The business consisted in a white van kitted out as a crêpe-making stand. The side of the van folded up into an awning, exposing a window through which food and money were flowing swiftly, in opposite directions. I hesitated before committing myself to the queue, which was quite long, but there was no other obvious place to eat at the entrance to the campus, and I suspected that the truck’s popularity was a promising sign.

The truck was the occasion for two overlapping social situations: the students waiting in line and the actual scene of crêpe-purchasing transactions. The student clientele struck me as fairly representative of Paris-area humanities-and-social-sciences: majority women, quite racially diverse, and dressed largely in long black coats, which have been the normative cold-weather apparel as long as I have been acquainted with the Paris region.

There seemed to be some gender dynamics at work. Sociability seemed to cluster around groups of women students (two or three or four at a time), while solitude seemed a more masculine performance (I saw more male students waiting by themselves). I was reminded, overhearing students’ conversations, that it’s not just the ethnographers who are outsiders on university campuses: I heard two students having a long discussion about which building was which, as if not everyone had a clear knowledge of campus geography. Meanwhile, student sociability didn’t seem too affected by ethnoracial differences, on any level that I could immediately observe.

(I don’t, incidentally, know absolutely for sure that these people were students; I didn’t ask. But their fashion choices, their markers of social class, their youth, their backpacks, their casual socializing, and their proximity to the campus seemed conclusive. Ethnography demands leaps of interpretation.)

The customers who were there with friends were obliged (normatively) to bid them farewell as they left the site with their food. This entailed standard French departure rituals, which could hypothetically have entailed la bise, the ritual kiss, which is common in friendship contexts involving women. Presumably it takes a bit of effort to faire la bise [kiss], and I noticed a shortcut: one woman announced to her friends “bises!” [kisses] instead of actually making the gesture in question. Standard French practice when you’re in a group, I suppose, but it also reminds me of the way you would sign a letter to a friend. In that sense, the verbal exclamation “kisses!” seems to hint at a takeover of physical interaction by writing. The becoming-prose of the world.

On the other hand, perhaps one should say instead that these little moments of sociability were a sort of “found poetry,” secreted within the lines of an otherwise pretty hasty commercial exchange. You had to pay before you got your food: the staff would tell you what you owed when they had a moment of downtime, as your crêpe was cooking. There were two cooks, each making three crepes at once. Curiously, the place billed itself as being dedicated to sweet crêpes (“Le P’tit sucré”) but in reality almost everyone (80%+) wanted savory food. Lunchtime.

More to say about commercial exchange in this site, but for now, I’ll just leave a few other images of the scene.

To the left, a large plaza leading towards campus.

Twenty minutes later the scene by the truck was very empty, as lunchtime died down.

But new waves of people were regularly disgorged from the suburban train station.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The university is planning to renovate it all, they say, but what with the economic crisis, that might not happen next year. So some of the space has been borrowed.

A rack of costumes, a blue and green striped bag, a pink scarf, a green towel, a striped coat, a bit of floral decoration on the floor. Juxtaposed on the abandoned horizon of a decrepit sink, old metal taps greening at the base, a tap for distilled water, an electrical supply strip above the sink, lines of salts in the basin like geological strata, green and grey, a decayed piece of clear tape.

The local Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Co. have taken up residence in this basement, needing space for set & costume construction. This, as you can see, is the chemistry lab-cum-costume-shop.

Frilled dress the color of a desiccated lemon, cratered with shadows, dangles beneath the criscrossed pipes and the circular air exchange and the perpendicular fluorescent strips.

The lines of the clothes paralleling their coat hangers, the coat hangers paralleling the pipes, the ceiling all painted white as if to reflect as much light as possible.

A poster “Costumes of the 18th Century” was taped up on top of a graph of the vapor pressure of liquid helium, but it is falling down.

Little spools of thread in a grid of color in a monochromatic space.

My friend Soule was designing the costumes. She reputedly owns more sewing machines than she has teeth.

In the corner behind the sewing machines, study-looking electrical controls were waiting for someone to press STOP.

