” — and their politics proposed a sort of student labor exchange, a daycare (cf. UNEF), free public transit for students (cf. UNEF), recycling (cf. UNEF), recycled paper in the xerox machines, organic fair-trade food sold on campus, a carpool network, new environmental standards for academic buildings, and the like. They say they’ve already succeeded in building a collective garden.

The left-wing groups (notice how these panels were arranged in a progression more or less from most centrist to least centrist) on campus are SUD-Etudiant (SUD stands for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique) and FSE (the Student Union Federation). They are “syndicats de lutte,” which could be roughly translated as “fighting unions” or “unions in struggle”; they say “we privilege collective action over backroom negotiations to obtain our claims.” Their claims involve a total opposition to government reforms; they also demanded a campus daycare, “free and easy means of contraception,” and the renovation of the (decrepit) campus buildings. I was told that they don’t really do elections or care greatly about electoral politics, and they were probably the least aggressive in their campus outreach.

Mét, formerly known as Uni, said that they changed their name to be more appealing to the public. Not to mention getting a nice cheerful new color scheme, grey and pink. Their big argument here was “Stop the Strike!” or “Against the Blockages,” and they explained that they were for a closer link between universities and the business world, for more job placement, and, in essence, against the campus left. (Their pamphlet argued for punishing student strikers.) They were very slick and professional and extremely pushy, deploying canvassers at the campus entrances, intentionally encroaching on other campus groups’ space.

The elections themselves took place at this table (the above signs were hung on that white structure at left). As it turns out, UNEF won. Their site had a little press release:

“A large victory for UNEF, with 38% of the votes. It was a clear victory, leaving no room for appeals. UNEF showed a strong progression since 2008, gaining 3 seats, and returned to its place as the foremost student organization. UNEF obtained 2 seats of 5 on the Administration Council (1 seat for the Greens, 1 for SUD/FSE and 1 for Cé), 6 seats out of 16 on the University Life and Study Council (3 seats for the Greens, 3 for SUD/FSE, 2 for Mét and 2 for Cé), and 3 out of 4 seats on the Scientific Council.

“The other organizations showed strong losses. This elections shows that today there is no union alternative to UNEF, the other organizations (Greens, SUD/FSE, Cé and Mét) not getting more than 16% of the vote.

“UNEF thanks all the students who have supported the UNEF project; its three priorities will be:
-annual compensation for students in all majors
-fighting against competition between universities
-fighting against selective admissions in master’s programs

“We thank you for the confidence you’ve shown in us.”

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.

I met one of the graffiti artists and he was particularly proud of “Loveless.”

And of his slogans about “Class War.” (“We need love” it says in the corner.) (Don’t ask me what it means that he wrote in English, because I don’t know myself.)

Baptiste Coulmont, a Paris-8 sociology professor who’s also posted about this occupation, posted some similar pictures, describing it as “vandalismes et de dégradations (oups) d’expressions artistiques contre-culturelles sur lesquelles il ne faudrait porter de jugement.” That is, it’s “vandalism and degradation (oops) counter-cultural artistic expression that must not be judged.” Whatever Coulmont’s personal position may be, self-contradictory sentences like this show us the split consciousness and irreconcilable values that are so common at Paris-8. On the one hand, campus graffiti is viewed as a traditional form of free expression; on the other hand, there’s a major desire to build new, clean, “nice” university spaces. The more the campus improves its physical architecture, the more (implicitly) it sets itself apart from the somewhat downtrodden neighborhood it lives in.

The occupied space itself was divided into various areas: an agitprop table, a set of bookshelves labeled “feminist library,” a “free shop” that had clothes for exchange, a sleeping area, a bunch of tables where people ate, a kitchen. This was the agitprop table, looking out onto the semi-occupied terrace with its littered chairs.

That’s the feminist library in the background.

The kitchen felt curiously familiar: it reminded me of hippie co-op houses I know in the United States. Everything was sort of a mess but it felt lively. (There aren’t any pictures of the occupants here, though; they didn’t like the idea of being on camera. Possibly worried about the legal repercussions of being caught at the scene.)

The occupiers were apparently planning to accompany their wine with a side salad of green peppers, eggplant and broken carrots.

I asked someone in the feminist library what I should take pictures of, saying I wanted to record some traces of the scene. He suggested I look at a political book he had handy: “Chechen Children’s Drawings: I don’t want to draw war any more.”

The drawings were, frankly, depressing, but that’s only to be expected.

Although the overall political merits of the occupation are very much open to debate, I was quite impressed by the overall flourishing of new social organization. Everywhere there were lists of supplies to buy, lists of projects to attempt, instructions on how to use kitchen appliances. Here you can see another sign of nascent domesticity: a long list of proposed names for the occupied space.

Some of the names were awfully straightforward: “The Place (le lieu)” or “Free Occupation (occupation libre)” or “GAV, the Anarchist Vandalist Group.” But others were more idiosyncratic: “Siberia” (which was also the name for the walk-in freezer), or “The Eye (l’oeil),” “The Asylum (l’asile),” “The Ambush (l’embuscade),” or “The Non-Place (le non-lieu).” Some even managed to be incomprehensible: “Le Bischkek (capital of Kyrgyzstan?),” “Panorami (?),” “Fikdouin (?).”

At any rate, in this desire to find a name, I felt an intense and fascinating desire to create a new, almost-domestic space in an otherwise impersonal, sometimes slightly grim campus environment.

