Anyway, I just rediscovered a self-critical postscript that I had started writing afterwards about why that workshop didn’t really work out. Here it is, in the spirit of the thought that dwelling on our unsuccessful projects is a good idea.

The original workshop announcement:

This workshop aims to develop a mostly nonexistent genre that we could call the genre of the actually scary institutional critique. The premise: that many people have nestled away somewhere in their brains something about their institution (or department, discipline, campus, job, world, whatever) that to them is utterly intolerable, inexplicable, unjustifiable, ludicrous, unlivable, some little huddled kernel of lingering rage that can almost never be expressed, or at least that remains unresolved, because the genres in which we express institutional critique are generally either nonexistent, routinized by collegial etiquette, trivialized by being expressed only in private to friends, or else dismissed as activist hysteria or some other form of irrational excess feeling. The further premise: that it would be worth trying to develop a genre that would be equal to these non-normative moments of intense critical feelings. A genre that would break with the conventions of courtesy that make critique into an academic mode of social reproduction, that would exceed the routinized forms of mild annoyance that are normative for everyday differences of professional opinion.

Not that everyone does or ought to go around in a state of fury or other intense feeling, not at all. But it remains troubling that there are people who are really upset by various aspects of the academic world (I’m assuming we can all think of examples of this) who have no available genre with which to make their experience into something public that would actually threaten and change the people around them. Who have no genre equal to moments of real antagonism. Of course, universities have systems of unequal authority, mass complacency, self-interest, disinterest, etc, that make the inefficacy of critique far more than a question of genre. But the problem of making a critical genre that can actually scare (or touch, move, change) people in spite of all the defense mechanisms is one that seems to deserve our time.

Format: We’ll start with a discussion about critique and emotional intensity, and then move to a series of writing exercises in this possible genre. 

And here’s what I wrote afterwards:

Our aim was to have been actually scary institutional critique and we didn’t quite get there.

Psychologically speaking, I suppose you could say that this was because there wasn’t an overwhelming collective will to be scared. If anything, I felt like we were realizing a collective desire to talk, to have a bit of intellectual effervescence and being-together, to have phatic contact, to have optimism. Our meeting was not a scene of crisis or meltdown. Something scary would have been almost foreign to its atmosphere.

Procedurally speaking, this was also because we started out with a discussion of the premise of the workshop and stayed within this ostensibly preliminary moment probably longer than we should have. I wished afterwards that as a facilitator I had been more ready to cut short the discussion and skip to the writing exercises, although I was naturally eager to hear what people said, and I felt, afterwards, like I’d learned something important about criticality from that.  At the same time, I was a little perturbed to realize that we had fallen back slightly on our habitual logics of intellectual exchange: the logics of clarification, of questions and answers, of establishing our differences and similarities of opinion, of conversing. I ought to have known that these genres of talk were in a way already at cross purposes with scary criticism, because scary criticism necessarily stands outside the logic of normal conversation and outside the desire for kindness and outside the rhythm of normal temporality.  As I imagine actually scary critique, it calls for a response, yes, but not necessarily an intellectual response, not necessarily a timely response, not necessarily a thoughtful response. Maybe starting with a conversation was already a paradox.

What did, nonetheless, become clear to me is that there were some real difficulties with the premises of the workshop as I had imagined them. (1.) I had presumed that everyone has a lot at stake in the institution and therefore potentially would have an interest in being fully present and fully vulnerable to processes of critical reflection, but, as Michelle pointed out, many people have other kinds of relations with the university, more instrumental or practical relations; many want to come get some knowledge and some credentials without committing to the university as a total institution. In my view a university is indeed a total institution: both experientially, from the point of view of those of its inmates who live on campus or who at least live constantly at the scene of their work, and ideologically, inasmuch as universities are not just piecemeal providers of services but are also vehicles for visions of what society at large ought to look like, vehicles for cosmologies and totalizing ideologies. But some people don’t relate to the university so totally or so personally, and hence don’t feel much of the irrational utopian impulse to improve the institution.