There’s something surreal about this juxtaposition of things we see here, the texture of chemical dust crossed with the texture of gauzy lace, chromatic color slapped across white piping, abandoned lab benches masked by temporary theatre workshops. When I was writing about campus borders back in December, I had this idea that academic space was this enclosed single thing, fairly homogeneous, closed off from the outside world by police and custom, structured according to uniquely academic criteria. Here we have the opposite: academic space seems like a polyphonous thing, where old spaces are abandoned to decay while new totally different spaces emerge on top of them, where radically different kinds of cultural worlds overlap – the theatre and the laboratory. Here, academic space looks less like a sacred vessel for self-conscious scholastic profundities, or even any kind of unique thing at all; it looks more like the heteroglossic novel described by Bakhtin, where a single genre incorporates all kinds of disparate, even incompatible subgenres within it.

I have a lot of other pictures of this show whose costumes are being assembled in these photos, and of the university theatre, Mandel Hall, where it was produced, and I hope soon I’ll have time to think more carefully about what it means for academic space that it can incorporate theatre and all the very non-academic, even anti-academic, worlds of show business. (I could call it “performing arts,” but that makes it sound too dignified.)

this is the university’s skin. at the university of illinois-chicago. some building on the south side of roosevelt road. the branches creeping up across the brick and flung in the sun while the wall is in shadow, the brick stained and blurred and colored, the brick covered by creeping vines, the vines dripping down as if the blood of the bricks were pouring out through the mortar, the snow settled into the vines like cowbirds nesting in places they didn’t build.

the building stretches away to the left, its cement seam with the snow breaking up where the vines hit the ground, the tree shown in this wider view to spread out in a cloud of sunlit branches, a sole tree guarding the perimeter of the building, a total absence of windows, the vines pouring down. little bits of snow are caught in the brick and in the tree’s branches too.

if we bring the camera back still further we see that we are looking through a gate and that the reason why the snow is clear and untrodden around the building is that the building is fenced off from the street with iron.

if the university has a body then its skin is this oddly natural surface, not something that appears to be continuously curated by a meddling artist but something abandoned to the plants that drown out the square sound of the windowless walls by overgrowing them, by lying on them and catching their light. you can see where the iron gate has begun to fray and rust, chips of its finish vanishing, its own shadow falling across it.

the apparent social functions of this architecture are banal: to keep the heat in, to keep the light out, to provide security from the rest of the city. but my aim here is not to delineate the social functions of the architecture, rather to examine the architectural functions of the social. i suppose this ongoing series of my examinations of images of academic space is based on the supposition that everyone on campus must, like me, be experiencing the university as landscape, as aesthetic object, as a semi-ordered architectural conglomerate, even if this degree of aesthetic awareness is so low-level as to escape discussion and maybe not even to enter ordinary life in a meaningful way. but even something like the play of vines on brick, something without meaning, can still have effect.

my advisor william mazzarella thinks of the realm of aesthetic and sensory experience as only precariously integrated with the realm of discourse and the primary processes of ideologization: “the very attractiveness of [for instance] consumer commodities in some sense arises out of their uncanny inability to reify completely the materials upon which they draw” (shoveling smoke, 2003:20). “the life-world of the worker and the image-as-object always necessarily retain concrete elements that exceed the abstracting requirements of exchange value” (43). he calls for “a return to taking the ding-an-sich seriously; not as a route to some repressed ‘truth’ of the object or of the human condition, but rather as a constitutive, historically grounded, yet always excessive dimension of the production of value” (45). “might we not reconsider the idea of the ‘potentialities’ of an image-object in terms of a kind of embodied memory that supports and disturbs the frameworks of discourse?”; “the production and circulation of [for example] commodity images is all about achieving a provisional or temporary ‘fix’ on [the relationship between affect and meaning, the sensible and the intelligible], while at the same time relying on its lability for the harnessing of desire” (48).

what, then, is the relationship between meaning and affect in academic space, between institutional function and aesthetic lability? there’s a new way of phrasing a question that has preoccupied this blog for many weeks now. and whoever (if anyone) is reading this post, please say something about your experience of academic space in the comments!