After about two weeks, the university administration chained the doors shut and the students gave up the project. I’m told they were discouraged by a brawl which took place there about a week into the project. “The open space is now closed,” a friend informed me mock-seriously afterwards.

One of the occupation’s many spray-painted slogans, the one pictured here, had read: “Eat them before they eat us.” As it turns out, it was the occupation that got eaten first.

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

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

The train inevitably pulls into the station.

After which it inevitably leaves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.]

The more serious debate went on with a panel discussion.

However, among the panelists was the university president. And every time he opened his mouth to speak, people in the audience booed and hissed. He waited for them to finish; the moderator made failed pleas for civility; he spoke some more; his face became agitated.

In essence, his speech was a failure, blocked by the crowd. “By anarchists,” someone claimed later. He didn’t stay to the end of the debate, leaving by the side door soon after his (interrupted) speech had come to an end.

One of the other people talking was a representative of a squatter campaign. He explained to us that squatting had the advantages of being exciting and rent-free, but that, of course, there were “strong chances of legal trouble”… at any rate, I was interested in his negative comments on traditional protest forms. “Internships mean that corporations use young graduates for months and then dump them instead of hiring them. This will be your future if you don’t resist. New forms of protest must be invented against the Thatcher-like governments that resist “traditional” protests by waiting them out.”

And this has indeed been one of the common remarks about last spring’s university protests: that traditional protest forms (i.e., street marches) seem ineffective against a government that can simply ignore them.

Now looking back up into the auditorium, we can see one of the protestors standing up. He was shouting about the undemocratic format of the event and about how the voice of the audience had been excluded. The original format dictated that panelists spoke first, followed by “invited” audience comments, and finally general comments. That fell apart when the “general” audience wanted to speak sooner: after the speech you see pictured here, the event never returned to the sedate form of a well-groomed public event. Rather it hissed permanently with the noise of loud conversations among the audience, it hissed with interruption, it hissed with anger and incoherence.

Incidentally, it doesn’t look like such a large crowd in this photo, but there may have been a couple of hundred people there all told.

A number of foreign activists were present. At the end, an Austrian fellow took the stage to give a sweeping critique of the chaos of the event and to express a general sense of disappointment. He was speaking English, so the translation was into French. I’ll translate back:

We cannot simply talk about politics, we must act! It is a matter of respect not to insult others during the debate; we’ve gotten results at the end of six weeks of occupation of our university. The presidents of the university and of the region were obliged to negotiate with us. I’ve been surprised to see that this debate has been so philosophically oriented… and not adequately pragmatic. We’ve come a very long distance to bring you ideas and not to talk about philo[sophy]! Let’s move on!

Since I’m interested in the relationship between philosophy and politics, this last remark interests me. It seems to say: philosophical discussions are antipolitics. Philosophy discussions are a withdrawal from action. Philosophy is mere metadiscourse.

A minute later, someone, perhaps the protestors in the audience, set off firecrackers in the auditorium. Naturally, everyone jumped up out of their seats. (Including me.) We waited anxiously to see what would happen; another little explosion went off, even louder than the first. The crowd became muddled and people started to walk out. The security personnel showed up on the stage and waited outside in force. Someone made a half-hearted proposal to “occupy” the Sorbonne but I don’t think it got anywhere. At any rate, I got out of there and went home, not even stopping like a good ethnographer to survey other participants on their reactions.

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.).

The Department of Philosophy Annual Party.
Friday, June 29, 2007. Starting at 7:30pm. At Montreuil sous Bois, 6bis rue Dombasle. People’s House.
Metro: Mairie de Montreuil and Bus 121 or 102
Bus Stop: “Cemetery” and it’s to the right of Lycée Jean Jaurès.

Thanks to the hospitality of the Montreuil People’s House, the Paris 8 philo annual party will take place this friday june 29th at 7:30pm. It’s a nomadic, autonomist tradition that sees itself as a sort of philosophico-gastronomical and musical banquet where everyone can share food and drink with five other mouths, everyone presenting their own national or regional culture or their own culinary preferences. Much live music will bring out our mutual hospitality, and our pleasure in being together to share a festive moment (and to nourish the wish to see each other again next year). Students, teachers, and their family and friends are strongly invited to participate in the success of this EXCEPTIONAL ENCOUNTER.

Let me just note that, compared to the monochromatic deathscape of the last image, we see here a dramatically different style in indigenous art: more like the art of celebration than the art of nightmare political laments.

It has the nose of a bull, a mouth full of baleen stuffed with gravel, the whiskers of a bloody mop and the facial shape of a television set (complete with little feet like a dimpled chin). Don’t ask me what this face indicates, but since it was high up on the wall near the ceiling, I doubt many people look at it on a regular basis.

It’s some kind of an object with handles…

“Madness is when you keep acting the same way, expecting a new result… -Einstein.” There are similar versions of this statement in English, but I’ve never heard it was Einstein who said it. Still, it’s entertaining that a slogan that in a sense critiques repetition would be prominently displayed in a classroom, which is, after all, a place for the repetition of knowledge. It’s also entertaining that this (written) utterance of the slogan is itself a repetition of a well-known formula that has seldom been known to produce definite results — thereby also arguably performing what it criticizes.

