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.

American universities, especially the most prestigious and the most exclusive, are skhole made into an institution. Very often situated far away from the major cities — like Princeton, totally isolated from New York and Philadelphia — or in lifeless suburbs — like Harvard in Cambridge — or, when they are in the city — like Yale in New Haven, Columbia on the fringes of Harlem, or the University of Chicago on the edge of an immense ghetto — totally cut off from the adjacent communities, in particular by the heavy police protection they provide, they have a cultural, artistic, even political life of their own, with, for example, their student news­ paper which relates the parish-pump news of the campus. This separ­ate existence, together with the studious atmosphere, withdrawn from the hubbub of the world, helps to isolate professors and students from current events and from politics, which is in any case very distant, geographically and socially, and seen as beyond their grasp. The ideal-typical case, the University of California Santa Cruz, a focal point of the ‘postmodernist’ movement, an archipelago of colleges scattered through a forest and communicating only through the Internet, was built in the 1960s, at the top of a hill, close to a seaside resort inhabited by well-heeled pensioners and with no industries. How could one not believe that capitalism has dissolved in a ‘flux of signifiers detached from their signifieds’, that the world is populated by ‘cyborgs’, ‘cybernetic organisms’, and that we have entered the age of the ‘informatics of domination’, when one lives in a little social and electronic paradise from which all trace of work and exploitation has been effaced?

From Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 41.

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.

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

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

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

Secretary: “Yes, it’s on the edge.”

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

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

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

Me: “Really, they’re here?”

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

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

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

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

The long version:

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

I quote:

Infrastructures

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

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

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

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

I got hired largely because I had a background in both anthropology and web programming. These past few years, while I was finishing my dissertation, I was also working full-time as a web applications programmer for the University of Chicago’s Humanities Division. Mainly I built administrative applications for them — internal software to keep track of student progress, keys, endowments, course scheduling, that sort of thing. I also worked on some research projects — Scrolling Paintings and the Digital Media Archive were the most interesting — and used a bunch of handy technology, like ansible, solr, ruby on rails, ember.js, drupal, shibboleth, LDAP, nginx, postgres, or redis. It was an unusual job, because a lot of universities don’t have in-house software development, but I learned a lot there.

In any event, my new job in Whittier is half in the Anthropology Department and half in the Digital Liberal Arts Center. This spring I’m teaching a class on digital cultures, and next fall, I’m thinking of teaching a class on anthropology of education, and another about web programming. And I’m working on a couple of book projects coming out of my dissertation — one’s going to be about the French faculty protest movement in 2009, the other about the Philosophy Department at Paris 8 — and hope to be able to blog much more regularly, at last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was struck by the grain of the windowpanes and the gravely complexion of the sunshine. The date was April 14, 2010. The occasion was a debate over the university’s impending transition to “expanded competences and responsibilities,” responsabilités et compétences élargies, which is French bureaucratic jargon for the transfer of various managerial functions (like human resources management and accounting) from the national Ministry of Higher Education to the local campus administration. In short, it is a sort of managerial devolution, wherein formerly centralized bureaucratic functions are removed from the national level and transferred to the local level. This process was mandated by the Sarkozy government’s controversial 2007 university law, the Loi Pécresse or LRU, and since Paris-8 was a center of opposition to this law, the transition to the new managerial regime was controversial on campus.

An elongated view of the center of the amphitheatre shows the windows carved high up in the walls, the central dais with the President in his suit surrounded by his counselors, the vertigo of looking down at him over the cascade of desks and the cascade of hair and the scattered ranks of faculty and staff, the monotonous lines of critical leaflets that had been put out on the desks before the meeting to sway over the crowd, the many empty desks and seats that reminded us that, in the end, only a tiny minority of faculty, staff or students would bother to attend an event like this one. (To be fair, it was a relatively well-attended event, but nonetheless the room was mostly empty.)

Looking across the room, we get a clearer view of the ranks of assembled heads, the baldness of old men, the pink hands of the guy next to me, the cris-crossed gazes of cris-crossed heads, of the way that most people sat in couples or small groups of their friends and allies (people seldom sat right next to their local adversaries, so that their physical proximity loosely mirrored their social proximity), and a good view of the trapezoidal shape of the desks, and of their emptiness, and of the elaborate grid of lighting and air handling mounted in the ceiling, and of the reflections of daylight in the ceiling, and of the way that the space was closed off symbolically and acoustically and spatially from its surroundings, on the one hand by its architecture, on the other hand by its sociology.

But the thing that strikes me most is the way that these sorts of phenomenological details don’t leave a trace in local memory, don’t much stick in anyone’s head as far as I know, don’t get recorded or memorialized unless through the passing, partial whim of a passing ethnographer. The debate over this reform continues at Paris-8 and has, if anything, gotten more bitter than ever in the last year — so I’m told — but the little details, the little visual impressions, of a debate like this one just don’t stick anywhere. And it’s interesting to try to document these sorts of things that don’t matter.

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 ought to give you the general idea. The other wall and the inside of the door were no less decorated.

Beside the chain that flushed the toilet tank, there was a little user’s guide. “Please flush the toilet with the softness of an old lady. Thanks!” (This incidentally is also a fairly characteristic example of French cursive handwriting.)

A lot of the decoration was concert announcements and seemingly random images.

There were also some mock-political slogans. “Work less to earn less and live better” (travailler moins pour gagner moins et vivre mieux) is a parody of Sarkozy’s “Work more, earn more” (travailler plus pour gagner plus). Interdit d’interdire? takes a bit more explanation: it translates as “Forbidden to forbid?” which is a famous 1968 slogan, but obviously the joke is that it’s juxtaposed with an image of a smoking smileyface, as if to say: you don’t seriously want to forbid forbidding something as unhealthy as smoking, do you, radicals?

Some essential technologies for hygiene and body care: toilet paper, air freshener, a radiator for the winter. (I know someone out there is going to be saying: what is the point of anthropology if the best it can do is tell us that the French use toilet paper? To which I reply: As an anthropology blog, part of the goal is to remind us that what’s taken for granted one place is nonetheless far from universal. Laura Pearl Kaya reports that in Irbid, Jordan, for instance, toilet paper is “an amenity generally considered disgusting… and rarely found outside of tourist hotels” [2009:263]. Even in France, as every tourist knows, a toilet seat is far from universally supplied, particularly in public toilets.)