Incidentally, if you count, this comes to 18 males (prof included) and 23 females (TA included), i.e., 44% male and 56% female. The “Me” is yours truly, and the “?” is someone who may or may not have been sitting across from me, but was masked, in any event, by someone else’s head. In any event, the “objective” gender balance isn’t that far from even.

We see here, first and foremost, a striking emergence of same-sex spatial blocs (colored lavender): a large male block is in the bottom right corner, while a large female bloc is in the upper left. Elsewhere in the room, the seating was more mixed by gender.

Why might we see this pattern? Is it because certain academics simply prefer to sit beside people of the same sex? Surely many academics are conscious of gender and sexuality in public settings, and in choosing who to associate with among strangers. This was the first day of class, after all.

Or we could consider a more plausible hypothesis: does this pattern emerge because academics sit near people they know or are friends with? Certainly, when I enter a public space, I try to sit with my friends, and in this case I actually came in with friends. On this hypothesis, we might observe gendered spatial arrangement as a result of certain academics preferentially developing same-sex friendships. Such a pattern has been around in anthro grad school since the 60s and 70s, according to Susan Philips, and I think it continues today, insofar as many academic friendships are shaped by long-lasting sexual competition or collaboration, difference or solidarity, sexual desire or disinterest…

Also, we have to consider the extent to which gender is merely the expression of other forms of social organization. In this room there was a very salient, collectively recognized difference between the Anthropology Department doctoral students and the Social Science Master’s students (MAPSS). For instance, the bloc of males in the bottom right was all doctoral students, if I recall correctly. We can’t really analyze this here, for lack of knowledge of prior relationships in the room, but it’s interesting that space gets structured into blocs without anyone having a conscious will to create such structures. That a general spatial organization can emerge from a number of little personal decisions about who to be proximate with.

Gender in this space did not seem difficult to decode, on a crude level. I read it off from footware, from hats, from coats, from the length and shape of their hair, the tone and pitch of their voices. People seemed content to perform their genders in unambiguous fashion. I should emphasize: I’m not saying that “M” or “F” exhausts what there is to say about gender; it’s a crude and simplistic categorization and it needs to be generally resisted. But the sad fact is: this crude binary categorization captures real patterns in the social world.

For instance: the symbolically central space, of course, was occupied by the male professor, the “head” of the table (colored green). In an odd visual reflection of this spatialization of male authority, the foot of the table was occupied by a male student too. That guy happens to be a friend of mine, and he has long had a habit of sitting in that seat in this particular room. I don’t know if gender has much to do with that habit.

Perhaps, then, there’s no gendered pattern to read in this reflection, just contingency into which observers can project their own predetermined symbolic structures; perhaps it’s a mistake to read symbolic structure directly out of the empirical circumstances, as I’m doing; perhaps the real gendered dynamics of the room have little to do with the seating chart. Perhaps I’m ascribing structure that is meaningless to the participants (except me). Certainly, it would be hard to detect a direct link between participants’ genders and the academic conversation that subsequently took place.

The problem with analyzing gender in academia is an inescapable tension between gender as a hermeneutic that one uses to ascribe order to an indeterminate social situation, and gender as a deep structure that brings prior order to the world in unconscious and unnoticeable ways. Gender is a thing one invokes contingently, perhaps wrongly, in making sense of the social world; but it’s simultaneously what determines and regulates that world prior to anyone’s perception or action.

Feeling silly and reflexive, I said at the beginning of class when we went around: “I work on anthropology of universities. This week I’m especially interested in the gendered organization of academic discourse.”

People laughed.

Apparently the thought of social determination and gender provokes laughter. The only question is: is it the laughter of recognition or the laughter of disavowal?

The skyline of a campus is different when it’s obscured by the trudging stalks of its scrub plants.

The university can so easily be made to become a tipsy line drawing mauled by the shadows of leaves and stalks.

