Academic and religious boredom

Posted on Posted in franceTagged , ,

I’ve written before about the curious state of academic boredom. Lately, I’ve been reading Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, and was struck by his comments on boredom in traditional French church services:

The rhythm is slow. The audience is bored to tears by the respectful abstraction of it all. Religion will end in boredom, and to offer boredom to the Lord is hardly a living sacrifice. (Yet as I write these lines, I wonder if I’m not making a crude mistake. Magic has always gone hand in hand with emotion, hope and terror, and still does. But are there such things as religious ’emotions’? Probably no more than there is a ‘psychological state’ – consciousness or thought without an object – that could be called ‘faith’. These are ideological fictions. Surely religion, like theology, metaphysics, ceremonies, academic literature and official poets, has always been boring. This has never been a hindrance, because one of the aims of ‘spiritual’ discipline and asceticism has always been precisely to disguise and to transfigure this living boredom…)

(Vol. 1, p. 220-21. English translation by John Moore, Verso, 1991.)

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Superficiality

Posted on Posted in ethnography, france, ordinary life

As I was about to leave my fieldsite in April 2011 — almost two years ago now, I’m sorry to see — I have a conversation that goes like this:

“I’ve had shallow relationships with people,” I lament to one of my closer comrades among the philosophy faculty. “J’aurais voulu pouvoir comprendre les vies des gens, comme un romancier, mais ça a souvent resté superficiel.” I would have wanted to be able to understand peoples’ lives, like a novelist, but it often stayed superficial.

“Mais c’est comme ça que les gens se connaissent eux aussi,” responds M. But that’s exactly the way that people here  know each other. And he adds: “Le seul ami avec qui j’ai des échanges hors départemental, c’est B., avec qui je discute des choses personnelles…” The only friend who I talk about non-departmental stuff is B., we talk about our personal lives…

I’ve written about this moment before, but re-reading my notes, I’m still struck by this testimony of the intensity of academics’ non-relations with each other, of the depths of their superficiality, of the way that friendship can come to seem the exception to the rule. It’s a good reminder that ethnographies of intimacy may in fact not always be a good way of understanding the social reality of a modern institutional world, where even the locals may not know each other that well.

Time passes for old mornings

Posted on Posted in ethnography, europe, photos

As you get farther from your fieldsite, things change and fade and blur and accrue artificial color in your memory, like food coloring.

creteil reflection w

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

creteil reflection 2w

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

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

 

Disciplinary exophilia, or, how self-scrutiny always misses

Posted on Posted in absurdity

When academics decide to set their sights towards studying academic culture, there is an amusing trend in their choice of research objects. Call it disciplinary exophilia, the desire for the other. For who do academics study when they study academics? Themselves? Why, no. Au contraire. The anthropologists study the scientists (Joe Masco), and the historians study the anthropologists (George Stocking). Sometimes the scientists study history (Peter Galison), but more often they study postmodern philosophy with great care and concern (Alan Sokal), while the post-modern philosophers are, of course, studying science with equal vigor (Foucault). Education researchers, not themselves known for being particularly enterprising, study academic entrepreneurs (Slaughter and Leslie). The conservatives, naturally, scrutinize left-wing radicals (David Horowitz) while left-wing radicals study the ostensibly moderate and relabel them neoliberals (David Harvey). Sociologists study how humanists rate and rank each other (Michèle Lamont), while literary scholars write reports on how physicists are lazy readers of their colleagues’ papers (Charles Bazerman). A few brave souls study the presidents and boards of trustees (Thorstein Veblen may have lost his job over it), while the presidents generally don’t do research of their own, but they do request studies on how to cut costs by 3-9% in the next fiscal year. Opposite disciplines attract, sharpened knives held out in front as they charge towards each other.

What is this disciplinary exophilia, this tendency to choose to critically examine someone else’s discipline rather than one’s own, a tendency, reduced to its structural basis, to examine the other rather than the self, in short an unjustifiable bias towards alterity in one’s scholarly objectifications? Now of course it is the case that occasionally disciplines do self-scrutinize. But what happens then? The same thing, of course, just exactly the same kind of alterity bias, repeated on a smaller scale: the temptation is irresistible to scrutinize one’s colleagues, one’s theoretical competitors, one’s students, one’s elders, in short, those bad others that ruin one’s discipline. (I leave the provision of examples of this sort as an exercise to the academic reader.) Once in a while, true enough, individual academics do manage to self-scrutinize; however they seldom scrutinize their present; instead they are more often concerned to analyze their past self, which is, after all, almost like examining someone else.

So why not reverse this hideous bias away from self-scrutiny? Let’s start right here, right now, right in this very blog post. In fact, let’s start by scrutinizing this very sentence. Wait. This sentence? No, that one back there, three sentences back. Didn’t it enact a hidden politics of self-satisfaction and indulgence? Wasn’t it a bit lumpy, ill-formed, a bit past the parameters of good style? Rotten, really. Rotten. Not remotely up to the high standards of reflexivity established by David Moser’s aptly-titled “This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself” (a story which, parenthetically, I strongly suggest you, the reader, immediately read).

Dominic Boyer, my college advisor, once made a valiant attempt at self-scrutiny but it also ended in immediate failure (which was, alas, precisely his point). I quote: Continue reading “Disciplinary exophilia, or, how self-scrutiny always misses” →

The mystique that enables corrupting the youth

Posted on Posted in absurdity, america, politics, text2 Comments

I’m quite amazed by this excerpt from a letter of Richard Rorty’s, to one Milton Fisk, on March 20, 1971:

No, it’s the best bet available for improving society. This standard bourgeois liberal view of mine has the same cynicism of all bourgeois liberal views—it says to the people on whose necks one trods that it will be better for their children’s children if they keep on getting trodden upon while we educate the more intelligent of their children to understand how society works. But I believe it anyway. I honestly think that we—the parasitic priestly class which confers sacraments like BAs and PhDs—are the best agency for social change on the scene. I don’t trust the aroused workers and peasants to do themselves or anybody any good. To put it still more generally, I think that nothing but a revolution in this country is going to make it possible for millions of people to lead a decent life, but I still don’t want a revolution in this country—simply because I’m afraid of finding something worse when the revolution is over. So insofar as I have any thoughts on the higher learning in America they are to the effect that we pinko profs should continue swinging each successive generation a little further to the left; doing it this way requires the continuation of the same claptrap about contemplation we’ve always handed out, because without this mystique the society won’t let us get away with corrupting the youth anymore.