If we look more closely at the art next to the toilet paper, we see a postcard entitled “The world as seen by the French.” The different parts of the world are labeled as follows. Europe: “Euroland.” Russia: “Bigger drinkers than us.” Mongolia: “Lots of emptiness.” Eastern Siberia: “We’ll never be going that way.” Turkey/Middle East: “Scary zone.” India: “Lots of little people.” China: “Cause of all our woes.” Japan/Philippines: “Live animal eaters.” Australia: “Very far away.” Mauritius: “Little piece of France very far away.” North Africa: “Former colonies.” Sub-Saharan Africa: “Incomprehensible zone.”

Antarctica: “Terra incognita.” Southern tip of South America: “Home of Nicolas Hulot” (who’s apparently an environmental activist). Brazil: “Machucambos Country (indian musical groups).” Colombia: “Wicked FARC.” Guadeloupe: “Little piece of France very far away.” America: “New friends.” Canada: “Incomprehensible cousins.” Somewhere in the Arctic: “Santa Claus’ Country.”

I won’t get into a long commentary on this little image, but suffice it to say that it falls within the genre of this kind of maps; it involves a deliberate use of national self-stereotyping; and it invokes an interesting sort of national surrealism. It’s tacitly saying, in other words, that every nationality has its own, inevitably distorted, inaccurate, hyperbolic way of looking at the world. And it’s interesting to me that even in a space as tiny and enclosed and private as this toilet there’s an image of the world. As if even the smallest, most confined, most ostensibly instrumental and even profane spaces sometimes find themselves becoming scenes where the world gets presented as a totality.

Here at right we have the one potentially controversial image in this whole series: a silly photo of scantily clad men in towels labeled “Gay Saturday at The Baths.” I was ready to just accept it as one of the larger series of silly images, but soon after I moved in, one of my two (former) roommates made a point of saying something like, it’s not me who put that one up, don’t get worried, it’s just a joke or something like that. To make the most blindingly obvious interpretive comment about this, we see here that certain representations of sexuality are potentially threatening to the heteronormativity that pervades Parisian male youth culture, and hence evoke moments of boundary maintenance like this one. The message apparently being: Don’t worry, no one’s gay here. I guess if you wanted to meditate about this further, you’d have to think about how sexuality, privacy, intimacy, and bodily functions all get wound up together in spaces like this one.

I liked this poster, which is for the French publisher (called l’école des loisirs) of Where the wild things are.

Obligatory Beatles poster. To me, what’s interesting about it is its visual composition: we have here not just an image but an image of images, a compound image.

And to make matters even more analytically curious, I discovered that this particular toilet is — as ridiculous as it sounds to say this — a kind of reflexive space, a space that reflects back on itself, a space that represents itself to itself. Because on the back of the door was a photo of this very same toilet — presumably taken at the beginning before anything was put up on the walls. An image of toilets past, I suppose.

There were a bunch of other images of this apartment, of the roommates hanging out together, and of their living spaces. These two were photos of the living/dining room: a series of representations of the apartment itself as a domestic and social space. Of course, everyone including me has now moved out, so all this is gone now. They hadn’t found new tenants, so the place is probably sitting empty at this very moment, as I write.

I just want to end with a couple of broader observations about toilets. As American anthropologists recall from Horace Miner’s Body Ritual among the Nacirema, the (Western) toilet is a deeply profane space, and — as Miner observed fifty years ago — “excretory functions are ritualized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy.” That mostly holds true for France (with the major exception of male public urination, which is very widespread). Admittedly, there’s a whole economy of toilets here: there are people who make their living as public toilet attendants, collecting something like 35 cents from each visitor, and Paris famously has these peculiar self-cleaning public toilets scattered throughout the streets. Far from being totally private spaces, the shared public toilets create boundary zones between public and private, between physical intimacy and social distance. But they’re still deeply instrumental spaces, toilets: one associates them with what one can call in English “bodily functions” or in French, apparently, “faire ses besoins” (roughly, doing one’s needs). Which is why it becomes anthropologically interesting that a toilet would get so decorated, becoming as much an aesthetic space as a place for pure corporeal functionality. Along with the visual art, for that matter, there was an enormous pile of newspapers, which indicates that certain of my roommates spent long periods of time in this small space.

What does all this have to do with universities, you ask? Well, first of all, as a room in a student apartment, I reckon it falls under the broader rubric of “student culture” and hence deserves our attention. (Two of the three long-term residents here were students; the third was a recent graduate.) Indeed, universities themselves have toilets — ones which, in the badly underfunded French university environment, have sometimes become cause for consternation. So in a purely empirical sense, I’d point out that even the little temples of “bodily functions” constitute part of the institutional and social arrangements of academic culture.

But beyond that, it seems to me worth recalling in closing that, if it seems particularly inane to comment on toilets in connection with universities, that in itself is only a sign that we still live in a world built around a deeply felt opposition between the “higher” life of the mind and the “lower” needs of the body. I guess the hyperbolic way of putting this argument would be: there could be no universities if there were no toilets. Partly that’s just for simple biological reasons, of course. But it’s also true inasmuch as the cultural divide between mind and body — which the university embodies institutionally and draws on conceptually — would simply make no sense if there were no embodiment of the lowest and most corporeal side of things. For the university to be a very highly valued cultural institution, there must also be a very disvalued and stigmatized cultural institution to stand in opposition.

Seriously, though, I’m half kidding.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The university was bordered by the railroad tracks. This is what the main Faculty of Letters building looks like, seen from the train. Its façade was crumbling; here you can just make out the nets over the entrance to catch falling rubble.

But if you got off the train and walk down the little side street by the campus, there’s no sign of anything academic. No pedestrians, even, when I took this around evening. A few parked cars. Emptiness.

The only visible resident of the neighborhood seemed to be this cat, which fled moments after I took its picture.

By the way, if you want to see where this is, I’ve given an approximate map of my walk on google maps.

The most common form of public communication was a “Private Property” sign. That, it seems to me, is decidedly characteristic of this rather wealthy town.