The view out the window is obscured by bars, or anyway a sort of anti-vandalism metal grating. Is it there to keep the philosophers in? To keep the masses out? Neither, but it does seem that its function is to make sure that the only way into the room is via legitimate possession of the classroom key, thereby maintaining physical control over academic space.

Security at Paris-8 deserves more of an investigation than I’ve given it so far. Maybe later this week…

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.

If for some inexplicable reason we peer under the desks, the long landscape of the amphitheatre is disrupted by the iron trunks of chairs and the round wooden wings of seats and hanging desks. No more clean linearity of the sightlines.

Not everything was what it appeared to be. This discolored patch on the back wall, now decorated with a fire evacuation plan, was almost certainly once a window into an AV booth. I couldn’t say why it was walled off.

“It’s your university, don’t dirty it.” I saw a couple of these signs. Apparently someone believes that little moral exhortations on signs are going to radically improve the course of student conduct and reduce (what must look to administrators like) vandalism. Ironically, the sign itself is dirty, crumpled and worn.

Someone ignored the sign and left tags on the wall. (Let me know if you have any idea what this means.)

“We want a rich life, not the life of the rich!!!” It turns out that some of the seeming student “graffiti” was also a carrier of a moral message. But a radically other moral message from the “don’t get things dirty” imperative of the other sign. This is an anti-wealth or anti-class message, I guess. A curious image of human beings in the cage of a shopping cart. I hadn’t heard of this group, No Pasaran! they seem to be called, but they seem like some kind of small left-libertarian group. From their website, I couldn’t tell what they do besides publish a journal. That and put up stickers.

They made an attempt to paint the windows black, but if you found the gap in the paint there was a view out into the bitter gray of near-dawn, the lit windows of the next building fading into the reflections of the desks in the glass.

A raised table, poorly lit by a fluorescent lamp shining on the whiteboard and a dim incandescent light aimed high on the wall & accomplishing nothing. Two microphones, passed back and forth between panelists. Debris of paper and waterbottles. Notebooks. Five men, one woman. Semi-formal dress: coats and jackets, Balibar in a vast yellow scarf, collars peeking out from unbuttoned shirts. Some are leaning back, the two to the left seem to be maybe whispering to each other, a couple take notes, the man at right stares out into space hands clasped as if the audience weren’t even there. (We will come back to this point.)

If we turn to look at the audience, we see a lot of middle-aged and old folks, interspersed with a collection of philosophy students and other possibly radical youth. Many of the people I know from the Paris-8 philosophy department showed up — unsurprising, since it was partly a homage to their recently departed trostkyist colleague Daniel Ben-Said. The room was almost full; you can even see, as if in a cartoon, two people draped across the auditorium window and peeking in (at top center). It’s interesting to think about the collective bodily states of an audience. This would be easier if I’d given you a bigger image, but you can see at the same time the orchestration of the collective gaze (largely directed down at the speaker) even as many seem to be facing elsewhere, looking down at their notes, looking off into space. In terms of overall posture we can see something like an orchestrated slackness, a socially authorized moment of physical laze, with a lot of people leaning forward onto their desks, their heads extended towards the podium, the rest of their bodies left behind dangling like irrelevant appendages: in a setting like this, where you’re sitting still for long periods in an auditorium, the torso and arms become nothing but support systems for the eyes and ears, the mouth is irrelevant since you’re not talking, the hands may wiggle slightly as they take notes, the legs are doing nothing but waiting for future motion. Often the arm is propping up the chin, or the cheek, or some other part of the head, as if the burden of thinking weighed things down too much for the head to hold itself up — and though I’m sort of kidding about that, there’s no question that we can see here some excellent examples of socially authorized intellectual audience posture. The melancholy lazy attentiveness of a hand holding up a chin, little imitations of Rodin’s Thinker, would seem a lot less normative at a rugby match, I’m guessing. Note-taking too might seem out of place in a stadium or a rock concert: we notice that seemingly spontaneous intellectual engagement as an audience member is in fact done in accordance with local social norms. Local norms that differentiate the occasion from other occasions.

Just before the talk, a crowd milled around outside at the bookseller’s stand. Bookselling seems to be the kind of small commercial activity that goes best with talking about communism. That and selling coffee in the session breaks. I did hear a few interesting ideas in the talks (Balibar‘s especially), but afterwards I tended to agree with some other friends that it was a deeply academic occasion, one with no audience participation and a traditional division between the speaking intellectual luminaries and the silent receptive audience.

This sense of the event seems to have been shared, because afterwards, someone wrote a satirical email to the philosophy department listserve:

Je me permets de vous transmettre en récit un cri silencieux que j’ai entendu aujourd’hui, partagé par qques personnes

Comme dans une scène de dialogue platonicien,
qqu’un a rencontré qqu’un qui cherchais à connaître tous les détails concernant l’événement qui réunit Balibar, Rancière, Zizek, et les autres qui avec eux prirent part au banquet, et quels discours ils tinrent sur le thème du communisme.
Malheureusement, il ne pouvait rien dire de précis, sauf qu’il avait mal au ventre
des problèmes de digestion surement
Puis le récit se transforme en publicité
après le café décaféiné voici le colloque communiste décommunisé
le public n’a pas droit de prendre la parole
mais tout cela est pour le bien du communisme pour que “les débats puissent aller le plus loin possible”, “pour approfondir les problématiques” sans être dérangés par les sans-parts et sans perdre du temps…..après tout c’est une question de productivité
Ne cherchez pas pour Socrate, le récit est post-moderne, à placer sur la voie de la comédie.