Does that mean that we could hope to dig past the complex inner workings of academic cultures to uncover their aesthetic surfaces, as purely superficial, trivial, unpredictable visual experiences?

So often the public parts of academic space are either purely functional, or else over-designed by people with a crude and ritualistic sense of style. We get bare heating ducts or else we get marble pillars, fountains and hyperbolic flower arrangements. But what about the little aesthetic accidents, the roofs through weeds, the window on nothing, the long gallop of a chainlink fence pierced by a gate?

I suppose the first thing to say about visual analysis of academic culture is that the architects’ and bureaucrats’ intentions must diverge wildly both from the space as it is actually built, and from the varying visual experiences of the space that different people have. And the slow look of an analyst has little in common with the glance of a busy professor. (Probably it has more in common with the eye of a bored student studying the lecture hall ceiling.)

If you look at the campus from a certain point of view, your camera down in the dirt, the clear lines of roofs and windows are obscured by huge and dark shapes.

Weeds have a skyline too. The whole aesthetic structure of academic space is overturned if you lie on the ground and look out from there. The weeds look higher than the tallest chimney. They are blurry, hard to bring in focus, almost dizzying.

The University of Chicago decorates the tops of its buildings with crosses. They are mostly lost from view, unless you climb to the top of the towers and look out over the rooftops to see them, crosses silhouetted against the sky.

The crosses are defended by faux crenellation. A bit of industrial equipment is probably invisible from below. Tiny snow patches linger in the north-facing slopes of the roof. The roof serves, after all, to keep out the sky, its snow and rain, its wind, and all other unwanted intrusions into scholarly meditations.

Part of the university’s moat, the Midway, is visible farther off, just before the row of buildings in the background. It is full of trees and roads and large empty space that serve, intentionally or not, as barricades against the poor neighborhoods to the south. The space south of the Midway has a dangerous reputation in student culture – Amadou Cisse was shot and killed there last year. There is actually a ditch in the center of the Midway, rather like the crude dry moats in early wooden castles. It functions similarly to the cliff in Morningside Park that protects Columbia University from Harlem. They are blunt instruments for protecting class differences.

At dusk, the university ramparts stick out from the thickety trees which conceal long rows of parked cars. The top of the ramparts is the edge of the sky. Crosses and turrets guard the top of academic space, forgotten symbols of God and War.

The status of Linnaeus, god and symbol of academic classification. It’s symbolically interesting to put a symbol of academic order and academic power in the park that simultaneously serves as the university’s south border. If academic power consists in the legitimate right to classify the world, as Bourdieu would have put it, then it’s interesting too that Linnaeus faces south, as if the emissary of academic classification to the farther South Side.

Linnaeus, you’ll see, is also hedged in by trees. Curious that the tree, far from being an unwanted intrusion of natural order into the planned and regulated campus space, is so often co-opted as a symbol of academic splendor and wealth. (Not to mention other funny semiotic resonances: the “tree of knowledge”? the “groves of academe”? why these tree symbols?) But trees are also cut down when administrators find them a nuisance – and then sometimes there are controversies, particularly with environmentalist groups who defend their groves against what are invariably plans for new development. How do these protesters imagine the university’s relationship to trees and to the land?

it’s summer in this picture. i was on top of a hill when i took this. i was 18. just before i left for college. the year 2000.

the rows of graves run down the hill to the high brick buildings. the silver dome of the basketball stadium rises like a silly saucer. the trees were the dark green of summer. it was probably hot out.

it’s a little eerie that the view of the university leads down out of a hill of graves. this is the university of connecticut; they have the same thing at cornell university too. a campus graveyard. just a place for the bodies to go when they’re done working, i guess. a convenience, just like the campus coffeeshop. why leave campus when all the amenities are close at hand?

or maybe it’s an allegory of academic death. down in the valley is the campus; up on the hill are the dead, watching over it all. it fits perfectly with that trope of the “dead wood” among the professoriate, a stock image of the old, decrepit and unproductive faculty weighing down on the young and lively.

it was quiet up in that graveyard; no one much liked going there. some people say universities are logocentric, are all talk, but how do they explain the symbolic significance of academic space dedicated to silence, to emptiness, to unproductivity?

down there in the valley of campus buildings i took another picture. it was a sardonic piece of graffiti.