(2) Which reminds me of a second problem, one chiefly raised by Lauren: that, contrary to the workshop’s tacit fantasy, we don’t live in an ideally rational public space where eloquence is necessarily power or where better means of expression or diagnosis or affect transfer necessarily mean better results. It seems to me that, of course, yes, there is no guarantee that critique will ever change anything, and there are no magical rationalisms to resort to. But at the same time, surely a total absence of criticism would be an even more unpalatable response to problematic institutional situations than an uncertain critical project? Criticism may be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for change, but pragmatically speaking, can’t it help? Along these lines, I suppose I would advocate a sort of minimal optimism about the potential of critical rationality.

 But at the same time, what still feels deeply contradictory about the premises of the workshop was that I simultaneously presupposed (a) a deeply nonrational, prediscursive, utopian desire to participate in a hazardous, collective critical process and, at the same time, (b) a kind of quasi-rationalist commitment to a discursive procedure (or “genre”) by which critical desires might be given voice. I mean, given that the premise of the workshop was about trying to make critical affects audible and collectively disturbing, obviously my aim was to establish something far from a nice placid space of rational debate, but ultimately there was also a hope that this sort of critique would open towards some transformative logic (whether in the guise of a discursive rationality or otherwise).

Another ambiguity in the original program: Who was the scaring supposed to be directed at? Was it about scaring the self or scaring the other? At any rate I meant “scary critique” as a way of scaring someone; but there are such immense individual differences about what’s scary to us or to others.

One of the lessons I learned was that the scary is the particular. The scary seems to have a much more complex relationship to the generic than I had initially understood. Can there, in fact, be a genre of scary criticism, or does a “critical genre” already imply routinization and formalization that detracts from an event of scaring (or being scared)?

If it’s the latter, maybe we should revise the workshop’s premises. Maybe we should say: let’s get rid of the idea that scary critique should find its home in a genre, period. Maybe we should think of scary critique as a way of troubling genres (with apologies to Butler). Of course we can’t really communicate without genres. But trying to make a better genre is quite a different project from trying to avoid being generic.

As an afterward to this (in 2017): I see in hindsight that this whole rubric has a family resemblance with Bruno Latour’s 2004 mediatation, “Why Has Critique Run Out Of Steam.” But on re-reading Latour’s essay, I’m disappointed to rediscover that he thinks of critique as fundamentally epistemological. In that essay, “critique” is basically a set of scripts for demystifying false idols and attributing unconscious motives, whose underlying purpose is to show that the critic “is always right”:

When naive believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naive believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. (239)

Latour is of course describing something real about academia here (though see also Eve Sedgwick’s essay on “paranoid reading,” which is much more psychodynamic about critical affects and which I’d like to write about in detail). But critique in my terms here is not really supposed to be about epistemological classification (“X is real, but Y is a fetish”) and it’s not supposed to be about attacking an Other or gratifying a Self.

To critique, in the way I had in mind, is partly to establish affective solidarities in the face of bad circumstances. In other words, critique is about giving voice to the intolerable (and there are many kinds of intolerability). It’s about breaking with the convention that we must appear to be ok. Rather than being about self-fortification (as in the weirdly anal-retentive script that Latour describes), it’s supposed to be about thinking about how we come undone.

We already have plenty of rituals — like “confession,” “therapy,” or “critical analysis” — that limit and channel these moments of intolerability; but they usually end up being functionalized, just another lid keeping people steaming in their pots. Nevertheless, these rituals aren’t entirely hollow. Essays that dwell on intolerable moments — Viola Allo’s Leaving remains one of my favorites — are still powerful and deserve some sort of amplification that they don’t always get. And I like the critical essay format — more than, say, the personal confession — precisely because it gives voice to the impersonal side of being undone. It amplifies what’s collective about bad news.

I’m just not sure whether this form of affective amplification can be generic. It seems like a bad contradiction to hope that any genre can reliably produce an event of rupture.

Philosophizing in senior year???

1) The 2003 “official instructions” for the philosophy teaching program in senior year say: “Philosophy teaching in senior year… contributes to forming autonomous minds, warned of reality’s complexities and capable of putting to work a critical consciousness of the contemporary world.” What do you think of this?

These formulations pose two major problems.