The little café with its colorful mural was closed by evening.

As I approached the tunnel under the railway, a little sticker on the back of a road sign, half scratched off, transmitted a plaintive cry: “Citizens, The Social Republic Calls us to Revolt.” It was signed by the CNT-AIT, which apparently is an anarcho-syndicalist union. I doubt that Aix would be the most receptive town for this sort of message.

If you look back towards the university campus along the railway (which was up on the embankment at right), all you’ll see is cascades of spring flowers and long grass. No one was present; and the omnipresent walls (at left) served to separate private space from this strip of semi-public, unclaimed territory.

I crossed under the railway and climbed up its embankment. The university may be that tiny hint of a building mostly hidden by the trees; note how quickly it disappears into the semi-urban landscape. One is hard-pressed to call Aix a city, but “town” seems the wrong word for a place of 143,000 inhabitants.

A bit farther along, I came to a nursery school. In the mornings I often saw parents picking up their children there.

The official sign reads: French Republic. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Marcel Pagnol Nursery School. I note that the security arrangements are less severe and the fences lower than on the university campus.

As I neared the campsite where I was staying, the scene looked very much like highways everywhere at sunset. The streetlights waiting to spring to life. A few cars passing. The sheen of the asphalt.

No sign that it’s a college town. Perhaps the category of “college towns” is somewhat overrated, or at any rate tends to conceal the fact that academic spaces never manage to totally control or colonize their surroundings. The idea of a “college town” is scarcely applicable in France, at any rate; Aix is about as much of a college town as you can get, and even then, it’s nothing like, say, Ithaca, New York.

If we climb up into the university building and look out, we can examine the inverse perspective: the town seen from the university.

This (taken a different day) was the view from the philosophy department. That’s the campus library in the midground. This balcony in the foreground is officially off limits, though I saw undergrads climbing out through the windows to play on it.

Oddly enough, just as the university doesn’t look like much once you wander off into the neighborhood, so too the town doesn’t look like much seen from the university building. Red roofs are scattered among the trees, beneath the surrounding hills. The university blends into the town and the town blends into the surrounding landscape.

What’s the point of all this, you ask? I’m not sure myself, yet, but it seems to me important to emphasize that no matter how much universities may fantasize about their own importance, they still rapidly disappear into their surroundings.

A note for the bibliographically inclined. As regards the boundaries of campus spaces, the prior work I know of includes the following: Kate Eichhorn’s Breach of Copy/rights: The university copy district as abject zone (see also my old post), James Siegel’s Academic Work: The View from Cornell, Gökçe Günel’s The Gated Campus, Its Borderless Subjects, and the Neighborhood Nearby, Gordon Lafer’s Land and labor in the post-industrial university town: remaking social geography, Juliette Guilbert’s Something That Loves a Wall: The Yale University Campus, 1850-1920, and Blake Gumprecht’s The American College Town.

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

W — Go West

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose I should start by clarifying a few references. The “University-World” is the current official slogan for Paris-8, a concept-slogan that draws on the large fraction of foreign students at the university. Historically, it’s been a radically left-wing campus, hence the significance of the orientation towards the formerly socialist East. The university is currently located in Saint-Denis (if you haven’t picked that up from my earlier posts). And in Saint-Denis, the university’s mailing address is on the Rue de la Liberté, which is used here in the last sentence to amplify the consonance between the United States and Paris-8.

Now, I have to tell you that this text would come across as pretty counter-intuitive to most French readers. American universities in France are pretty often pictured as the incarnation of pure neoliberalism, of entrenched business influence, of massive structural inequality between rich and poor. In that light, it’s a bit of a shock to see the American university portrayed here mainly as a bastion of intellectual progressiveness, as the home of new ideas, of the “French Theory” of Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Cixous & Lyotard, of what Noudelmann called la pensée vivante, literally living thought. That goes against the stereotype.

Of course, and this is what I like about the text, it has some interesting ambivalences in its characterization of nations. France is cast as at once the bastion of a conservative, quasi-nationalist Sorbonne but also as the home of Paris-8, the radical institution from which much French Theory is said to have come. The United States, for its part, is painted as “producer of the best and the worst,” its trashy culture industry clashing with its intellectual openness. On the other hand, Noudelmann’s ambivalence about the U.S. is hardly identical to his ambivalence about France. One notes a certain asymmetry: France never appears here as a definite entity, but only as a cultural and institutional context designated by the adjective French. The United States is on the other hand made into an entity by being called by name. It’s as if France’s contradictions were spread out spatially and institutionally (the Sorbonne appearing, for instance, as the locus of conservatism), but the United States’s contradictions were condensed into one being.

The key conceit of the text, given the France-USA opposition, is to make Paris-8 into the key mediating figure between France and the United States. The U.S. appears here at moments as a massively magnified projection of Paris-8’s intellectual life. One wonders, of course, whether Noudelmann isn’t a bit overly optimistic about the life of French Theory in America. Many would argue that it became a radically apathetic, professional-intellectual commodity in its passage to the American humanities. I can certainly testify that the link between French radical thought and social movements, precarious even here, is dramatically more absent in the United States, so that there’s an effect of political deracination in reading, say, Foucault. And, of course, Paris-8 as a mediating institution is far from being without contradictions. A full analysis of this text would have to examine what it means that the text was displayed in an exposition on the history of Paris-8 that was derided by students as being an excuse for the past generation to relive their past radicalism in the glossy form of an exhibit. (I’ll have to come back to the exposition another time.)

In a way, this text is a commentary on the way that political space is nationally marked. At the start of the text, the (once socialist) East opposes the (emblematically capitalist) West, leaving France is somewhere in the middle. But by the end of the text, Europe is cast as a walled global center, encircled by its post-colonial others (Africa, India, the Caribbean) whose intellectual presence in France is thanks to their passage through the USA, where post-colonial studies has been more successful. In this later passage, the USA is cast as a point of intellectual mediation between Europe and the postcolony. I’m not sure what to make of this, to be honest, though it’s a good reminder that any understanding of French politics would seem to demand a fairly complex account of spatial metaphors.

