I’m imagining here that other social researchers are like me: they have a lot of ideas for research projects, but only some of them come to fruition. Here are some of mine:

• Interview project on the personal experience of people applying to graduate school in English and Physics. (It got started, but didn’t have a successful strategy for subject recruitment.)
• Interview project on student representatives to university Boards of Trustees in the Chicago area. (I got started with this, but didn’t have the time to continue.)
• Historical research project on what I hypothesized was a long-term decline of organized campus labor at the University of Chicago. (I only ever did some preliminary archival poking around.)
• Project on faculty homes in the Paris region. (I only had fragmentary data about this, and it was too hard to collect more, and never the main focus of my work.)
• Discourse analysis project on “bad writing” in the U.S. humanities. (I did write my MA thesis about this topic, but it needed a lot more work to continue, and for now it just sits there, half-dead.)

One might even argue that my dissertation research project in France was a sort of “failure,” in the sense that I never really did what I set out to do, methodologically. The original project was going to be a multi-sited, comparative ethnography of French philosophy departments. But it took a long time to really get accustomed to the first department where I did research (at Paris 8); and although I did preliminary research at a couple of other departments, after 18 months I was just too worn out to throw myself into them. So I made my dissertation into a study of a single department instead. Most ethnographers wouldn’t call that a failure, exactly — it felt more like pragmatism in the face of fieldwork. But at some level, it wasn’t what I originally wanted to do.

This reminds me that failure is one of those ambiguous, retroactively assigned states. How do you know something failed? Because it never “succeeded”, so eventually you did something else, or stopped trying. You don’t have to classify as “failure” everything that doesn’t succeed; my dissertation research evolved into something different and more doable, and its very criteria of success shifted along the way. Some things are neither success nor failure, they just morph. Or sit in limbo, somewhere between failure and success. Maybe I’ll revive some of my failed projects someday.

But failure’s ambiguity doesn’t entail that there is no such thing as failure. And my point here is that, even though academics live in a world where they are supposed to constantly project success, it would be better if failure was treated more openly. I suspect a lot of us have failed projects. I think they should be something you can list on your CV. They’re a barometer of your ambitions, a diary of how you became a better researcher, a set of unfinished paths that someone else might want to follow. In short, failed projects are a kind of (negative) knowledge. As such, it strikes me that they ought to have a more dignified existence.

After not having written much in the blog for a couple of months, I’m hoping to start writing a lot more regularly now that I’m in Paris for my fieldwork. The universities are just in the middle of closing down for the year, having final exams and the like, so it’s a bit unclear what I will really be able to accomplish before the summer doldrums. I’ve gone to a couple of demonstrations against the government university reforms, and will probably blog about that in my next post. And I have some initial contacts and invitations to pursue. No doubt this is pretty much the typical situation for the start of a research project. (If anyone is curious about the details of the research plan, you can read my long research proposal.)

But at any rate I am rapidly acquiring tons of material, enough for decades of anthropological analysis — I just bought a couple of used philosophy textbooks; one could spend a week just examining them. It’s an odd spectacle when philosophy, with all its claims to high intellectual status, is simplified to bullet-point form and turned into a high school subject. Or websites: there are dozens of curious philosophy and political sites out there. Right now I’m just trying to figure out some system to archive and keep track of them all; I suspect that some of them will vanish over the years and I’m wishing I had a simple means for archiving them. (There’s a really complex tool called Web Curator that seems, alas, more trouble technically than it’s worth. I’ve settled for the low-fi wget for the time being.)

Ethnography affords strange sensations, an uneasy sense that one is (or should be) becoming a phenomenological instrument, a kind of human tape recorder that gathers up the social and experiential, with a trembling urge to record everything, the peach of sky or scrape, the rustle of signs, the footfalls of quarrels and procedure, the jitters of ordinary life. Before one can objectify others one has to objectify oneself as a recording and processing apparatus.

Is ethnography in fact the verification of a hypothesis (given in advance)? Or is it the interpretation of a social world (addressed to whom? to said world’s inhabitants? to foreigners? to one’s own curiosity?)? Or the textual aestheticization of a set of scenes that are more perceived than theorized? Is it the liberation or subjection of an ethnographic object, or perhaps the effort to induce a greater state of self-consciousness within that object? Or a form of collaborative intellectual exchange between actors taken (or mistaken) as intellectual subjects? Or maybe ethnography is simply my discipline’s exercise in creating a falsely immediate sense of cultural reality, a retroactive projection of events or cultural orders into a more fluid set of half-understood situations, a falsely concrete thing made for social analysis?

But I guess this set of questions runs together a number of different issues and we should ask more particularly: What is ethnography, epistemologically speaking? Or aesthetically speaking? What is ethnography, taken as a political act or performative gesture? What is ethnography’s function in the anthropological institution? For a few seconds just now on the horizon a low aircraft glowed in the light. Grey clouds curl over grey highways and tapioca sunshine. The view is approximately as follows.