(Quoted in Neil Gross’s sociobiography of Rorty.)

So basically, Rorty could not, or could no longer believe in the claptrap of the beauty of liberal arts education as teaching “contemplation”, but was happy to continue its rhetoric in the service of gradualist progressive politics (“swinging each successive generation a little further to the left”). His reason for being against a “revolution” was fairly understandable, if not very noble: as a good “liberal bourgeois,” he was afraid of being worse off afterwards. Or, he suggests, of having someone else be worse off afterwards. His claims to altruism are somehow not very convincing, and one gets the sense that Rorty was animated by a curious contradiction between his own class interests and his anti-Communist leftist ideals. (Gross goes on about his parents’ politics at great length; it’s one of the best parts of that book.)

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A classroom scene, #1

Posted on Posted in france, ordinary life, pedagogyTagged , ,

I’ve decided to start typing up some of the scenes of everyday life at Paris 8 that made it into my fieldnotes. Here’s one encounter.

It’s the 1st of December, 2009. I’m having coffee with a young man who is my classmate in a class on The Symptom (le symptôme). I think his name is K., but am not sure. He has dark, long hair, a prematurely tired face, a short body, a set of metal crutches and a handicapped leg that dangles.

He is in trouble, he says. He says he doesn’t get what is going on in any of his seven classes. He isn’t sure what he is going to do when midterms come [les partiels].

We talk about the relationship between the department’s pedagogy and its politics. It’s unclear what the relationship is, we agree. But, he adds, one little link [un petit lien] comes in the form of the relations between professors and students. Our teacher in the symptom, for instance, is a lot closer to her students than a traditional teacher would be. But nevertheless: he doesn’t know her name. He doesn’t know any of his professors’ names, he says. He’s only there for the ideas, he says.

K. would leave Paris 8 after that school year, going back to Toulouse where he was from. He had been living in Paris in a cheap apartment, but had never been happy there, hadn’t made a lot of friends, he would tell me, resignedly.

K. was himself a symptom. Of something. His alienation, we might too readily suggest, was the social and subjective product of low status, youth, lack of Parisian social networks, and non-membership in the philosophical nobility, with its characteristic forms of language. He really believed in the intrinsic value of philosophical ideas that Paris-8 offered, but by his own account, couldn’t make sense of them.

What do you know about faculty democracy?

Posted on Posted in america, politicsTagged , , , , 2 Comments

A correspondent of mine at the French group Sauvons L’Université asked me what I knew about the American institution of the “Faculty Senate.” The answer, loosely speaking, is not that much. The only time this issue has really even seen the light of day, on my campus, was in 2008 when there was a controversy over the Becker (formerly Milton) Friedman Institute that provoked long debates over faculty power (or its absence). On the other hand, in an extremely well-known case at the University of Virginia this year, the faculty and many other campus constituencies protested the removal of their president (Teresa Sullivan) and ultimately managed to get her reinstated in spite of opposition from the chair of their Board of Trustees. My general suspicion would be that the collective power of the faculty is rather minimal, at most American campuses, except in certain exceptional moments of crisis.

So here’s my question for you (assuming there are still people who have this blog in their blog readers): What is your assessment of the state of faculty democracy, in your personal experience? How would you describe the balance of power in your own institutions? What cases do you think are worth talking about? And what, if anything, do you think is worth reading on the topic?

Write a word in the comments, and we’ll see what we can collectively come up with!

The moment of human resources

Posted on Posted in france, neoliberalism, politicsTagged , , 2 Comments

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, French debates over university reform have often dwelt on the question of human resources, and even on the very desirability of thinking about universities in those terms. The advocates of a more “modern,” “competitive” university — who are themselves often products of business and public administration schools — have generally tended to take such a perspective for granted. In an exemplary moment, Valérie Pécresse, in January 2009, remarked that

‎”… je sais que les ressources humaines sont le cœur de l’université. Naturellement, dans toute organisation les ressources humaines sont au cœur du système. Mais dans un monde où la production intellectuelle est tout, plus que jamais, « il n’est de richesse que d’hommes ». Ces hommes et ces femmes qui font l’université, je les écoute et je les entends.”

[“… I know that human resources are at the heart of the university. Naturally, human resources are at the heart of the system in any organization. But in a world where intellectual production is everything, more than ever, ‘the only source of wealth is men.’ These men and women who are making the university, I’m listening to them.”]

If you believe that ideology is at its most effective when it is perceived to be entirely natural and universal, then this remark was an ideological moment par excellence. For Pécresse’s assumption here is that every human organization depends on “human resources”; she makes no distinctions between organizations governed by contemporary business logic and any other kind of organization. And in invoking a 16th century proverb by Jean Bodin, she certainly suggests that the logic of human resources long predates contemporary capitalism.

At the same time, Pécresse’s discourse was hybrid. Even as it placed the image of human resources at the heart of the university, it allied itself with a very traditional conception of academic life: the conception where the faculty are the university, where the university is constitutively a site of the production of knowledge, of “intellectual production.” The logic is one of an extension of the traditional logic: yes, men and women make the university — as the traditional definition would have it — but what they are doing is (intellectual) production that constitutes wealth — which inserts a much more business-centered view of human activity into the traditional definition.

Pécresse generally seemed to believe in the success of her hybrid discourse. Her detractors tended not to, seeing her as an agent of naked “corporatization of higher education” (as it is called in English), and I suppose viewing her gestures towards traditional views of academia as idle rhetoric.

Medium-sized American college towns

Posted on Posted in america, photos

Around this time last year, I happened to pass through the city of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It’s a medium-sized city of 38,000 people, set beside the Mississippi River. When I showed up on my bike in the haze of summer, it felt quiet and empty, and I imagined that it was a sort of rust belt merchant town, a victim of the obsolescence of Mississippi River traffic, like Cairo. The economic story is a bit more complicated than that, it turns out. According to the city’s 2007 Comprehensive Plan (sec. 2), the town has had several periods of growth, initially in the 19th century because of river traffic, then around the turn of the century with a shift from steamboats to railroads, and again after World War II with a shift towards interstate highway traffic. This shift towards the highway, and I suppose the general post-war rise of car culture, brought about a familiar story of urban transformation: the surrounding farmlands partly became into suburban developments, while the historic downtown was increasingly abandoned:

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

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

(This mural depicts town history.)