ça aide devant le tragique

“I’ll allow myself to share the story of a silent cry I heard today, one shared by several people

As in a scene of platonic dialogue,
someone encountered someone who wanted to hear everything about the event with Balibar, Rancière, Zizek, and the others who took part in the symposium, and what speeches they gave on the theme of communism.
Unfortunately, he could say nothing precise, except that he had a stomach ache
surely it was digestive problems
after decaffeinated coffee, here we have the decommunized communist colloquium
the public had no right to speak
but all that is for the good of communism, so that “the debates can go as far as possible,” “to deepen the problematics” without being bothered by outsiders and without wasting time… after all it’s a matter of productivity.
Don’t look for Socrates, this story is post-modern, to file under “comedy.”

it helps in the face of tragedy.

I won’t comment much on this intriguing prose poem other than to suggest that it’s revealing of a collective appetite for new intellectual or political forms in the face of a conference that was organized in an obtrusively traditional fashion.

This is the scene. The group is La Ronde Infinie des Obstinés, the Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn, which I wrote about a little bit last summer. Now it is winter. They have been meeting again every week to make the rounds. Two hours. Six to eight. At night. On mondays, right in front of the Minister of Higher Education. It has a regularity to it. A rhythm. If you’re going to walk in circles for hours on end, you better have a high tolerance for repetition.

Last week there wasn’t a big crowd. Twenty people, thirty at most. Carrying their red flags, which, though it’s hard to make out, have an emblem of a circle and the words la ronde infinie des obstinés in black script. There’s a ritual symbolism to marching with red flags, as if little political rites were one way of endowing otherwise inscrutable political acts with a publicly visible symbolism. In other words, without the red flags it would be ever so much harder for passers-by to get the political point. The red flags have a hint of a definite political content (Le rouge est aussi la couleur du communisme, says wp), but also and perhaps more importantly they serve to mark the event as political, and as they serve to mark the event as an event, as something that retains its identity from week to week not only politically but also visually.

Metapolitics, for lack of a better word, has been one of the major issues in the French university sphere. By metapolitics I mean the political question of whether some issue is a political issue. For many protestors last year, university policy was viewed rather like a space of battle, of political forces, of political ideologies. Sauvons l’Université! (Save the University!) went as far as to talk about a repoliticization of the university — though that was in July and now, six months later, the repoliticization has dwindled. But this view of events as political would never have been shared by the Ministry, for whom the protests appeared not as political acts but a species of irrational academic conservativism. In other words, as not politics. As just a kind of nuisance resistance to policy. The large part of the government response to the university movement consisted in ignoring it, hence in aiming to deny its status as politics worthy of official recognition. In short, there was a contest over political legitimacy, a metapolitical contest over political status that was itself folded back into the political situation.

(This raises some methodological problems for political anthropologists. Is it already partisan on my part to talk about university politics? To talk about conflicts? There is no local consensus on whether ‘university politics’ even exists as such. To analyze is already inevitably to take a stance on some of these issues.)

In a situation rife with metapolitical concerns, the red flags, drooping under the weight of their symbolism, come to seem like an effort to repoliticize a dormant situation. (And I wanted to write more about the red flags, about the scene at the Ronde, about stubbornness as a political project and emotion, but perhaps on the whole it is more sensible to split things up into a series of shorter posts. NB: Thanks to Jean-Claude for the photo.)

This is the university where I do my research, this year. I like this picture because it has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with the overdetermined and crass narratives that so easily predetermine one’s whole perception of this campus space. This is the tree that has grown up behind the amphitheatre with its jagged roof, the arms of the branch entirely geometrically incompatible with the sawtooth linearity of the dark building. There’s nothing here about politics, nothing here about pedagogy, this picture contains no academic knowledge, it embodies no concept unless you count the concept of mute visual juxtaposition of organic and inorganic form. There’s no knowledge in this picture, no sociality, no people, no conversation, no texts, no pedagogy, no politics, no record of human activity besides the roof built to some absent architect’s scheme. It’s autumn but you wouldn’t know that except from a couple of tiny leaves that gleam yellow in the underexposed daylight.

If we look to the left we can see that I was in an empty courtyard, where I had retreated one afternoon to write my fieldnotes and gnaw my sandwich undisturbed on a bench. It’s a site meant for human interaction: we see the sulky lips of the concrete benches curled over as if waiting for someone to sit down and converse merrily; but no one’s there, as the site is slightly out of the usual circulation patterns and the pedestrian bridge that normally brings traffic through this area is closed for some sort of repairs. Trees stoop low almost sagging. Leaves are scattered across the asphalt and some of them are falling into the storm drain. The shadow of the rooftops leaves behind inversely jagged sunshine. Funny how such a small shift in the camera’s angle can shift the colors so completely; the high contrast of sky and twigs has been replaced by drably sunny grey and brick and ragged green and hints of graffiti.