There’s something to be said here about style, too, about the sly turns of phrase (not all of which I very adequately translated), about the sense of a continuous stream of thought created by the narrative’s twists and turns (is Paris-8 the most American of French universities? No! Unthinkable! And yet… And yet…). There’s something to be said about the paradox of a text that describes the globalization of ideas in a language that’s so full of local references as to be barely translatable (who abroad has ever heard of Saint-Denis, to say nothing of Liberty Street?). One sentence in the second paragraph was especially hard to translate: “l’Ouest nous a peut-être fait un enfant dans le dos.” Faire un enfant dans le dos can mean “take advantage of” but also has a more specific sense of getting pregnant against the wishes of one’s partner. Noudelmann explained to me that the idea is that the United States has given birth to French thought without France wanting it to, which is a rather striking sexualization of intellectual traffic, and one that reverses the usual “France is to the USA as feminine is to masculine” imagery.

There’s something curious about this text for an American reader too: doesn’t this tale of Paris-8 as the origin of French Theory run counter to the simplistic ways that French Theory is typically recontextualized in the United States? As far as I can recall from my undergraduate education, we weren’t taught to think of French post-structuralists as coming from a precise institutional location in France; rather, they were contextless ideas that seemed to come from “France” in the abstract, subliminally playing on the high-status connotations that French culture and language still enjoys in the American cultural imagination. There are in fact famous American academics who visit Paris-8, but I think most Americans of my acquaintance who read “theory” have never heard of it.

Well, my American readers, now you have.

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.

As you can see, Paris is still by far the biggest university town. If we look at the accompanying figures for 2007-8, it turns out that Paris proper has 156,743 university students, with 320,942 total in the Paris region (Ile-de-France). After that, we have Lyon (73,262), Lille (58,788), Toulouse (57,907), Aix/Marseille (56,590), Bordeaux (53,335), Montpellier (43,355), Strasbourg (37,299), Rennes (37,008), Grenoble (32,978), Nancy (28,078), Nantes (26,329), Nice (21,664), and from there on down… As in the last post on centralization, here too, mapping by student population size, we can see that the Parisian region remains by far the largest university site — its 320,942 of 1,225,643 total public university students comes out to 26% of the nation’s university population. (Note that universities only constitute about half–56%–of the French higher ed population, but we’ll talk about the rest of them some other time.)

But our thinking about centralization has to shift when we find out that, over time, provincial universities have grown and thus diminished Paris’s relative standing. In other words, it seems that historically, Paris used to be even more the center of the academic universe than it is now. To better understand this process let’s look at a thumbnail sketch of French university massification by a sociologist I know here, Charles Soulié:

Dit de manière extrêmement schématique et en si on se base sur l’évolution du nombre d’enseignants titulaires dans chaque faculté, discipline, on observe que la 1er massification, celle des années 1960 donc, sera à l’origine d’un développement sans précédent des disciplines de lettres et sciences humaines, tandis que la part relative des facultés de sciences, et médecine, baissera considérablement. Plus précisément en lettres et sciences humaines, la progression sera notamment le fait des nouvelles disciplines de sciences humaines sociales (psychologie, sociologie, etc.).

Put very schematically and looking at the evolution of the number of teaching appointments in each faculty and discipline, one sees that the first massification, that of the 1960s, originated an unprecedented development of letters and human sciences; while at the same time the relative fraction of the science and medicine faculties was considerably diminished. More precisely, in letters and human sciences, growth occurred primarily in the new social and human sciences (psychology, sociology, etc).

La seconde massification verra l’explosion des IUT, universités de proximité, antennes universitaires diverses, la part de Paris et de la région parisienne diminuant considérablement dans le potentiel national à la faveur d’un processus de régionalisation croissant de l’enseignement supérieur. Concernant les disciplines, elle s’accompagnera d’un développement très important de la faculté de droit sciences économiques, les lettres et sciences humaines, et surtout les sciences dures, connaissant une augmentation inférieure à la moyenne, tandis qu’en raison du numerus clausus la part relative des enseignants des disciplines médicales diminuera considérablement.

The second massification saw the explosion of IUTs (University Technical Institutes), local universities, and off-campus university branches; the relative size of Paris and of the Parisian region fell considerably in the face of a process of growing regionalization in higher education. This was accompanied by major growth in the faculty of law and economic sciences, while letters and human sciences, and especially the hard sciences, grew less than average. The medical disciplines, because of the fixed limits on their admissions, saw the relative size of their teaching faculty considerably diminished.

I’m not an expert like Soulié on what he would call changing disciplinary morphology — that is, the changes in proportional sizes of the disciplines. But the gist here, which is supported by various other publications I’ve come across, is that the “new” social sciences grew in the 60s, while now it’s the more vocational fields (business, economics, etc) which are the major growth fields. And if it’s true that, as Soulié says, the most recent university expansion goes hand in hand with university regionalization, then we might reasonably expect that Paris, the more traditional academic capital, would remain more dominant in older fields like “letters, languages and human sciences.” As is, to judge by this map of letters and human sciences enrollments, indeed the case:

It’s obvious from visual inspection that the relative size of Paris is much larger here than in the other diagram. I couldn’t easily find the exact figures for each city, but the key (which I had to crop) suggests that Paris has 120,000, while the other large dots are only a few tens of thousands. In other words, it does seem to be the case that the most traditional subjects (the humanities and social sciences) are particularly Paris-centered.

Indeed, if we look at the distribution of doctoral enrollments, we can see that Paris is, if anything, even more overwhelmingly dominant:

Here Paris is represented by a dot that means 20,000, while the other dots are probably one or two thousand and less. In other words, even if university education has been spread around the country, the reproduction of the disciplines, of the professoriate, of the academic “corps” remains almost exclusively a Parisian concern.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find data about the changing rates of Parisian (demographic) dominance narrowed down by discipline and degree level. But I think we can assume that some disciplines are less centralized than others, and that the degrees of Parisian centralization have shifted at different rates depending on the disciplines. I’ll try to track that down. In the meantime, it’s interesting to reflect on the curious interrelations we see here between ongoing Parisian dominance and growing but only relative decentralization. It’s as if there’s decentralization, but only according to a pre-existing spatial hierarchy. Ongoing centralization and gradual decentralization at once. Which should be no surprise to readers of David Harvey on contradictory spatial processes…

The scale refers to the number of universities in a given region. A few regions, shown in white, have only one university each; the majority of regions, colored grey, have two or three or four; and then there are a handful of regions with five or more, shown in various shades of red. Paris (or rather Ile-de-France, which simply means the Parisian metro area) is the major outlier, with 17 universities. Alas, I couldn’t find a color bright enough to indicate this degree of institutional dominance, and this isn’t even taking into account all the other major academic institutions that are primarily based in Paris: the Collège de France, the École Normale Supérieure, Sciences Po, EHESS, and so on. As for the universities outside France proper, there is one in Corsica (Corse) and two each in the Territoires and the Départements d’Outre-mer. (I actually know nothing whatsoever about these overseas universities; it would be interesting to learn about them.)