This is the eastbound bus stop at Garfield. Dozens and dozens of university students come through here mornings, getting off the red line, waiting to go to campus. It’s one of those places where there is interracial coexistence without much real human contact. Pretty much all the white people here are university students. The university is set in a white enclave in an overwhelmingly black part of the city. There’s still a real degree of anxiety about race, or maybe it’s about class difference, or about both at once, inseparably. I’ve met white students who say they’re afraid to come here at night, not for any articulated reason, just out of an ingrained sense of “danger.”

This too is a border zone of the university, though not one where you can see a physical boundary. But I like this photo because some of the social barriers are written on the faces of the two people who ended up in front of my lens. The lady just looks out into the street, indifferent, sort of peaceful. The guy glares at me, his eyebrows creased, his mouth jagged, his head off axis. He hated me, I felt at the moment when I clicked the shutter, but just then the bus showed up and we went off in opposite directions.

It’s a place where strangers have different ways of remaining strangers to each other, of remaining separate from each other, of defending themselves against their fantasies of other people. Sometimes there are people who want cigarettes or directions. In warmer weather, people read academic texts while leaning on the edge of the bridge. There’s a perpetual howl from the highway and subway that run below. The edge of the university stretches off into the abyss of the road.

Where the lights of the classrooms are left on pointlessly, shining on nothing, embroidering the frillery of the windowpanes.

Where the gothic architecture is lit from below like a clown with a flashlight beneath his chin, pretending to be monstrous.

Where the darkness is kept white as fat by the lamps which are there to preserve safety and security.

Where there are cocktail parties, or receptions, or evening talks or concerts, or tired pallid figures seated in rows at their library cubbies, or people going in and out of the bar, mostly students since the faculty tend to go home and the staff always go home, except the custodians who work in the bright shine of their isolation from daytime activities, and the security guard guarding the library against its patrons, and the contractors staffing the dining halls, and the police who circle in their cars, staring into space and saying nothing.

Up at the corner of 39th and Drexel is the northwest corner of the University of Chicago’s police patrol zone. In the warmer months, at least, one can often see a patrol car parked there just south of the end of Drexel, the guy inside just sitting there, motionless, not watching, not waiting, just still, like a sculpture, out of place because nothing is ever happening on that corner, unless you wanted to count the fountain on the little plaza, an empty little symbol of a public park where no one is sitting, not even in the summer, since the neighborhood is on the empty side, on that block, at least.

Back on campus, where I took this picture just north of Bond Chapel, the police patrol more regularly, like shepherds, keeping the bikes from wandering off without their owners. If you waited later into the night, into the wee hours, the place would just get emptier and emptier, I suppose, until morning.

One of the ways universities organize their peaks is with built objects that rise higher than others, that rise for the sake of rising, because height is symbolically potent: a church, a gilded library cupola, a smokestack, a triplet of water towers, a triplet of flagpoles.

Two opposed types of structures reach skyward on this campus (again the University of Connecticut): the most ritualized and symbolic rise beside the most utilitarian and nameless. On one hand, the steeple of the Storrs Congregational Church, the flags of Connecticut and the U.S.A. and the university, and the cupola of the Wilbur Cross Library. On the other hand, the radio tower, the water towers and the smokestacks. The sky simultaneously represents the heights towards which the most sacred buildings reach, and the dumping ground for the exhaust from the campus heating plant. The university as factory collides with the university as temple. (Of course, the more utilitarian, industrial towers and smokestacks are far taller than the merely symbolically tall flags and cupolas – twice as high, at least. But this physical fact may not be very symbolically significant.)