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

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

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

What is ethnography for?

Posted on Posted in ethnography, ordinary life1 Comment

I was just looking back at my fieldnotes and was sort of surprised to come across this metacommentary on fieldwork that I wrote on the plane the first time I left for the field:

One is reminded in flying to Europe of the class indistinction of anthropologists as professionals, of their dreadful similarity to tourists, study abroad students, bourgeois American adventurers and the like; one wonders whether anything is either valuable or particular to anthropological knowledge-making; one is irritated by the ideologically ritualistic nature of fieldwork (the sense that it is expected, even forced, to be a rite de passage). One has an uneasy sense of oneself as a phenomenological instrument, the trembling urge to record everything, everything, the peach of sky or scrape, the rustle of signs, the footfalls of quarrel and procedure, the texture of an ordinary life — one wonders whether ethnography is in fact the verification of a hypothesis or the interpretation of a social world (for the benefit of its inhabitants? for the benefit of foreigners? for one’s own amusement?), or the aestheticization of a set of flittering scenes that only cut skin deep, an artful display of surfaces; the freeing or subjugating or an ethnographic object, or the effort to induce a greater state of consciousness in an object; a form of collaboration intellectual exchange between actors taken or mistaken for intellectual subjects, or simply an exercise in concocting a misplaced authenticity of a culture that one falsely imagines one can experience immediately, done for the benefit of a disciplinary system of reproduction?…

What’s interesting about this to me in hindsight, I suppose, is that none of these questions really get resolved by doing fieldwork or by writing up your results. It’s just that you just learn to not worry about them after a while. I note that I posted a version of these comments — a cleaned up version! — early on in my fieldwork. I think I thought then that these sorts of questions would receive positive answers.

The scholarly pretentiousness of “the way in which”

Posted on Posted in absurdity, america5 Comments

The way in which. The way in which. The way in which…

I hear this turn of phrase so often. It’s what academics often say when they mean “the way that x.” There is often, as far as I can tell, not much difference in meaning between saying “the way that x” and “the way in which x,” except that the latter is a much more academic usage. The way that(in which) academics use this expression bothers me. It seems gratuitous. It seems wordy. It creates barriers to communication with non-academics that don’t have to be there.

In case anyone’s not sure that “the way in which” is a specifically academic usage, I’ve compiled some handy evidence from Google that clearly shows “the way in which” to be more scholarly than popular. On regular Google, “the way in which” returns 180 million results, versus 839 million for “the way that.” In other words, in the general Google corpus, “the way that” is about 4.66 times more frequent than “the way in which.” On Google Scholar, on the other hand, there are about 2,420,000 hits for “the way in which,” versus 1,080,000 for “the way that.” So among scholars, on the contrary, “the way in which” is 2.24 times more frequent than “the way that.” Or put otherwise, scholars use “the way in which” about 69% of the time, versus only about 17% of the time for the general population.*

Let’s take some examples of this usage, drawing at random from the academic articles on my computer.

From Merle Curti’s 1955 “Intellectuals and Other People,” an interesting analysis of American anti-intellectualism: “Some intellectuals, however, have continued to invite resentment by the way in which they hold their learning.” Curti could have said the same thing, as far as I can tell, by writing “… continued to invite resentment by the way that they hold their learning,” or even “continued to invite resentment by the way they hold their learning.” Admittedly, it’s less formal if we omit the relative pronoun, but then, questioning formal language is precisely what we’re here to do.
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A campus controversy

Posted on Posted in france, politics, translation

Over in France, there’s a controversy brewing over a conference on Israel that was going to be held at Paris-8 next week. It’s been covered in a range of newspapers. The gist is that the conference, subtitled “Israel, an apartheid state?”, had been authorized to be held on campus, but when a major French Jewish organization expressed opposition, the campus administration withdrew its authorization. Here’s a quick translation of the campus president’s communique explaining his decision:

To the university community,

The University of Paris-8 was recently asked to give its authorization for a conference on its campus entitled, “From new sociological, historical and legal approaches to the call for an international boycott: Israel, an apartheid state?”, planned for this February 27-28.

Initially, the President of the University did give an authorization to the conference organizers, on the condition that a certain number of obligations be scrupulously observed. These involved, on one hand, an absolute respect for the principles of academic neutrality and secularism [laïcité], and on the other hand, the removal of the university’s logos and visuals, since the university is not the organizer of this conference.

In giving this authorization, the President was mindful—as in every case when he is asked to approve public events—at once of the rights of freedom of speech and of assembly for campus users, of the maintenance of public order on the premises, of the institution’s intellectual and scientific independence, and of the principle of neutrality in public service vis-à-vis the diversity of public opinion.

However, today it appears that respecting these conditions will not be enough to guarantee the maintenance either of public order on the premises, or of the institution’s scientific or intellectual independence, given that the pluralism of scientific approaches, the pluralism of critical and divergent analyses, must be regarded as intangible academic obligations.

Indeed, the presentation of this “conference” as “academic,” along with the repeated presence of “Paris 8” on the conference publicity, could be, in themselves, of such a nature as to create confusions that may infringe on the requirement to keep the university free of any political or ideological grasp. The reactions elicited by the conference, which have begun to compromise the university itself, reveal that confusion has set in, and that there is a real risk to the principle of neutrality of public services in research and higher education.

The theme of the conference, the nature of the planned presentations, as well as of the contributors’ titles, strongly polemical in nature, have caused strong reactions that foreshadow a serious risk of disturbances in public order, and of counter-protests that the university is obliged to prevent.

In such circumstances, the President of the University has decided to withdraw the previously given authorization.

The President’s Office has contacted the organizers to propose that on-campus space should be allocated for a day of public debates, in the framework of a diversity of views.

Concerning the organization of the conference on February 27 and 28th, it is decided that the President’s Office will offer the university’s services in locating other premises off-campus where the conference can be held.