Looking at the diagram, it’s striking how Paris is surrounded by relatively empty academic space. The other big university poles would seem, in fact, to be as far from Paris as possible, at the southwest or southeast or far northern corners of the country. As if outside Paris there was an academic void for a while and major university centers only sprang up again when they could begin to escape its presence. The smaller red regions are far from the capital city.

All the same, I should acknowledge that this is probably a moderately misleading map. It doesn’t show number of students or number of teachers or institutional prestige, and these don’t always vary directly with the mere number of universities. In fact, it seems that when a city has multiple universities, they often began as one institution and were organizationally separated at some point. The University of Paris, after all, began as one entity and now there are 13 of it; 13 separate Universities of Paris, I mean. So sheer number of universities in a territory is not itself a conclusive measure of much.

But I do think if we mapped out student populations on the same map we’d find a roughly similar distribution, and this map does help visualize the Parisian center—provincial periphery system that continues to organize academic space in France. Nothing like it exists in the United States, where the most prestigious universities tend to be somewhat spaced out and located in different cities (they once primarily served students from their own regions, I suppose); of course there are major university cities like Boston and New York, but no single center is dominant.

That said, even within Paris there is enormous intellectual stratification, amounting to a center within a center. The oldest and fanciest institutions are clustered in the Latin Quarter right in the center of town not far from the centers of French government, as if spatial proximity to the French State went hand in hand with intellectual dominance in the academic world, while the universities of the outskirts (banlieues) are often poorer, serving more working-class students in poorer conditions, as in Paris-8 in Saint-Denis where I’m working this year. If you wanted to say something abstract about this, you might observe that it’s curious how national space symbolically structured according to these sorts of status differentials, which moreover form a sort of fractal where every center has its own internal periphery and every periphery appears to have its local center. Within Paris there is another periphery; and then again even within the center of the Parisian center we can still find marginal zones; and yet still within the periphery of the Parisian center, as at Paris-8, there are still smaller zones of dominance and zones of social abandonment. I was just hearing about Alexandre Bikbov’s research where he asked people to draw maps of how they see their social world: and it crosses my mind suddenly as I’m writing that it would be tremendously interesting to ask people to draw me maps of the French university world as they picture it.

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.

I have a bunch of photographs of university quads to look at here, and some more recent articles from the U.S. context to think about, but to start off this new set of posts I wanted to begin with this extract from a History of the University in Europe. It offers a very suggestive picture of how universities began to acquire real estate in the first place:

“In the late Middle Ages, as student populations grew and universities ceased to migrate, universities acquired buildings and movable property. For a long time time in Paris and Bologna the administration had not needed to take care of buildings, because there were none. Lectures were held in houses rented by the masters, examinations and meetings in churches and convents. In Paris, however, both the theological faculty and the nations began renting property as early as the fourteenth century, and acquiring it in the fifteenth century. With lecture halls in the rue de Fouarre and many other places, with colleges and lodgings, and with churches (all of them on the left bank of the river), the Quartier Latin became the university quarter of Paris. The young Bologna studium, too, contented itself with private houses and religious or public buildings for lectures, meetings, and ceremonies.

Growing numbers of students, some of them very young and needy, made housing facilities more necessary as time passed. College buildings arose everywhere, but especially in universities with large faculties of arts, such as Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and later on the German universities. Italian studia also looked for lodgings for their students. The comparatively few colleges in northern Italy were founded in and after the fourteenth century, at first in converted private homes. After 1420 a special type of building appeared, the domus sapientiae (house of wisdom) or sapienza, a teaching college modelled on the Collegio de Spagna in Bologna, built in 1365-7. The rooms were grouped around an arcaded courtyard. Gradually the sapienza ceased to be dwellings and in early modern times became the official university buildings with lecture rooms, discussion rooms, a library, rooms for accommodation and administration, archives, and a graduation room. The palazzo della sapienza became the current name for these sumptuous university buildings. (136-7)

[It goes on to describe 14th-century quadrangles built at Oxford and Cambridge, funded by donations and university funds.]

… By 1500 old and new universities alike possessed proper academic buildings — lecture rooms, assembly rooms, a chapel, one or more libraries, lodgings for students and teachers – and many articles of value. Throughout Europe, faculty buildings, and particularly college buildings with libraries combining functional needs with a show of magnificence, were visible signs that the masters in the late medieval university were no longer footloose. No longer could universities threaten to migrate, no longer could public authorities tolerate strikes or secessions; the monumental disposition and architecture of the late medieval university showed how completely it had become a part of society. University towns had acquired a character of their own. (139)

The back story here is that the early medieval universities (composed after all mainly of a bunch of masters teaching in rented rooms) were capable of wholesale mobility. If the local authorities ceased to be congenial, scholars could threaten to leave town, taking the university with them. (As in Bologna in 1211-20 or Prague in 1409; the former was only a threat, the latter involved doctrinal dissenters leaving to found a new university in Leipzig.) The acquisition of campus real estate spelled the end of this mobility and thus the loss of a major political option. Not that I really know anything about medieval society, but I imagine this moment as being the end of the powerful rootlessness that American hobos celebrated in song.

At any rate, acquiring real estate obviously had logistical advantages. We see in this passage that there was a real need for student housing and classroom space, and later libraries, offices, and so on. Universities entered into a regime of private property and ownership. And, the last paragraph tells us here, these buildings came to confer social legitimacy, “combining functional needs with a show of magnificence” that must have been equally a show of significance. The overly schematic reading of this passage would be that early universities acquired social legitimacy in the moment of their entrance into regimes of conspicuous consumption of private property.