Another day later in the fall the sun came out of a cloud and the trees began to look more barren. This peculiar street, a service road really, just dead-ends in the fence which marks the end of campus. I cannot adequately stress how peculiar it is that this campus has only one public entrance and otherwise is completely encircled by a wall; I suppose there must be a gate at the end of this little road, but I have yet to see it opened. Down there where the curve of the road ends, you can’t see him in the contrast and the low resolution but a young guy was sitting by himself on the bench, hunched over something in his lap like a book, as if keeping intentionally as far as possible from anyone. It was one of those days where the afternoon sunlight wavered and threatened to withdraw altogether as if at the end of a sulky monologue.

Incidentally, I also feel certain that the planner who designed this road must have felt very clever to have contrasted the blocky grid of the brick building with the sinuous bends of the road and its bordering flowerbeds. And the wispy trees at right have a verticality that parallels that of the building at left, framing the road in the middle as if it ran through a valley with obstacles on both sides; although the organic trees are also and simultaneously the symbolic opposite of the building. Symbolically speaking, we can see on this campus and on many campuses an emergent opposition between the natural, which becomes ornamental as it is represented by carefully arranged decorative plant life, and the social, embodied by the brick and metal buildings where university life happens. Though what’s funny is that it’s often the buildings which evolve in unpredictable and convoluted ways, getting covered with graffiti or just plain worn out or repurposed or speckled with cigarette ash, while the ornamental campus trees often remain relatively untouched and unworn and continue to fulfill their assigned purpose as elements in a landscaped landscape. As if the built structures were actually more organic than the plant life, so carefully tended.

If we look inside the building, here in the corridor of the art department where philosophy classes also meet, the scene is more highly aestheticized, the floor shined, the light arranged, the walls colored in dramatic dark hues, the students coming and going like blurred creatures with bookbags, two people at the end of the hall approaching each other (is the one on the left waiting for the other, leaned on the wall?), everyone in dark clothes, posters marked the walls, paint chipped off near the floor (those white marks on the wall at right center) where passing feet have damaged things by accident. At times this hallway is packed with people waiting for their classes. Most of the rest of the time it just sits there waiting to be passed through.

Passing space. Quite often this corridor space of freedom and transition turns out to be more socially fruitful than the classrooms that it connects. This is a space where you see people make friends, where people make plans to meet later, where they inquire where the bathroom is (just on the right here before the doors), where they try to find the right classroom, where it’s easy to talk to strangers, where people sit on the floor trying to finish their lunch before class, where people sit waiting for someone to show up with the key, because classrooms are kept locked up when class isn’t in session, because of an ill-defined fear of misbehavior. This ill-defined fear is prevalent across campus, indicated by the barred windows on buildings within the campus, which is itself already walled in and guarded; and there is a definite class subtext to the security measures, an interpellation of the student body and of the neighborhood youth as a threat. Now, this corridor, and its twin on the next floor up (the cinema department), are visually nothing like the rest of campus; they’re remarkable for their boldly painted dark walls and their colored lighting effects; if you look at the end of this hallway you can see that normal fluorescent lights return out in the lobby. Still, the aesthetic differentiation of this corridor does nothing to lessen the pervasive security measures; I wouldn’t be surprised if over the last couple of months I’ve wasted an hour of my life, cumulatively, waiting for someone to show up with the key to the classroom. It’s a contradictory space, a space of visual differentiation and security concern and lively but very periodic sociability. Right before class is a good time to hang out. Other times, the hallway looks more lonely, and you feel loud and conspicuous if you’re talking, like the time on this very spot when I asked an old man about his PCF political background during the class break.

Outside the front gate of the university on a different day and more recently, on a cloudy day before (american) thanksgiving around nightfall, a series of pink banners announces the 40th anniversary of the university. An art exhibit is in the process of being mounted, scaffolding inside used to install things that hang from the ceiling or decorative lighting. Last year there were doors in this wall, and these doors were cracked and postered, and the interior of the room you see here was not an art exhibit but rather the university’s main and only entry hall, a gloomy but politically active space plastered with signs and slogans like “vive la lutte armée!” and battered vending machines and towers of chairs arranged as if leftover from barricades. (I wasn’t there for the barricades, but I heard someone say this fall that it was convenient, at the time, because if you needed a spare chair, you knew just where to find one.) Now the doors are gone and it’s glossy and someone has decided to spend money on backlit pink signs that glow in the blue of dusk. The university looms up in this photo, a tower of a chaotic building. And as we see from the signs, the university is also self-memorializing, a phenomenon often locally referred to as “nostalgia for ’68”; I fully expect that when the exhibit opens here, the chaotic political space that used to be there will be entirely replaced by fancy text and artfully chosen photos that aestheticize the messiness and incoherence and spontaneity of actual political action on campus. The genius of the culture industry that seizes on 1968 and other such glorious resistance fantasies lies in their ability to turn political spontaneity into a theme to be ritually commemorated and reinvoked.

As I took these pictures, no one was looking at this unfinished exhibit besides me. Someone came up behind me and said: “Salut, Eli!” I jumped. I wasn’t expecting to be seen. “Salut,” I say, “ça va?” but the kid had already walked away. Obligatory greetings at Paris8 can be interminable but also superficial.

Across the street in the subway station there is a little bakery where people buy coffee and sandwiches. Or pastries. Sometime maybe I’ll write a structural analysis of campus eating establishments, but suffice it to say for the time being that this place, being a private establishment, charges €4.20 for a lunch special (un menu étudiant) versus €2.90 for the cheap sandwich deal at CROUS on campus. But the difference is that the sandwich at the bakery is far better tasting.