-The university administration

This decision has prompted a fair amount of outrage from faculty (including American intellectuals like Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky), who, naturally, invoked the same principles of academic freedom (“intellectual and scientific independence”) that the campus president (Pascal Binczak) had invoked in defending his change of views. I think it’s quite interesting that the principle of academic freedom can equally be invoked to license or to deny campus space for controversial events — the proponents of an event can argue that political interference shouldn’t be allowed to censor campus events; the opponents can argue that politically charged topics are insufficiently academic to deserve campus space. At the level of principle, I think this is more of a real dilemma than most parties want to acknowledge. Not many people today want to live in a static university where ancient, let’s say Aristotelian, intellectual doctrines are the only ones allowed to be presented on campus. But most campuses these days also want to set limits on acceptable speech. And it’s not clear to me that there is a principled way to set such limits on a purely intellectual basis.

Ultimately the relevant “principle” seems most often to be “what’s currently acceptable given the social mores of the moment” or “what some plurality of current scholars think is acceptable,” but given that both of these are historically contingent and variable reference points, I’m not sure they are extremely defensible. It seems to me it would be much more honest if administrators admitted that the main principle, in moments like this one, was just to save face or to avert conflict, was in short a principle of sheer expediency. My sense is that large bureaucracies make decisions for such reasons of expediency much more than they can possibly admit in public.

Jeffrey Williams on academics’ class status

Posted on Posted in americaTagged , , 1 Comment

I decided today that it would be wise to quit Facebook and put more energy into this blog. If there’s anything I’ve learned in graduate school, it’s that it works wonders to channel one’s excess energy into something that’s not work but that nonetheless involves making something. Music. Writing. Cleaning the house.

Anyway, I’ve been working on an essay about precarious work in French universities, and I came across a passage that I think is a great starting point for any analysis of academics’ class status. It’s in an essay, “Smart,” by Jeffrey Williams, a literary critic; it’s one of the best essays about academic culture that I know. In this passage, Williams is trying to teach us that academics’ class status is ambiguous: definitely not working class in the traditional sense, but distanced, often, from the conventional markers of professional success.

Class is not just a question of what money you have or don’t have, nor solely a question of status conferred by cultural capital, but that it marks your body. If you look at most fellow academics’ hands, you’ll rarely see calluses.

I start with this… to broach both the visibility and invisibility of our class position. As academics, especially in the humanities, we have a vexed relation to class. On the one hand, by normal markers such as educational level (only about 10% of Americans have grad degrees, not to mention doctorates), the kind of work we do (white collar, with some autonomy, setting our own hours, etc.), salaries (which, while we might complain of how low they are, are much above the national mean, and certainly higher than, say, school teachers), as well as by tastes (what kind of magazines we have on our coffee tables—if you’ve ever tabulated the survey at the end of Paul Fussell’s Class), we are of the cultivated classes. Attaining our position through educational credentials, we are quintessential denizens of the professional-managerial class.

On the other hand, we often eschew or deny our class position, projecting a distance from the normal parameters of class in America. There are several ways that we do this: sometimes by projecting a kind of bohemian position on the peripheries of, if not antagonistic to, normative culture (we’re not like sharkskin suited lawyers, but wear jeans and open collars, and proclaim our queerity); sometimes by asserting a clerical position set against mainstream capitalism (we are not profit-seeking businesspeople, instead working in the non-quantifiable realm of culture, whether conservatively sanctifying its lineage or progressively opening it); sometimes by celebrating our uselessness (we fumble at basic tasks like filling out forms, because we reside in the higher realm of the mind); and sometimes by proclaiming our political resistance (as intellectuals, we stand outside capitalist society to criticize and resist it). Thus we are the class that somehow stands outside class.

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Losing the Excellence Sweepstakes

Posted on Posted in france, politics, translation

In France, one way that the Sarkozy government has been financing major projects on universities is with a large loan it took out in 2010, termed the “Grand Emprunt.” (I would translate this as “major loan” — “grand loan” would sound a bit silly in English.) Part of the funds have been directed towards so-called “Excellence Initiatives” (Idex, initiatives d’excellence) in the universities—the sums offered were large, and many campuses felt obliged to compete for the money. Apparently the president of one regional council was disappointed that his region’s universities failed to get their Idex, and wrote a letter to that effect which has become public. The following letter was one striking rejoinder:

Monsieur le Président,

I must say that it is with consternation that I read the letter you sent to university administrators in your region. This letter has made the rounds of the country, since I myself received it nine times. I can understand your disappointment in learning that the Idex wasn’t chosen in the Grand Idex Sweepstakes. I understand as well that, faced with drying up ministerial funds for higher education and research, the regions have done what they could to help their academic institutions—yours perhaps more than others.

But how is it possible that this desire to do right, this will to defend your region has managed to blind you to the point of not seeing how the “Major Loan” in general, and the “Idex” even more so, are fraudulent? Maybe you forgot that the President of the Republic himself announced that the interest paid out from the loan will be compensated by deductions of regular funding—making it quite officially a zero-sum game, where the losers pay for the winners? Moreover, you obviously haven’t taken into account that the loan procedures are aimed at systematically removing any role from elected academic bodies and at further demolishing our system. How can you not see that it takes a grandiose stupidity to put Montpellier and Marseille, Lyon and Grenoble, Bordeaux and Toulouse, Paris 2-4-6 and Paris 3-5-7 in competition? That in such tournaments, whole territories in the West, the North and the Center will not have the slightest chance, in spite of their efforts?
Continue reading “Losing the Excellence Sweepstakes” →

Ashamed to be apolitical

Posted on Posted in america, politics2 Comments

What happened to activist anthropology? To solidarity and support for those fighting injustice and inequality? At the AAA meeting in Montréal support for the Occupy Wall Street movement was conspicuously absent. As the masses converged upon Le Palais, I was anticipating a strong show of support. Yet, when the activists began shouting “Occupy….Montréal….Occupy…Wall Street,” they were met with disdain and not open arms. Are we just armchair anthropologists, all about observation and indignant toward participation? I was told activist anthropology was gaining steam, but that did not seem to be the case in Montréal. Where were the impromptu meetings or discussions dedicated to the most important movement of our day?