It’s overly schematic because, even without really knowing the historical or institutional detail, it’s obvious that there were more complicated forms of political recognition at work; a quick glance at the book reminds us that there were real political tensions between kings, local authorities, the Pope, the local Church authorities, the local townspeople… social recognition of universities in such circumstances was obviously not one-dimensional. Nonetheless, the basic link between property and legitimacy seems clear. Such a link appears self-reinforcing: the more a university is legitimate, the more it can acquire property; and the more property it has, the more legitimate it is. It’s no coincidence that the richest universities today are the wealthiest; Thorstein Veblen noted a hundred years ago that money confers prestige. It’s interesting to note, however, that according to the passage above, functionality came first in the acquisition of campus real estate, while the ostentatious magnificence of the buildings came second. As if social distinction was patterned first of all on functional utility? That seems somehow a very American notion.

At any rate, even today university mobility is not entirely dead, even in spite of the long-strengthening equation between universities and their physical presence, i.e., their campuses, i.e., their property. One of my fieldsites, the University of Paris-8, was forced to move to a new campus at the hands of a hostile government in the early 80s. (I won’t get into the story just now.) This year, an American case is very interesting: Antioch College in Ohio was closed by a hostile board of trustees, but in an itinerant fashion worthy of the Middle Ages, some of its faculty moved into new makeshift lodgings, kept teaching, and lobbied to be given back their campus buildings. They had to change their name, because apparently they had no legal right to the old one, and are now the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute. There are a lot of documents online about the closing, but it sounds like there might be a new college opening before long, after a great deal of struggle by alumni. Hearing a presentation about this last spring, I had the sense that these Antioch activists were themselves deeply attached to the physical space of their prior campus buildings. Paradoxically, then, even as they demonstrated that actually a university can detach from its real estate even now, their desire for their lost physical premises evinced something of an ideological attachment to the historically emergent equation of a university with its physical place.

I won’t get further into the details. I’ll just note for now that the birth of university real estate was the prerequisite for the enclosure of university space and the making of what’s now considered (in America) the college quad. More historical fragments of this political history in future posts.

It has slowly dawned on me that a huge number of universities came by their premises, by which I don’t mean their philosophical axioms but their physical environments, in exceedingly peculiar ways. Some of what follows below is hearsay and I don’t really have time to do historical research. But there’s more odd variation here than one might have predicted.

• The Danish School of Education occupies a building that, I’m told, was during World War II the Nazi museum of Scandinavian folk cultures. (This apparently had something to do with creating an Aryan heritage, though I gather that Germans at the time were hard pressed to pass themselves off as more Aryan than the Scandinavians!)
• Cornell University: Was once a farm (albeit financed by the massive business success of Western Union’s telegraph operation in the 1850s). University of Connecticut: likewise was once a farm.
• The University of Paris-8 used to be in Vincennes but was forced to move to Saint-Denis in 1980, and all its original buildings were demolished on the government’s pretext that it was a den of drug dealers (according to a film I saw).
• Columbia University: founded in 1754 by royal charter of King George II. It originally met in a schoolhouse with eight students; now owns $2 billion in New York real estate assets. Has suffered recent controversy about potentially displacing Harlem residents in a campus expansion. (NYU, founded in 1831, also now owns about $2 billion in NYC property.)
• The University of Paris-Dauphine is housed in the former NATO headquarters. These were left vacant when Charles de Gaulle decided to withdraw France from NATO in 1966.
• The University of Illinois-Chicago was built just next to an interstate highway exchange that had already destroyed much of Chicago’s Greektown neighborhood. The new campus, built over local protests, displaced 8000 people and 630 businesses, according to the university’s own historical documents. According to this article, the university’s development also effectively destroyed nearby Little Italy and Maxwell Street.
• The University of Chicago was built on some surplus real estate bought from the business tycoon Marshall Field. Now has expanded to $2.4 billion in land, buildings and books. Controversial involvement in 1950s “slum clearings” that demolished some 193 acres and displaced as much as 30,000 people (if you believe this source; I haven’t found a better one).
• According to many rumors, various post-60s campuses (possibly including Syracuse Univ, UC-Irvine, University of Texas, and/or certain French campuses), were built or remodeled to prevent student radicals from gathering in threatening crowds.

If per French myth little boys come from cabbages and little girls from roses, then here I suppose we might conclude that little universities come from farmlands and slum demolitions while little colleges come from royal charters and spare military headquarters… which are delivered from the sky by storks, no doubt. Seriously, though, just this little sample suggests that many universities come to exist through absurd and somewhat disturbing circumstances, ones that don’t make it sufficiently into our theories of the university. Can one find in any existing philosophical concept of the university – Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, for instance – the merest hint that universities would be involved in sometimes surprisingly massive projects of urban dislocation, in urban destruction that can only so very optimistically be called “creative“?

These historical absurdities in the origins of academic institutions aren’t to be sloughed off; they can teach us something important about the irrational kernel that lies at the core of seemingly neat institutional teleologies. My point is not, mind you, that universities are to be understood as pure historical accidents, purely random organizational conglomerates. Kant’s aforementioned book starts out by saying: “Whenever a man-made institution is based on an Idea of reason (such as that of a government) which is to prove itself practical in an object of experience (such as the entire field of learning at the time), we can take it for granted that the experiment was made according to some principle contained in reason, even if only obscurely, and some plan based on it–not by merely contingent collections and arbitrary collections of cases that have occurred.” And indeed, it’s true that there are always principles of organization, “ideas of reason” if you’re inclined to call them that, at work in university organization. The purpose of looking at the oddly arbitrary origins of universities is hence not to discount university structure, but to show how this structure is constantly hiding and appropriating the little historical mistakes (or sometimes calamities) that set it in motion.

The picture I started out with is an empty lot a mile to the west of the University of Chicago. Did you guess that this scrubby patch of worn snow is adjacent to one of the nation’s richest institutions of higher learning?

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.

At times, the mold approaches the complexity of mountaintop lichens, or perhaps it’s more like a spontaneous display of abstract art.