You can get an idea of the way that social life takes place here on the casual social ground of empty space in front of the subway gates. It was almost night and raining a little; people were clustered inside or under the eaves outside. The space had a regular rhythm, like any subway station; every four minutes a big crowd streamed out from the gates, having just gotten off the train, while in the other direction people trickled in towards the inbound platform at a lower and more even rate. This station is the end of the line. You can see in the picture three people (male) standing in baggy jeans and sweatshirts talking to each other, five or six people in line for pastries, a couple of people walking in towards the subway. It’s an anonymous space, part commercial, part social. It’s not a place where everyone is dressed in downtown Paris bourgeois getups.

And if we look back towards campus out the window of the subway station we can see the little crowd of people, again mostly in dark clothes, many in jeans I think, but at any rate a large crowd who has finished class for the day and is going home, trickling towards the metro, crossing this large expanse of empty asphalt that is an even more transitional space than any campus hallway or courtyard. Sometimes people hang out here and smoke, but mostly people just rush back and forth, actually running, sometimes, when they’re late for class. (If you get off the train that arrives at 9:05 a.m., this is fairly common.) There’s a fruit stand out here too, just out of view at right, the type where if you only have 30 centimes or a ten euro bill for a 55 centime orange, the guy will probably just take the 30 centimes. You can see here that the courtyard is bleak, looks rained on, with a few dents and blemishes and tattered posters, and you can see that the aesthetic attention put into the interior campus landscaping doesn’t extend to this courtyard outside the campus gates, even though, by all rights, this courtyard is a far more central campus space than anything I showed above. You can’t go to this university without crossing this courtyard. At dusk the university glows in the dusk, the rows of lights show warm in the library windows against the cold gray of clouds and the cone of a single tree sticking up and a metro station pillar in the middle, and yes that’s the library glowing over there above the pink signs of the art exhibit I showed above. The reflections of the metro station’s lights swim through the photograph in a little school.

In this picture we see a university that isn’t visibly a “maoist university” (as someone described it) or necessarily “une université de banlieue” (a university of the outskirts) or “une Université-Monde” (a University-World) or “une aventure de la pensée critique” (an adventure of critical thought, as one current slogan would have it). Or to the extent that we do feel inclined to apply any of these retroactively produced labels to what we see, we can do so only through an exercise in classification that, at times, interferes with our comprehension of the social and visual spaces of the campus. They say that ethnography is an exercise in trying to understand the local understanding of local life, but sometimes local systems of classification can become an ethnographic burden, can interrupt and conceal the lived curiosities and contradictions of carelessly evolving ordinary worlds.

Knowledge is a weapon! … The union is a force!

This is the continuation of my last post about the visual culture at the University of Toulouse (Mirail). Just having seen the 14 Juillet, i.e. Bastille Day, the national holiday in celebration of the 1789 French Revolution, it’s tempting to draw some comparisons with a rather different, far more legitimate kind of political landscape: that of the enormous military parade that took place Tuesday morning on the Champs-Elysées. Yes, I went, curious to see what exactly was involved in this enormous national pageant.

I was planning to be somewhat stunned by what I expected to be the overwhelming spectacle of a parade of tanks and thousands of soldiers through Paris. But my first sight was rather of an overwhelming flux of ordinary people, backed up inside the Metro station. Just to get up the staircase (the escalator was motionless) took five minutes of slithering through crowds, the kind where anonymous bodies smush together and purses and backpacks whack you inadvertently. Once outside, people thinned out marginally, so that there was occasionally room to breathe, but there was still a mass of bystanders twenty rows deep separating me from the parade. I found my friends and we wandered back and forth in the crowd, the shorter one climbing on the back of the taller to get a peek at the action. We caught glimpses of the shiny helmets of the mounted cavalry, adorned with feathers bobbing in horsey rhythms, and we saw the roofs of red trucks carrying the firemen (pompiers), and a number of miscellaneous military trucks, which looked like the army towtruck brigade, with a crane or two painted helmet green. The helmets of the soldiers atop their trucks were motionless, as if they were under orders to stare straight ahead. Their civilian audience, meanwhile, was busy climbing every available object to try to catch a glimpse of them: lampposts, fences, trees, and one guy who stood improbably on top of his bicycle, which leaned against a statue. For us there was never a clear view of the spectacle, only a chaotic view of the audience.

So from my perspective, instead of being a direct visual experience of the French army on the march, the parade seemed more like a discontinuous encounter with the distant sights of their passing signs: the tip of a gun, the plume of a feather, the whir of a patrol of helicopters passing overhead, the spiral of an ornamental paratrooper descending to salute Sarkozy. It struck me, though, that the military’s essentially absent presence was somehow fitting, that the fleeting quality of their appearance is emblematic of the average citizen relationship to the military here (or in Chicago, for that matter). The military is something that appears at the fringes of everyday life, something whose power is more a matter of imagination and media representation than immediate contact.

After the parade, people crowded around on the street to examine the dispersing military vehicles. Here, people huddle around a Convoi Exceptionnel involving a tank or two escorted by some police cars. Here there was a bit of close contact with the military, but not at the height of a spectacular parade; just in the incongruous context of a tank driving through the middle of Paris. Which brings us to an interesting fact: if one examines the media representations of the parade, there is no sense of the crowd, no sense of the spectators, no sense of the unframed afterimages of the military dispersing into the city streets. Rather, one finds a series of perfectly framed photographs of state power:

Mal Langsdon/Reuters; published at liberation.com.