It is said that those who do not think something can be done should get out of the way of those people doing it. I guess that is what the majority of anthropologists chose in Montréal— simply get out of the way. When the activists stormed the meetings, I heard several anthropologists uttering “This is not the time or place,” “Someone should alert security,” or “They’ll let anybody in here.” Others ignored their chance to join the movement…

…It is because of corporate greed and profits over people that there are not enough jobs in anthropology and in education in general. Margaret Mead once said: “It only takes a few like-minded individuals to change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” Unfortunately, it seems many anthropologists have no interest in changing the world. They seem content doing anthropology from their armchair, waiting on the younger generation to fix the problems that they helped create. For the first time in my life, I was ashamed to say that I was an anthropologist.

I have some quick comments on this. I was there too, and I agree with Montgomery that most anthropologists reacted with indifference to an effort to have an Occupy-style assembly in the lobby of the convention center. I didn’t hear the outright contempt or snark that Montgomery reports, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been some of that too. And, generally speaking, I strongly relate to his frustration with academics who think their role in the world is to study other people’s politics, but not to act themselves.

Continue reading “Ashamed to be apolitical” →

Renaissance critiques of scholarship and ironic reflexivity

Posted on Posted in absurdity, europe2 Comments

The Renaissance seems to have been a particularly rich moment for internal critique of the academy. I happened to be reading a bit of Erasmus‘s The Praise of Folly (1511) today and was struck by its hilarious, bitter parody of medieval scholastics. For instance, on scholarly publishing:

Of the same stripe [i.e., belonging to the party of Folly] are those who strive to win eternal fame by publishing books. All of them owe a great deal to me, but especially those who scribble pages of sheer nonsense. As for those who write learnedly for the judgment of a few scholars and would not hesitate to have their books reviewed by such true judges as Persius or Laelius, they seem to me more pitiable than happy because their work is a perpetual torment to them. They add, they alter; they blot something out, they put it back in. They do the work over, they recast it, they show it to friends, they keep it for nine years, and still they are never satisfied. At such a price they buy an empty reward, namely praise, and that only from a handful. They buy it with such an expense of long hours, so much loss of that sweetest of all things, sleep, so much sweat, so much agony. Reckon up also the loss of health, the spoiling of their good looks, weak eyesight (or even blindness), poverty, envy, the denial of pleasures, early death, and other things just as bad, if there are any. Such great suffering your wiseman thinks is fully repaid by the approval of one or two blear-eyed readers.

This book was first published in 1511, which means that the 500th anniversary of its publication was last year. It’s safe to say that European universities in 1511 looked quite different from today’s incarnations thereof. The printing press had only recently been invented; everything was taught in Latin; education was not for the masses, and had not been yoked to post-Enlightenment nation and workforce-building projects. One could go on in this vein, if one were a historian. (I’m not.) But what’s so fascinating about this little bit of Erasmus is that, in spite of the enormous institutional, political, cultural, and intellectual gulfs that separate us from these early universities, something about the experience of academic work seems to have remained constant, along with certain of the work’s basic instruments.

For even today, scholarly work in the humanities is deeply text-centered, just as it was for Erasmus. And the psychological follies that Erasmus describes are quite familiar, for me and I suspect for many grad students in the humanities. Do we not all have friends whose scholarly work is a perpetual torment? Whose work—to use language Erasmus would not have used—is an immense locus of neurosis and barely sublimated anxiety? And is it not obvious to everyone that the coin of scholarly approval remains, precisely, praise, and that praise is still and always, existentially speaking, an empty, ephemeral reward? Do we not all know people—though not ourselves, of course!—or so we say in our better moments—who have slaved for weeks—if not months—or indeed years—striving for infinitesimal dribblings of warm feelings for our work—such warmth being of course craved but always inevitably despised for its inability to entirely satisfy our desire…

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On blogging and not blogging

Posted on Posted in ordinary life1 Comment

In spite of my desire to write more on my blog back in July, I obviously haven’t done a good job of keeping up with it. That isn’t something that you should interpret as a choice. It was more like the result of economic necessity: back in July I started working for the university, first in a web development job, now also as a TA, and that, plus the pressure to write my dissertation, has pretty much made it impossible to find time to write here. That’s somewhat frustrating, because I still have a lot to say, and I think that this blog can be a good place for me to process my fieldwork materials, and to continue my ongoing desire to make French university life more understandable to an Anglophone audience. (And, of course, to amuse my occasional French readers.)

It’s ok, of course, to not blog. Blogging has a rhythm and a lifecourse. Sometimes it fits in with one’s other obligations, and sometimes it doesn’t. But at the same time, I think there are reasons why more scholars should blog that go beyond the personal. On a personal level, it is certainly good for academics to de-dramatize the act of writing, to get in the habit of writing things that are short, that are concise, that are clear. But on a political level, it seems to me that blogging is a good way to remind ourselves that research (especially in social sciences) should have some public import. If not public benefit. A blog is a way of reminding oneself that scholars at least might speak to the public. A blog is a way of acknowledging that unread scholarship doesn’t have much value. A blog is a way of proclaiming that research can be translated into words that a non-academic could read.

That’s not to say that I am blind to the obvious fact that most academic blogs, including this one, mostly speak to a small audience of fellow academics. But I think we have to distinguish between the sociological reality that blogs tend to be in-group, and the fact that blogs do also encode aspirations to be less in-group. And at a sheer level of institutional access, a blog is accessible to the public around the world: anyone can type in a URL.

I guess, to be a little more precise, there is no essence of what blogs do or don’t do. But this one, at least, is the product of an aspiration to do more than write to a tiny audience of the fellow-minded.

I’m hoping that maybe if I find a better rhythm for blogging — once weekly, maybe — that I can get back to it. There are stories I still want to tell. Coming soon: more on precarious labor, more on international university politics, more on the details of French reform movements, and more photos of little campuses in small-town America…

But if it turns out that I don’t get a chance to write more often in the near future, I will reiterate: that is not a choice, it is a matter of institutional time pressures. And this blog is not going away, no matter how patchy it gets.

