(An aside for French analysts — obviously my claim is not that this political difference is entirely determined by gender, just that the gender difference here is symptomatic. Obviously, the French far right is doing pretty well this year with a woman candidate.)

In any event, I have long been struck by the usually-unmarked masculinity of Marxist theory, in both the United States and France. To draw on my personal experience in the academy, I might mention dominant male figures like Terry Turner, an activist Marxist-structuralist anthropologist who taught me an introduction to Marx’s work in college, or Moishe Postone, who has long led an intimidating Marx seminar at the University of Chicago. In these sorts of seminars, you’re not likely to hear much about gender, and the presumption of universal reason usually seems to lodge just a little too comfortably in the figure of the male teacher. It’s the usual critical theory paradox: ostensibly emancipatory ideas get drenched in the conventional authority of male power.

Now of course I’m not saying that there are no important women Marxist theory people — Nicole Pepperell’s work comes to mind, or Kathi Weeks’ recent The Problem With Work. A little farther back, the 1970s socialist-feminist theory world was one of the most important moments in Marxist theory, with books like The Dialectic of Sex and The Politics of Housework. (Though it is not always clear that most male Marxists have read those books…) And I emphasize that I’m not necessarily singling out the Marxist theory part of the academy as being the worst possible case of masculine power. (Though that would be a depressing comparative analysis which I haven’t undertaken.)

But.

The masculinism of Marxist theory continues in the present. And it is a problem.  A not-just-historical problem.

As a case in point, consider this new essay in the New York Review of Books, “The Headquarters of Neo-Marxism” by a political philosopher, Samuel Freeman. Freeman’s essay is a review of three books about the Frankfurt School, all three written by men (Stuart Jeffries, the German Stefan Müller-Doohm, and Peter Gordon). The reviewer is a man. Every single person mentioned in the review is male, except for Hannah Arendt in a footnote. And a quick look at Freeman’s five other book reviews in the New York Review of Books shows that he has only ever deigned to write about fellow male authors.

Gender avalanche. Is that a thing?

Perhaps I should note that Freeman himself is not a Marxist. I hadn’t heard of him before I read this review, but he seems to be a Rawlsian, to judge by his book publications. Rawls’ work, not incidentally, got denounced by at least one card-carrying Marxist philosopher as “an ideological rationalization of mid-twentieth century American welfare state liberalism” — and not surprisingly, Freeman’s seemingly favorite member of the Frankfurt School is Habermas. This on the grounds that “as John Rawls said to me, he is also the first major German philosopher since Kant to endorse and conscientiously defend liberalism and constitutional democracy.”

Freeman predictably goes on to write — in a non-class-conscious way that is entirely out of keeping with this topic — that “We may sometimes lament capitalist excesses and be bothered by the emptiness of consumerism, but few of us condemn capitalism as a moral corruption of the self that prevents us from realizing true human values or from knowing the truth about ourselves and our social relations.” It is only in the last paragraph that he concedes that the current Trump-Republican program might push us back towards thinking about a Frankfurt School-esque analysis of authoritarianism and capitalism.

OK, so Freeman isn’t “really a Marxist” (the gist of his essay is essentially “Marx + Frankfurt School for Dummies,” incidentally, with a strong liberal bias). It would nevertheless be pointless to draw too strict a line between the “official Marxists” and people like Freeman who seem to want to become public spokesmen for Marxism, as the latter role is already a form of participation in the marxian universe of discourse. And it’s that entire social universe of Marxist/marxian theory that is way less feminist and more masculine than it should be.

In Freeman’s defense… Actually, I’m having a hard time thinking of much to say in Freeman’s defense. It’s 2017. Nothing about feminism is really settled (and philosophy qua discipline has immense problems with sexism and sexual violence) but I find it a lamentable commentary on Freeman that he didn’t seem to notice the blatant masculinism of his own discourse, or of the Marxist tradition he is commenting on. And it’s a sad commentary on the New York Review of Books, moreover, that their editorial process evidently does not preclude publishing texts like this.

Total self-consciousness is manifestly impossible. That doesn’t make minimal self-consciousness an unreasonable standard to insist on, whatever one’s gender.

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.

In some ways this plays out a characteristic attitude toward class in America, that, because we are all in the great middle class, we do not experience the class distinctions of the old world. This affects what the German sociologist Hans Speier calls the “masked class membership” of the middle classes. But it also has specific permutations in academe, and we experience and enact class in distinctive ways. This holds true especially in the humanities, that have a traditional bearing set apart from business and little commercial crossover. In the post-welfare state university, some of the sciences, technological programs, and practical disciplines, like business, are oriented toward paying their own way, through grants, business “partnerships,” and patentable results, so do not oppose the world of commerce. Rather, they embrace it. (If you look at the cars in the parking lots around the quad, you’re more likely to see Mercedes, BMWs, and Lexuses near their buildings, instead of the Hondas near ours.) Members of those disciplines might give up some of the humanistic aura of the university, but they express less ambivalence about their class position.

Many of our codes and practices play out our peculiar relation to class. Most academic measures purport a structural neutrality, beyond class, but they also carry with them, and inculcate, a distinctive range of affects designating our class. While we are not marked with the striations of class in the visible ways that a stooped factory worker might be after twenty years at a drill press, we are nonetheless marked by the ways that we feel, experience, and act out professional life. Some of the difficulty of talking about this realm of feeling or affect is that it is more amorphous than visible marks, but it is not any the less tangible—tangible when the ticket agent acts deferentially to us when it says “Dr.” on our itinerary, or when at the faculty meeting the full professor frowns at the tentative assistant professor and adjuncts aren’t even allowed, or when the persistent student expects us to be in our office 9-5, by his or her lights seeing us as the clerk behind the counter of the educational department store, by our lights misrecognizing our true position. Or tangible, as Stanley Fish has pointed out, when we drive sensible cars. Affect is how we embody our class position, and in a sense generates our class position.

It’s a splendid piece of social observation: it remarks on frowns, on hands, on academics’ titles and their choices of automobile. The observational detail is, perhaps, more sparse than in an ethnographic text; Williams uses his details to illustrate his analysis, rather than using the analysis to try to make sense of the details. But I think he is right to call attention to the fact that American academics participate in larger fantasies about American classlessness. And he’s right to raise the spectre of the Bohemian heritage (a real study of academic bohemianism is long overdue).

One does wonder two things about this analysis. First, of course it’s true that academics’ class status is going to be shaped by the larger class structures of the society where they live. But don’t academics have a peculiar mixed-class status elsewhere as well? In France, for instance? And, relatedly, aren’t academics more socially heterogeneous than Williams makes out? There are plenty of underemployed adjuncts out there — they clearly don’t have the same class position as the Ivy League tenured superstars, even if they share a professional identity. Class and professional identity are not always synonymous.

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

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

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

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

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

Mal Langsdon/Reuters; published at liberation.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another one put its political message even more simply:

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

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

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