In the newspapers’ photos of this event, we find jet fighters with red, white and blue exhaust traversing the Arc de Triomphe, fairly symmetrically framed, the aircraft looking like a large pitchfork poking the sky from the ground. And soldiers perfectly coiffed in long mechanical files. And sometimes the photos are full of military regalia but almost lack a frame, as if the army effaced the horizon to fill the visible world. There are pictures of political leaders (Sarkozy, Monmohan Singh from India) reviewing the troops with generals at their shoulders, of their wives waiting (always, in this series of photos, it’s the women who are the appendages of the male figures of power, and the soldiers themselves are 100% male), of political celebrities greeting each other.

Our provisional conclusion about the absent presence of the military in the eyes of (what I take to be) an average Parisian civilian is only intensified by this clash between personal experience and media representation. For the vast majority of the crowd, lacking a good view of the parade, the army remained barely visible when seen first-hand, but was spectacularly, immediately present as soon as you examined the newspaper, the TV, the internet photo galleries. As if the military’s absence at the level of lived experience was only amplified by its rich presence at the level of collective representation. (Worth noting that public representations of the military are, of course, in themselves complex and varying: e.g., the left-center newspaper Liberation showed somewhat fewer military photos than its more conservative counterpart, Le Figaro. And in terms of everyday life, I could tell you about people gaping to see the helicopters passing, little girls sitting in the back seat of a military truck, people lining up to get their photos taken with soldiers in uniform…)

The intellectually fruitful question thus seems to be: where and how does the military appear in the French society and collective representations? How does the military figure in French political life today? Surely the symbolic level is at least as important as the facts of actual current military operations. And this suggests an accompanying question, which comes back to my research project: how does military force enter into university politics? What is going on when, as in the sticker I showed above, we are faced with the metaphor, “knowledge is a weapon”? What happens when “the military” is replaced by “the militant”? When public spectacles of military force are transmuted into objects in academic activism? When we find that “la lutte,” struggle, is a privileged term in French leftist or union movements? When we find all sorts of invocations of the raised fist — a sign which evokes fighting, no doubt, but not really armed rebellion? Take for example this mural, back in Toulouse.

This may have been the most elaborate piece of political art I saw on a campus littered with political art. Look closely. To the left, Che Guevara (with a red nose). Moving right, there’s a dangling chain, what looks like workers on parade with arms raised, faces almost obliterated by the passage of time (or vandalism of the mural, hard to say), a red star and a raised fist, flames, a woman with braids and a face masked by a red bandanna, the Toulouse slogan “Pour une fac critique et populaire.” And at right, perhaps most interestingly of all, a long quotation from the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, which says in its 1793 version (art. 35): “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

I don’t believe that this article appears in the version of the declaration currently in legal force in France (the 1789 version, better known, lacks a clause authorizing insurrection). But it is striking that even in the “most left-wing university in France” one finds a reference to official, Republican texts in the midst of the most radical piece of political art. This reference works, I think, because activists can appeal to the historical entanglement between Republic and armed revolution as a source of justification for anti-establishment activism. Curiously, this kind of activism can draw simultaneously on Marxist and French Republican imagery. Marxism, of course, also offers plenty of historical moments of actual armed struggle, war, insurrection and counter-insurrection, and so on. Which is why we see the odd juxtaposition of Che Guevara and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the same mural. Or a yellow hammer and sickle juxtaposed with the figure of a militant painted in the red, white and blue of the French Republic:

Note what looks something like a sword in the guy’s hand. But in fact, when we examine further, we find a strange tension between, on the one hand, the figure of the activist as an embodiment of radical militancy, and on the other hand, this militant’s subordination in relation to the police, who are (obviously) the figure of state violence:

What looks like a policeman — a guy with a pistol anyway — is advancing down the stairs and pushing down what must be student protestors, armed with books and scissors…  it says “Rebellion” but in fact what happens in Toulouse this spring is that eventually the French CRS (riot police) cleared out the protestors. “Sans résistance,” says the news story. But regardless of how or whether actual events are represented in this mural, the “militant” theme is loud and clear:

Work ! Money! Papers! For NO ONE !! War on the state! Long live freedom!

Another one put its political message even more simply:

Death to the uni[versity]! … with the anarchist A just above.

And why death? Why death to the university? What does that mean?

Death is the ultimate symbol of violence, the ultimate outcome of military intervention, the ultimate angry political demand. We can see here, in this little piece of graffiti, what happens when armed conflict becomes the model, the working metaphor, for every sort of political situation. Even one about so non-military an issue as national university policy. In this model, every political situation becomes a “struggle,” becomes a confrontation, becomes a reinscription of past histories of revolutionary violence. Of course, many French university activists do not employ this genre of radical imagery. But for those who do, it seems that they accept a traditional image of revolutionary politics that seems in the end little more than a conceptual twist on the ideological categories of the Republican military tradition, which so problematically presents itself in the parade above. In the universities too, militancy seems to be an absent presence: something easier to represent than to deliver, something more easily imagined than lived.

No to the LRU! says a figure falling into a trash can. Or is it the LRU itself that’s falling into a trash can?

“For a critical and popular university [fac]!” Apparently this is a traditional militant slogan at Toulouse.