Full of question marks

Posted on Posted in ethnography, france, politics1 Comment

Continuing my analysis of the April 2010 debate at Paris-8 over the passage to “Expanded [Managerial] Competences,” which I invoked in my last post, I wanted to give a snippet of that discussion, since it says a lot about how French academics grapple with the future of their institution. I haven’t gone through the whole recording yet, but I wanted to just present a little fragment as an example of (a) how my informants debate institutional politics and (b) of the fragmentary, partial nature of ethnographic evidence. The following was the speech (they call it an “intervention”) of one senior male professor, a fairly outspoken character as I recall:

Est-ce qu’on va l’année prochaine, est-ce qu’on va pas l’année prochaine, à mon avis c’est vraiment une fausse question, et l’argumentation pour nous expliquer qu’elle était la bonne est surréaliste. C’est-à-dire ou alors on nous dit que la loi n’existe pas, c’est-à-dire que si effectivement le prochain président est un navré zozo, qui va appliquer la LRU dans toute son horreur, il aura la loi avec lui, donc, ça ne sera pas très compliqué de défaire les trois motions qui ont été voté par le CA, il aura assez de majorité, et pour ailleurs le CA qui votera trois motions contradictoires différentes, et basta. Donc l’argumentation de pourquoi il faut y aller maintenant me semble extrêmement étrange ou alors il me manque quelque chose que je n’ai pas compris. Par contre, le vrai débat est, puisque nous sommes tous d’accord que cette loi est une catastrophe, ils ont dit ça au tribune ce que le gens se sont dits (???), la question c’est, comment on résiste à une catastrophe et comment même, si on sait que la loi c’est la loi et que Paris-8 n’est pas dans la stratosphère en dehors de la loi, en dehors de la réalité, de comment on se met en position de pouvoir résister le mieux et avoir les meilleurs gardes-feu qu’on peut se ???. Peut-être que c’est effectivement de réfléchir à la question, est-ce qu’il n’y a pas une solution pour sortir de la logique de la loi LRU, est-ce qu’il y a pas une solution pour réinventer le statut expérimental ? Je dis pas que c’est possible, je dis que la réfléxion de la porte est là-dessus. Et je dis le même en ?? de l’argument en disant, mais, attention, la LRU n’est que la prémière étape de la ?, dont la deuxième, là on est ??. Donc la vraie question c’est quelle stratégie prend l’université ? Quel contenu elle défend ? Quelle spécificité elle défend pour que, malgré l’offensive de restauration qu’il y avait avec la LRU, premier état de refuser, nous ? pas toute la trame ? C’est ça, le débat. Et je ne sais pas la stratégie qu’on prend l’année prochaine si on prend cette alternative c’est quoi la différence ? Il y a une différence politique pas [??] Tout le monde sait que c’est différent de dire et ben oui et hélas la stratégie [cherchait la dissolution??] et comme je suis dans un état de droit m’oblige d’appliquer la loi, ah, bon, y a une loi, nous allons l’appliquer, ah bon, que nous soyons contre. Si personne ne voit la différence, c’était trop. Continue reading “Full of question marks” →

Politics that fade

Posted on Posted in france, space1 Comment

I happened to discover the other day that if you display photographs from my fieldsite at full vertical resolution, while reducing the width, you get a vertiginous sense of height. This here was the light of late afternoon as it fell through low bushes across the windows of an amphitheatre in Bâtiment D (D Building) at Paris-8.

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.)

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The fallacy of blaming universities for unemployment

Posted on Posted in politics5 Comments

I feel obliged to respond to wretchedly short-sighted articles like this one in Salon that critique liberal arts programs for not preparing people for the brutal job market. I’m just going to say this as simply as I can: It makes no sense to blame universities for producing graduates who can’t get jobs, because the problem is the employers, not the employees. We don’t have a “shortage of qualified graduates”; we have an employment system that’s broken and harmful, an employment system that prioritizes the needs of business owners and managers over those of society and the general population, an employment system, in short, whose constant failure to sustain collective life and common dignity is scarcely to be blamed on the educational system. In the end, education is only one input into the employment system, and when the problem is that system itself, it just makes no sense to dump all the blame onto one of the system’s inputs. If you put someone through a meat grinder, no matter how well prepared for the experience they may be, no matter how much they’ve been educated to be a good, flexible, attractive lump of raw flesh, they come out ground to pieces.

Now, contrary to received wisdom, unemployment is in no sense inevitable. In fact, anthropologically speaking, the phenomenon of unemployment is an aberration. The majority of human societies have had no such thing as unemployment. This should be obvious, if we reflect for a moment on the structure of work in small-scale agrarian societies where people work primarily for themselves and for their household. There were, for example, no unemployed people among the Nuer of Sudan, at least not when E. E. Evans-Pritchard studied them back in the 1930s. He informs us that “there [was] enough land for everybody on the Nuer scale of cultivation… it is taken for granted that a man has a right to cultivate the ground behind his homestead” (p. 77). Or take the Gawans of Papua New Guinea, in Nancy Munn’s account. Gawan men and women alike were expected to work, and the lazy were condemned; as among the Maenge, “passivity [was] the social defect par excellence.” Nevertheless, “daily work,” which focused on the family’s garden, “is planned by each person or nuclear family… [and] a person’s participation in any wider group arrangements for work depends entirely on individual decision” (p. 75, p. 30). For that matter, Michel Panoff, writing about the neighboring Maenge, notes that it took an average of four hours of daily work per adult to feed a nuclear family.

A world where a normal family with no money could work four hours per day to keep itself comfortably fed is, to us, unimaginable. A world where people by default have decent access to the means of sustenance even if they’re not wealthy and haven’t done well in the “brutal job market” is, for us, somewhere past the horizons of our collective imaginations. A world where there wasn’t a harsh competition to be able to participate in reproducing the material basis of our world is, basically, inconceivable. And the limits of inconceivability are accepted as normal; and the fact that our society is an anthropological aberration is utterly unknown.

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“Nothing left but the fac”

Posted on Posted in france, politics, translation1 Comment

I’ve just started reading the most prominent book on French university reforms of the past year, Refonder L’Université: Pourquoi l’enseignement supérieur reste à reconstruire, which translates to “Refounding the University: Why higher education awaits reconstruction.” It came out last October from La Découverte, and has spawned debate at, for instance, ARESER (the Association of Reflection on Higher Education and Research), at a seminar last November on the Politics of Science, and more generally within the remnants of the faculty opposition to Sarkozy’s education policy.