At any rate, I’m taking the liberty of reposting the photos here with English translation, because I don’t think it would have much impact just to give the translation without the images. Obviously, the images belong to their photographers, who unfortunately remain anonymous.

The photos that follow are the result of a photography contest organized at a university in the south of France, calling on students to testify about their working conditions.

Thus here you have the daily life of the students at this university. Some basic rules of survival impose themselves.

Rule number 1: Never hug the walls.

[It is dangerous to approach the foot of these buildings.]

Rule number 2: To enter a classroom takes courage.

… but the light is at the end of the corridor.

Rule number 3: Once in class, try to abstract from the environment and concentrate solely on the teacher.

Rule number 4: Expect to bring warm clothes in winter.

Rule number 5: The toilets are at the bottom of the stairs. Don’t go there unless you absolutely need to, and even then not without psychological preparations.

Rule number 6: If the atmosphere is too oppressive, don’t hesitate to get some air on a terrace…

… sit down at a cafe for a while…

… or play sports for a bit.

Rule number 7: Make sure to locate the emergency exits.

[i.e.: For safety reasons, the emergency exit is closed.]

In this context one would like to be able to believe the statements of our leaders:

Nicolas Sarkozy (speech of Jan 22, 2009)
“Higher education, research and innovation are our absolute priority.”
“I firmly believe that the universities should benefit from full ownership of their heritage.” Thanks!

Valérie Pécresse (from http://premierministre.gouv.fr)
“The year 2009 is distinguished by an unprecedented raise in the university budgets: every one of them is seeing its budget rise by at least ten percent.”
“The universities have seen a 43% rise in their safety budgets compared to 2008.”

However in this university:

The budget has risen less than inflation in 2009 while the university has assumed new costs within the framework of university autonomy.

Seven lines for technical and administrative jobs will be cut in 2009.

To continue thinking a bit about the visual culture of French universities, we have here a particularly interesting metacommentary on the physical environment, because it’s so clear here that the conditions of the buildings are a major concern for the locals. The unstated prerequisite of this commentary is approximately: “our buildings are falling apart and that is outrageous.” But here the sarcastic tone serves to re-emphasize the condemnation of the physical environment’s decrepitude, and in passing, at the end, to further condemn the Sarkozy government’s treatment of universities. Towards this end, the decrepit bathroom sink becomes a political signifier. The ludicrous signs – the emergency exit “closed for safety reasons” – are recontextualized as products of the government’s apparent political hypocrisy.

Oddly, there are almost no people in these photographs – the most we see is a long finger that apparently has just wiped some dust off a radiator, a photographer’s sneaker in the bottom of a frame. It’s as if the universities were abandoned as well as decrepit. I won’t pretend that I’m not a little shocked myself when I see this degree of physical decay, especially in comparison to the ostentatiously pristine environment of wealthy American universities, but it’s nonetheless interesting to trace how the built environment erupts into local political consciousness. If the decay of these buildings is recognized locally as a scandal, as an exception to the norms of academic space, then this seems to pose the inverse question as to what kinds of academic space are unmarked and pass as normal, acceptable. Does it have to be the traditional architecture of the Sorbonne? Or is it just necessary to have academic space without visible signs of decay?

A sudden piece of English text inserted in the middle of an exhibition of political photographs at my field site. Paris-8. A charming metacommentary on global reality. Merry crisis!

If you wanted to describe this image in the most basic descriptive language you could say: this is a photo of a photo of a graffiti tag set among other photos, photos of people bloody in protests, of police in riot gear lines, of people running and throwing things, of people invisible in showers of light. See that flood of white in the photo immediately beneath Merry Crisis? With the figure askew and silhouetted? I have no idea what that is. But I do comprehend that this is a collage of leftist protest culture, aestheticized in the genre of an art photo exhibition, and further recontextualized in the form of political statement attached on the outside of Paris-8’s Bâtiment B2. Paris-8 is a university with an enormous visual text taped and sprayed across its walls. Campus buildings frequently have deteriorated walls, just from the sheer number of signs (affiches) that have been put up and torn up and torn down. It’s the kind of place where images, like this one, are not only compound visual objects (referencing other visual objects and visual genres), but are units in an overwhelming student reappropriation of academic space, a culture of defacement of the corridors that someone jealous of property rights might call vandalism with a political alibi.

This defacement has limits, though, being essentially restrained to surfaces within arm’s reach of the ground. The buildings themselves tell a different story.

Two French universities. At left, the Sorbonne. At right, Paris-8. It doesn’t look like a den of graffiti in this picture, does it? From certain angles it looks slick. White. Steel. Futuristic, even, like a university garden city. With newly planted trees. The low orange fence, dimly visible here, shows that campus is still under construction. The Sorbonne, on the other hand, is a visual object that displays its prestige and institutional centrality through a long parade of arches and stone finery and towers, through the conspicuous display of functionless decoration, through pillars and chimneys and wrought iron that connote its age and full integration into the architectural code of state power in central Paris. (In other words: the Sorbonne is made of the same color stone and with the same bombastic architectural flourishes that characterize important public buildings in its part of town. Though I’m not an architect so I lack the vocabulary to really describe this homogeneity.)

The Sorbonne does a pretty good job of integrating its traditional stone architecture with its pristine self-presentation as a simultaneous icon of wealth, prestige, and the French establishment. On the other hand, at Paris-8, I sense a certain dissonance between the architectural invocations of futuristic architecture and the decrepit graffiti-laden floors and walls.

No future?! No peace! says a lone piece of militant graffiti in the Sorbonne, again at left. The staircase in Paris-8 at right, by contrast, is tagged twelve different places in red and yellow, its aestheticizing decorations patching the decrepit stairwell walls. The Sorbonne staircase has varnished wood paneling; Paris-8 has stained cement block and bare pipes. The texture of the two places differ, radically: sheen vs dirt.

A particularly good place to see the symbolic differences between campuses is in their doors. Their textures differ radically, again. At the Sorbonne: blue wood with many-paned windows divided up by metal bars, the university’s name carved in stone, a large S in wrought metal in the middle of each doors (just visible here), a wrought-iron fence with tulip tips, stone pillars emphasizing the doorway. Paris-8 by contrast: modern doors, metal, one pane of glass each, by design unadorned, in practice festooned with posters, with abandoned posters, with scraps of torn-down posters, part of one of the doors cracked (invisible here, alas) where someone must have kicked it, set on a low threshold. “Université Paris 8 Vincennes -> Saint-Denis” is set like a billboard above the doors in white and red on black (it runs the length of the doors here, just above).