“Get a new slogan please!” is the caption written below by someone who apparently disagrees or is simply bored.

[La fac, i.e. la faculté, is a now bureaucratically obsolete term that used to designate a college, a faculty, a division – as in the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Law, etc. It is still used in common parlance to refer to the public universities – les facultés – as opposed to other institutions of higher learning (private business schools, elite government institutes, and the like).

“For a hard and copulating university!”

This is one of those semi-untranslatable parodies. Instead of “une fac critique et populaire” we have “une fac qui trique et copulaire,” a perfect rhyme with a perfectly divergent meaning. “Triquer” is, according to a semi-reliable online source, a verb meaning “to strike” (like with a baton), which has militant connotations, but also “to get hard” and “to possess carnally.” And “copulaire” is an impromptu adjectival form of “copuler,” to copulate. So instead of a critical and popular faculty we have… well… one that gets aroused and copulates. Is anyone really advocating a sexual university, though? I guess this is mainly sheer parody, though there are long-standing and noteworthy associations between ’68 French leftism and sexuality that are in play here too. A famous slogan was, for instance, “Plus je fais l’amour, plus j’ai envie de faire la révolution. Plus je fais la révolution, plus j’ai envie de faire l’amour” – the more I make love, the more I want to make the revolution; the more I make the revolution, the more I want to make love.

Freedom in search of itself (with no compass). Seems rather ambivalent.

The muscled figure of a rather peculiar, gender-ambiguous creature, with long hair and what looks like lipstick but also with huge knees and three arms, is beating the reforms (LES REFORMES) with a yellow club.

A neat movement is a lifeless movement.

But “propre” is also an adjective signifying possession as well as propriety… so this could also be read as “a movement that’s on its own is a lifeless movement,” “a private movement is a lifeless movement.”

(At bottom, there’s something about Tunisia. Did I mention that the university is in a major immigrant neighborhood?)

Social movements are made to die.

More ambivalence here, no? Or at least ambiguity: we don’t know if this is the gleeful pronouncement of someone who hates social movements or the bittersweet musings of a militant. Does it mean that social movements are bound to accomplish nothing and end in uselessness? Or that social movements disappear when they win, transcending themselves through victory, as it were?

Free your mind [conscience, consciousness] and then you’ll be able to free your university [ta fac].

This struck me as a particularly hackneyed and empty slogan, personally, although an acquaintance in philosophy thought it was fine and not unreasonable. But I think she may not have shared my ingrained cynicism (or my sense of resonance with tiresome slogans from The Matrix).

Voilà: a trashcan with a human face! Or a face of some sort, at least, more cartoon than realistic.

I have no idea what this symbol means.

This one seems clear enough, by contrast. Always curious when French speakers choose to resort to English…

Act! Disobey! Alternative Libertaire!

Evidently this is a sticker belonging to a small libertarian socialist-anarchist organization. Their color scheme – black, red and white – and the red star are pregnant with ancient left-wing symbolism, and tend to communicate their identity more than the rather abstract slogan itself.

I rather like this one. It masquerades somewhat as another political slogan (Delirium! What a wonderful political emotion!), but turns out to be a sticker advertising a local band. (The link is in small print unreadable here.) Hence showing us yet again that political signs are vulnerable to various forms of recontextualization, reappropriation and culture jamming.

Women take back the night on March 7th!

The fine print is worth reading here too:
“Marre de la domination masculine” (Sick of masculine domination)
“Marre qu’on contrôle notre sexualité” (Sick of them controlling our sexuality)
“Marre des violences faites aux femmes” (Sick of violence against women)
“Marre d’être les premières victimes de la crise” (Sick of being the first victims of the crisis)

And then in the torn part of the page: “Manifestation non-mixte,” i.e. a non-mixed-sex demonstration for women only. With a curious icon in the background: set upon the traditional symbol for women, we find, reaching out of it, the figure of a woman (whose femininity appears to be indicated essentially by long hair and context) raising up her fist. An interesting icon, I think, because it reappropriates the raised fist, such a traditional symbol of leftist, revolutionary masculine power.

Looking back over this post… I see that I am not halfway through my collection of these images, but I suppose I should save the rest for a new post, lest this one grow any longer, and I miss dinner because of my blog. Which is a distinct possibility.

For now, I’m thinking of this collection of images as an incoherent political landscape, a collection of traces of contradictory political projects, commercial projects, rhetorical disagreements, nihilistic skepticism, comic optimism. I guess, in this presentation of images isolated photographically from their architectural and spatial contexts, one loses a sense of how the images become part of the buildings, blend into the walls or jump out from them, form a piece of everyday life. Walking around the university, no one besides me was looking at these messages. They become part of the background. The ambiance of the place. There’s an interesting paradox in these messages: their various cries for attention and urgency become reduced in daily life to a kind of vague institutional atmosphere. They signify student intervention in academic space even as they signify the impotence of this intervention as it turns to mere ambiance, something that appears to be largely felt rather than seen, ignored rather than heard. Of course, as types of media, graffiti and signage are remarkably unidirectional, leaving no indication even of their authors’ identities, much less a way of offering a response, aside from scrawling one’s own message (which creates an apparent dialogue between graffiti tags or signs without necessarily reaching the original authors). Unless some kind of contact info is given in the message (the occasional URLs, for example), these signs are just there, provoking reaction without affording any obvious possibility for interpersonal contact.