First, it strikes me as shocking that a philosophy textbook should begin with a series of “official instructions.” An instruction, in the sense of a directive, is entirely contrary to the “autonomous minds” that we are told to “form.” Are we told to “force our students to be free”? Moreover, in the context of schools, “instruction” has a second dimension: we still talk about “public, obligatory, civic instruction” [in connection with public education]. But instructing is not educating. Instructing basically means shaping someone’s mind to fit the competences that the institution judges socially useful. Educating on the other hand means communicating a potential to a mind which, one day, will allow it to help define what is or isn’t valuable for its society. Yet according to the “official” declarations, we’re still on the model of instructing, in both senses of the term.

Second, the goal proclaimed for high school philosophy teaching is completely exorbitant. I know that many people subscribe to it. But we should be astonished by the excessive disproportion between the end and the means: they have groups of thirty pupils, a very limited range of practical exercises, lecture courses, etc. And above all, it’s impossible for philosophy teachers to “form autonomous and critical minds” if the pupils haven’t been invited to be autonomous or critical since the day they arrived in the schoolhouse. Not to mention that the art of thinking isn’t reserved for philosophy. Would one be exempted from “thinking for oneself” in history, literature or physics? It must be said that the goal [of our philosophy teaching] is, in our present circumstances, pretty disconnected from these realities; and we might therefore give up on grading students’ homework against an ideal that very few people can claim to have attained. We could, at least for starters, propose simpler exercises that would be better adapted to our students’ competences (the ones “formed” by our instruction) and to our own. At the university we do all this readily enough.

2) What should be at stake in philosophy teaching? What should be its goals?

Well, I don’t want to say that there’s nothing special to expect from philosophy teaching. To my eyes, philosophy is in essence a critique of our values and an effort to demonstrate, by one method or another, the legitimacy or pertinence of the values we hold. The philosophers who we’ve read and reread over the centuries have all undertaken an examination of the values of their times. That said, these philosophers don’t play the moral purity card [la carte de bonne conscience]. They direct their critical examination at themselves, working with their own keen perceptions of the possibilities and blockages of their epoch. Today, as in the past, many people, including our official instructors, defend some values without examination and try to impose them on others. Wondering where our values come from, going over them with a fine-toothed comb and sorting them out, creating new ones, scrutinizing the motives for our adherence to them and the mechanisms that inculcate them — that’s what a reading of the philosophers can invite us to do. And that’s a truly priceless service.

Like Zask, I’ve been struck by the official rhetoric in France about teaching people to have free and critical minds, which always seems to entail, as Zask points out, the contradictory project of “making” people free, and to presuppose the unlikely premise that educational institutions know what freedom or criticality are. But I’m most interested, here, in the part of the interview that proposes a definition of what’s essential about philosophy: a critique of values.

It’s not an easy exercise, at present, to come up with a well-defined area of inquiry that’s essentially philosophical. Many areas of inquiry that formerly “belonged” to philosophy — physics, society, politics, the nature of “man” or of language, the structure of thinking — have over time (and not without struggle) developed autonomous disciplines of their own, which contest and quite often dominate the intellectual terrain formerly occupied by philosophers. There are plenty of philosophers who still write about all this stuff, of course, but these objects are no longer exclusively philosophical, and as André Pessel has put it, “if this link with constituted knowledges [in other domains] disappears, philosophy sees its field extraordinarily limited and reduced to an exclusive study of subjectivity.”

Without going into great detail about competing conceptions of philosophy (see some American examples), it seems to me that some of the more obvious options aren’t terribly thrilling. Consider some of the most well-known: there’s philosophy as the conceptual foundation of all the other sciences, or (in an alternative version) philosophy as the conceptual handmaiden of the sciences (ie, the philosophers show up to help scientists “clarify” their theoretical ideas); there’s philosophy as a specialized conceptual inquiry into fairly narrow but autonomously philosophical domains; there’s philosophy as the history of ideas; in a more instrumental version, there’s philosophy as a place for building “skills” in critical thinking (as in the lycées).

It seems to me that there’s something to be said for most of these fairly academic projects, though I’m especially skeptical of the first one. But most of them (leaving aside the first and last) don’t afford a particularly exciting public role to the field. Of course, in France we also see more politicized conceptions of philosophy: philosophy as (in effect) the training ground for public intellectuals (always a small group), philosophy as “class struggle at the level of ideas” (via Althusser), philosophy as an emancipatory project (often cited at Paris-8). Here again, however, the latter two are extremely marginal and the first, ultimately, is fairly elitist.