I may write more about this in the future (once I’ve finished it!), but I was struck by the very beginning of the introduction (pp. 15-16), which gives a nice capsule summary of how the university is seen as being at the absolute bottom of the prestige scale in French higher education. I’ll translate; bear in mind that “la fac,” short for “the faculty,” is French slang for “the university.” Bear in mind, also, that a major distinguishing characteristic of French public universities is that they’re open to everyone with a high school diploma, while other kinds of higher education have more selective admissions.

Bastia, August 2008. Conversation with a taxi driver. He finds out that his passenger is an academic. He brings up the case of his daughter, which he’s worrying about. She has just received her high school diploma, science track, with high honors. She wants to enroll in a private school in Aix-en-Provence to be a speech therapist. It’s a dream she’s had since childhood. This is the best school for it, it seems, but the tuition fees are high and you have to pay for lodging too (no dorm housing if you’re not enrolled in the public university). But above all, the results are uncertain: there are only a few dozen places for several thousand candidates. The academic tries to convince the taxi driver that it would be good for his daughter to enroll simultaneously in psychology at the university. That would at least guarantee that she’ll get a degree. Neither the taxi driver nor his daughter seem to have thought of that…
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Rage, repetition and incomprehension in precarious work

Posted on Posted in absurdity, france, politics, translationTagged , , , 1 Comment
The following is the text of an open letter sent to the President of the University of Paris-8 by a teacher in visual arts. She’s losing her job because of a particularly Kafkaesque circumstance: she doesn’t make enough money from art to maintain her tax status as an artist, and in France there’s a regulation that says you have to have a “principal occupation” to work as an adjunct. At any rate, this text, which tends to express its outrage through repetition and irony, is a particularly rich example of the emotional consequences of precarity.

Paris
April 28, 2011

Mr. President,
The honor I feel in writing to you is coupled to the hope that you will be able to spare a few moments.

In terms of the facts, all resemblance to the life of Christine Coënon is not accidental; in the form of the writing, all resemblance to John Cage’s Communication (Silence, Denoël Press, 2004) is not accidental (in italics).

I am a visual artist, an adjunct [chargé de cours] in Visual Arts [Arts Plastiques] at the University of Paris-8 since 1995.
I am 48 years old. High school diploma in 1980, two years of college (Caen, 1980-82), five years in art school (Caen, 1982-87) and then the Institute of Higher Studies in Visual Arts (Paris, 1988-98).
Holding a degree in art (DNSEP, 1987), more than twenty years of research and artistic production, fifteen years of teaching at the University of Paris-8… my pay as an adjunct in visual arts is rising to 358€ per month.
EVERY DAY IS BEAUTIFUL.
What if I ask 32 questions?
Will that make things clear?

Every week I teach two classes, a practical and a theoretical class, which comes to 128 hours of teaching per year.
All my classes are paid at the “discussion section adjunct rate [chargé de TD].”
Do you think my pay is fair, compared to the pay of a tenured professor whose hourly quota is less at 200 hours?

The adjunct is paid for the time spent in class: two and a half hours, although the time slots are currently three hours long. Should I refuse to answer questions after class? And course preparation? And correcting people’s work? And grading? And tutoring the seniors?
What is the difference between an adjunct and a baby-sitter?

In 2005, the semesters were changed from 15 weeks to 13 weeks; after which adjuncts were paid for 32 hours instead of 37.5.
32 = 13 x 2.5?
Why didn’t someone teach me to count?
Would I have to know how to count to ask questions?

Why, when a visiting lecturer [vacataire] gets a gross hourly wage of 61.35€, am I getting 40.91€ (compare to the rate of a visiting foreign lecturer)?
I was told that the hourly rate of 61.35€ corresponded to what an adjunct costs the university.
So if I just add the bosses’ overhead to my own salary, everything adds up.
Do I understand that adjuncts are supposed to be paying the bosses’ overhead?
These things that are not clear to me, are they clear to you?
Do you think it’s fair, this special system?

Why don’t adjuncts, who agree to work for a trimester or a year, get contracts?
They do, however, sign an agreement to work, and after that it’s a “maybe.”
If I start a semester, am I just supposed to imagine that I’ll be there at the end? The same thing for a year?

The adjunct is paid hourly, and thus doesn’t have the right to paid vacation or to an end-of-contract bonus. [NB: The French have something called an indemnité de précarité, which is supposed to be paid at the end of short-term contracts to “compensate for the precarity of the situation.”]
Is there any point in asking why?

Why is it that an artist must have money to make money?
Why does the university refuse the House of Artists’ regulatory framework? I pay them fees as a good taxpayer. [NB: The House of Artists is the professional association chosen by the French state to handle artists’ social security.]
Why does Visual Arts at the University misrecognize the artist’s situation, characterized by precarity?
(The median earnings of affiliated artists are 8300 euros per year, which is below the poverty line, and 50% of artists earn less than that…)

Is an artist who has “insufficient earnings” insufficient?
Why do I have the feeling of only being a chit for the accountants?
Why is the teaching artist considered “lucky” to get underpaid for teaching only if her research is profitable?
Why, paradoxically, does the University only recognize artists’ sales, and under no circumstances their research and teaching?
(I’ll permit myself to mention that in 2008 I got a research fellowship from the National Center of Visual Arts [CNAP]).

Is this the 28th question?
Have we got a way to make money?
Money, what does it communicate?
Which is more communicative, an artist who makes money or an artist who doesn’t?
Are people artists within the market, non-artists outside the market?
And if people on the inside don’t really understand, does that change the question?

Why do I teach at the University? (Some say there are Art Schools for artists!)
Why? Because I was invited there and, naturally, I found myself a place there.
I say “naturally” because, whether at an Art School or at the Institute for Higher Studies in Visual Arts, I have always felt a complementarity between the historian and/or theorist and the artist.
Too naturally, no doubt, I got invested and, too passionately, I have continued in the conditions that you know.

Is there always something to wonder about, never peace or calm?
If my head is full of uncertainty, what’s happening to my peace and to my calm?
Are these questions getting us somewhere?
And if there are rules, who made them, I ask you?
In other words — is there a possible end to these uncertainties and, if so, where does it begin?