There is a major difference between universities, too, at the level of security just inside the doors. When you go inside Paris-8, you don’t have to show ID but the place is visibly full of security cameras. The security personnel, apparently contractors from a private company, are in casual clothes and tend to lurk inside their security posts; the security post near the door is visibly full of surveillance monitoring equipment. When you enter the Sorbonne, on the other hand, you have to show the uniformed guard your ID and maybe state your business, but once inside, you are essentially unattended. One might schematize this thus: Paris-8 doesn’t care who comes in but doesn’t trust anyone on the premises; the Sorbonne is selective about who can enter but is happy to let its trusted visitors do what they will. (This, to be fair, is not purely a difference of class-laden institutional attitude. The Sorbonne is in a major tourist district, and it seems to be primarily tourists who are turned away at its gates. I have always been let in with my Chicago student ID.)

By now the symbolic differences between the two universities should be becoming second nature… Sorbonne at left, Paris-8 at right. A small amphithéâtre vs. a large classroom. Decorative paintings vs bare white walls. Wooden decorations vs plastic chairs. A bunch of old guys in suits vs a bunch of young kids in casual clothes. This place is ripe for a structural analysis.

Could you tell by looking that this is a vending machine? A vending machine turned into a platform for activist signs and stickers. A vending machine framed by graffiti that reads “Long live armed struggle!” and a crossed out “LRU” (Loi relative aux Libertés et Responsibilités des Universités, the controversial French university reform bill). The stickers, unreadable here, make reference to Palestine and the grêve générale (general strike) in Guadeloupe, and to militant groups (Sud-Etudiant, Union Syndicales Solidaires), and others I can’t make out in my slightly blurry photo… but I adore this as a spontaneous collage of impersonal commodity exchange (it’s a vending machine after all) and militant/graffiti poster art. Are the activists appropriating the vending machines as political advertising opportunities? Or are the activist signs ultimately just drawing attention to a cheap place to buy a cold drink?

Not that I have any quick answers. But I’m growing to like commenting on images. It’s a means of making spaces and atmospheres accessible at a distance, of capturing social dynamics as they become visible. Images have a tactility that can only be approached in prose by resorting to novelistic or surreal styles of description. And it takes time to produce that description… while a photo is taken in a sixtieth of a second. Though, actually, that’s a lie. It’s irritatingly time-consuming to take photos, download them from the camera, sort them, archive them, compare them, interpret them. Visual texts are laborious. (Note to self: find the people who design and put up these activist signs, inquire about how it works.)

I rather hate this phrase, a “visual text.” Images are not intrinsically texts, and though they can certainly be approached as such (examining their formal structure, their intertextualities, their meanings), it’s the height of scholasticism to blindly assimilate images to the realm of texts, to textualize the visual, thus rendering it all the more vulnerable to academic appropriation. I rather prefer the notion of “visual cultures,” which suggests that the visual can become a cultural value, an object of collective work and concern, as in the hallway graffiti of Paris-8 or the towers of the Sorbonne. It’s interesting that the visual environments of universities can articulate commentaries on the university, relations to the university, so that the visual culture constitutes a reflexive social space of its own rather than a mere background on which other kinds of social action occur.

Colleges and universities should never underestimate the power of special, transformational, and even sacred spaces on their campuses… Universities are products of history and tradition. Not only are they institutions of scholarly learning, but they also are sites of memory and meaning, with cultural spaces that have played host to decades or even centuries of ritual.

…Such transformational places with unique emotional resonance have an almost sacred nature. The word “religious” comes from the Latin verb religare, meaning to bind or reconnect. Thus, anything that reconnects us is, inherently, a deeply personal or spiritual experience that has great meaning — and the university campus is ripe with opportunities for people to reconnect.

…Elite universities understand the importance of branding in creating long-lasting loyalty among students, and they use very specific and often-repeated images in such efforts… such imagery typically has very little to do with dormitories, classrooms, libraries, or students working late into the night. Most images focus on the campus as a landscape, with views of special buildings, students walking or lounging on an open green, and, of course, football players or bands performing on the stadium’s holy ground.

So the sacred spaces on campus are something to be branded. Something to be created as a spectacular image that will produce “unique emotional resonance,” that will give us a “deeply personal or spiritual experience that has great meaning.” This Orwellian language deserves, I think, to be stood on its head: “unique” here really means “totally generic,” and “deeply personal” amounts to “totally determined by cunning advertisers.” For there is after all nothing personal in a pre-scripted contact with the sacred, except through the medium of delusion.

Sacred space in this discourse basically serves two instrumental ends: to create “great meaning” and to increase the university’s bottom line by stimulating alumni donations. Broussard continues:

Alumni of those institutions and others whose campuses have transformational and sacred spaces return to a wealth of traditions and reconnect with their alma mater, which is integral to giving back to their respective schools. Students who attend commuter institutions are not as likely to form the same kinds of emotional attachments, and as a result such institutions miss out on fund-raising and other opportunities associated with having a robust, dedicated, and committed alumni base.

… Once these places have been identified, it is essential to reinforce their function and develop their storylines. What is the history of the site? What meaning does it have? Tell that story by using signage, seating, plantings, art, and paving — elements that support but do not destroy the place’s uniqueness. This offers a great opportunity for fund-raising programs: Storytelling becomes a cultural-support system and should be treasured and nurtured by all parties.

Here we have the new culturalist advertising: it’s slicked up with a rusty anthropological language of meaning and ritual, as if ’60s Victor Turner-esque anthropology had provided a new marketing jargon for the early 21st century. Broussard is of course the president of a landscape consulting and architecture firm, so the article seems to amount essentially to a piece of free advertising for his service, courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Ed. I hate to talk about the “commodification of higher education,” since the very phrase seems to embody a political bias that precludes rather than enables further analysis, but sometimes there are cases, like these, that seem to fit the category too well to give it up.