Zask’s proposal for philosophy as a critique of values, in this light, has the advantage of being potentially open to all, sociopolitically interesting, and not necessarily a buttress of the status quo — without, however, necessarily becoming self-marginalizing (as so much marxist philosophy tends to). As an ethnographer of philosophers, obviously my relationship to philosophy is a bit strange, but let me just say that while I’m ambivalent about some of the field’s more grandiose claims, the idea of a field that does critique of values seems pretty compelling. A lot of anthropologists want to do work like this, but disciplinary norms of empiricism and relativism tend to prevent us from producing very well-theorized normative work.

“It takes a strong stomach to oppose the strikers”

Aristote Toussaint, 21 years old, master’s degree in business law at Bordeaux IV.

In student movements, when like me you’re in the opposition, you have an interest in keeping your mouth shut. Or you need to have a strong stomach! At the Nantes fac, where I was last year, I was threatened for my comments in the General Assembly [AG]. I couldn’t go to class by myself. I didn’t hide that I was a member of the UMP [Sarkozy’s center-right party], and then? I’m proud of my convictions. The strikers [bloqueurs] are disrespectful people, they call themselves defenders of democracy but they’re anything but democrats. They’re utopians, allergic to work. I’d like to think that the leaders act in the name of some real ideology, but most people are just following the movement. The ones who criticize the autonomy of universities [recently imposed by the Education Ministry] are the same ones who complain about not getting jobs when they graduate… In the end their action accomplished nothing, aside from a few weeks of vacation. For the time being, it’s rather calm in Bordeaux, and I sincerely hope that there won’t be any strikes this year. We have to be optimistic and continue to reform [the universities], whatever it costs.

A few thoughts on this: Toussaint’s sense of disgust and contempt for the protesters is fairly palpable. Interestingly, it’s hard to sort out the political disagreement here from what we could call his defense of the individual and his dislike of what he views as an irrational, slavish political crowd. In other words,  Toussaint seems above all to dislike the sense that his political opponents (a) are intolerant of his dissent (to the point of personal threats, he says); (b) are therefore betraying the ideals they claim to stand for; (c) and worse yet, don’t appear to truly hold any ideals, but mostly just “follow” what the rest of the movement is doing. Shades of Gustave Le Bon! Usually viewed as the central figure in the late-19th-century French right-wing critique of the masses, Le Bon wrote that “crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas.”

Curiously enough, though, Toussaint seems to complain not only that strikers are irrational but also that they have, in a sense, too many ideas. Calling them “utopians” (utopistes), he says they dislike work even as they complain of not getting jobs. (Though this seems like a contradiction to Toussaint, I think this is quite a common attitude among working people. “I need my job to live, but I don’t have to like it.” Et cetera.) Anyway, a utopian, surely, is nothing if not in the grip of a strong idea, is nothing if not known for an uncompromising refusal of the established pragmatic protocols of daily life. Toussaint’s critique thus appears not only to valorize the dissenting individual over the mindless collective herd, but also to critique the useless utopianism of work-refusal in the name of something like a procedural democracy where dissenters would have fair rights to their opinions. (But would still accept the basic outlines of the status quo.) Although Toussaint doesn’t put it this way, I see him making a critique of political utopianism in the name of something like democratic liberalism.

It strikes me as unsurprising that this critique would come from a law student. Law students seem to be known for debating, and are socialized to respect the established rules of procedure and grievance. Not to mention that law students, according to one of the other interviews here, currently have good job placement in France and therefore are probably more likely to be contemptuous of those who fail to get jobs. (A job after all can be a major status symbol for those who have them.) It’s worth noting that some of the protest against the university reform law in question did come from conservative law professors; but still, this resistance from a law student is sociologically unsurprising.

What to me is more interesting is the phenomenology of protest from the point of view of the minority opposition. It sounds like this guy was upset. Maybe frightened. Proud of his opposition. Viscerally opposed to his opponents. I don’t know if this is a common reaction, but it would be interesting to find out. And his complaint that ostensibly pro-democracy movements are actually undemocratic in their internal workings seems like something worth knowing much more about. It wouldn’t be the first time.