Are there any important questions?
The semesters are getting shorter, the quota of students per class is rising…
60% of teachers in visual arts are precarious, their pay rising a few hundredths of a euro each year.
I ask you, given that experience emerges over time, what will happen if experience is sacrificed for momentary profit?
Are these questions getting us somewhere?
Where are we going?

Mr. President, I hope that you will be able to understand these questions, and able to answer them too.

I inform you that in spite of the recognized interest in my classes, they are going to be canceled because I am subject to the House of Artists system (which is not even a professional obligation for me), and my earnings are below the threshold for being a full member.
“Fired for insufficient earnings”: my courses are being canceled because my earnings are too low.
Faced with the aberration of this situation, and without a response on your part, I will choose to make this letter public on May 19, 2011.

Please accept, Mr. President, this assurance of my best regards,

Christine Coënon
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Excerpt: returning to the field

Posted on Posted in ethnography, france

This is from my field notebook earlier this spring, as I returned to France after spending some time back in Chicago this winter.

march 2 – on returning to france

the sky hazed and prongs of sun forked into the railroad cars and the gravel ballast of the tracks. in the tunnel the buckles of the woman across the aisle shine and her hair is a vast mound. near me a man in gray types up his notes on a laptop, palefaced and bespectacled, and i stepped on his toe as i sat down. little whistles of mechanized high hats come from what i hypothesize is someone beside me with headphones; there’s a smell of shit replaced before long with a smell of vinyl seating; the guy across from me, his notebook falls from the seat on my toe, and he picks up his notebook before i can, but he sees my readiness to pick it up for him and says merci. the border guards barely looked at me as i entered. the guard looked african — always contradictory when social norms are enforced by the non-normative social type, though of course this formulation doesn’t do justice to the case at hand. we’re passing sevran, aulnay-sous-bois. it’s noticeably different light and heat from chicago, just as the meteorologists would have led us to expect. my thoughts feel unfocused as i write this. the country is not terribly unfamiliar so far. little houses, signs in french. red-tiled roofs. torn-up hair of the weeds and brush trackside that’s dead brown & unkempt. at least i observe that i have a will to write. as we get closer the tumbleweeds of white buildings rise up into landscape.

The shape of ethnographic materials

Posted on Posted in ethnography5 Comments

My department asked me for a summary of my “results,” and I thought it would be worth posting some of that here because I think it’s worth trying to be public, and therefore honest, about what exactly one ends up with after a spell of ethnographic fieldwork.

If I look at the physical form of what I’ve brought home, I find a reassuring but also daunting quantity of material: three suitcases of books and print matter, several thousand photographs, approximately 300 hours of recorded audio, 1750-odd digital documents in an archive I’ve been maintaining, and some nine field notebooks. Although I plan to make a more thorough inventory of my materials in the near future, my sense is that the data falls into five major categories:

  1. The discourses and organizational practices of French university politics: how people have debates, analyze their situations, produce slogans, march or blockade, express political feelings like anger or hope;
  2. the public practices of philosophy departments: what happens in classrooms and conferences;
  3. the intellectual world of French philosophy: the lexicon of its ‘cosmos,’ the characteristic forms and contents of its texts, the ways people enroll themselves in philosophical genealogies, and a more limited amount of data on local reading and writing practices;
  4. the organization and bureaucracy of French universities (which differ considerably from their American counterparts);
  5. local social relations: friendships, collegiality, social networks, status and difference marking;
  6. local historicities and futurities: how people conceptualize their history, future, and present conjuncture (which varies enormously with social position);
  7. finally, and hardest to articulate, a mass of unsystematic data on everyday life, the shapes and smells that serve as half-ignored backdrop to local action.

Looking over this material makes me realize that I have too much material to ever fully analyze, but also, paradoxically, too little material (or the wrong kind) to give an entirely satisfactory description of the days and lives of my informants. Ultimately, my material is based on many fleeting acquaintances and relatively few close field friendships. But when I said as much to one philosopher, he observed that in fact many French academics don’t know each other well, and that superficial, partial relationships are preponderant, which suggests that perhaps having many “superficial” relationships was, in a paradoxical sense, a form of full and typical participation in the world in question, and hence itself more a form of data than an ethnographic weakness.

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Early fragments on the intellectual precariat

Posted on Posted in america, europeTagged 12 Comments

Contemporary commentators often give us the sense that the increasing precarity of academic work is a recent and novel phenomenon. As I’ve noted before, in the American case this sometimes seems to rest on the historically inaccurate fantasy of a previous Golden Era of tenure, even though tenure, on further investigation, was apparently a rather recent invention that only became widespread in the post-1945 period, only lasted a few decades, and never covered all academic staff anyway. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that there aren’t ongoing degradations in the conditions of academic work; the last twenty years have not been pretty in terms of US academic employment. Things look particularly grim in Britain this year, given the threats of 80% cuts in public university funding; in spite of the fantasy that tuition will increase to compensate, it’s easy to imagine that many humanities departments will be closed down. (Or already have been.) And as I’ve discussed before, France has seen a growing discourse on academic precarity the last year or two.

But it may help our sense of historical consciousness to discover that even a hundred years ago, some people already had a fairly clear discourse on precarious intellectual work. I’m not a historian and I can’t pretend to give the whole picture, but if we search on JSTOR for “intellectual proletariat” the first use of the term is as early as 1884, and the term has been used occasionally ever since, being used on average a few times per year in the scholarly literature since the 1930s.

In 1904, one Frances J. Davenport wrote a review in the Journal of Political Economy of a book by Carlo Marin. Marin apparently set out to demonstrate that “the inferiority of the Italian is by no means innate, but is the result of his extreme poverty.” Davenport went on to summarize as follows:

The fundamental cause of the poverty of Italy, according to Dr. Marin, is the faulty system of education. Numerous but poorly equipped universities train great numbers of lawyers and of doctors, who cannot find employment and form an intellectual proletariat. On the other hand, the few schools of agriculture, industry and commerce are scantily attended, and the instruction lacks a practical character. Reduce the number of universities, improve their scientific equipment, and introduce into every university thoroughly practical instruction in agriculture, industry, and commerce; work directly for economic development and social improvement will follow.

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