According to Mary LeCron Foster, a symbolic anthropologist writing before I was born, the line and what she calls “lineality” are key cultural symbols of white America, and “up” the preferred cultural direction:

Our skyscrapers, jet planes, and spaceships all attest to the fact that the preferred line is up. We move “up” in our professions or “go to the top” of the class or the organization. It seems no accident that we are “up” from the ape since this is construed as progress, nor that history moves “down” to the present if no particular progress is implied. To the extent that we are future oriented we are also ahistorical, tending to forget events that happened earlier than yesterday. As “up” is good so “down” is bad. To be “down” is to be “out.” “Low” character contrasts with “high” moral worth.

Universities are indeed “up,” or at least are at the top of a number of our prestige hierarchies: they’re reckoned more advanced than secondary or primary education, more pure than technical schools, more comprehensive than colleges, more free in their intellectual inquiry and critical reach than other fora – one could go on with these cultural associations (not that I endorse them), or perhaps just note that it is, after all, called “higher” education.

Yet oddly enough, the campus buildings that most reach skyward, in their architecture, are the most traditional: the church and the library. The physically largest academic buildings, on the other hand, do tend to be the most futuristic, and the most recently built: the vast laboratories built for the sciences and engineering schools, the business school, the sports stadium. But although these modern buildings may be tall, they seldom face up.

To find a modern structure that symbolically appeals to the sky we have to look elsewhere: to the blue emergency phone, built in a little tower, capped with a little cupola of its own, reminiscent of a police siren. It appears to be at once sacred and utterly pragmatic: it promises immediate police assistance while serving as a symbol of protection against the forces of chaos, criminality, threat, fear, rape, robbery, drunken mayhem, and other evils that spread across the campus grounds, especially at night. Its color, blue, symbolizes the police, but the sky too, as if the emergency phone offered rescue “out of the blue,” from above.

Campus borders are not homogeneous. They can take shape as an iron fence, a fork in a road, a pasture’s edge, an asphalt lot. Sometimes there really is no border at all, just a progression from the campus center to the outskirts to the countryside. Yet the university, or this university at least, thoroughly undoes the usual progression between the city and the wild. All of a sudden, surrounded by trees, practically without outskirts, industrial buildings rise up; apartment towers and and sports stadiums appear in the middle of nowhere; the clutter of fallen leaves is replaced by a grid of brick pathways. The rural university is an anomaly in the landscape, small and insignificant between the hilltops but still sprawling, sucking the local rivers dry and polluting the groundwater.

The spatial and temporal boundaries of campus overlap oddly. That day before Thanksgiving, for example, the center of campus was quite vacant, while the outskirts had a fair number of middle-aged people walking their dogs – or just walking themselves. The center of campus is itself spatially differentiated and bounded in all sorts of ways: organized by landscape architects into walkways and driveways, lawns and fences; carefully labeled and mapped and lit (at night) in orange sodium; vertically stratified, with the library looking down on the computer science building, which in turn looks down on the adjacent business school; in short, aesthetically and functionally differentiated.

Edges within edges, exteriors within interiors within exteriors, illogical leaps between different borders, fences that protect nothing. The landscape of the university’s borders is partly a document of the history of the university – that agriculture school, for instance, is a relic in a state with not much agriculture any more. And all those forests around the university, running out to the horizon in blue, have grown back since the decline of agriculture in Connecticut. Once, according to folk history, almost the whole state was bare of trees. So the forests at the edge of the university’s fields are a symbol of the disappearance of the farms that that university used to serve.

The social borders of the university are nicely symbolized by its physical arrangements. That parking lot? A good sign that most of the student have cars. That most of them come from families that can afford cars. Those little roads, running over the hills and through the fields? They run off into the countryside where most of the faculty live, in their faux colonials with their children. Marking the meager barrier between town and university. It’s radically different to enter campus through a quiet back road than to enter by the state highway, through commercial strips and traffic howls.

The politics of the university are apparent in its borders too: in the fences that keep the unauthorized from entering the playing fields and the horse fields; in the presidential houses at the campus margins that are overpriced and out of place, paid for by taxpayers in the hopes of housing receptions for prospective donors; in the way the university uses its land. There’s a good question for a land-grant university: what is its relationship to the land?