Twelve or fifteen standardized brown boxes of books, covered in dollar store tarps and dust from lizard corpses and asbestos toxins — I’m lining them all up, three by four, three by five. Each box is stamped identically with bar codes, and green icons certify that they are all made from recycled paper, but nothing says where the recycled paper came from, so you wonder, does it come from dead books? Obsolete books? All those textbooks that your students don’t really read — do their carcasses get recycled into your moving boxes?

I’m leaving all the boxes in a dirty garage with bad air in Whittier, California, where my precarious postdoc contract is coming to an end. And a week later the movers will come for them, but I won’t watch as they stack them up in a trailer. The books will traverse the desert flats and the desert mountains, sit indifferently through a long series of desolate towns, and cross the Mississippi driven by some unknown driver. Each day the books will get slightly more crushed by the furniture stacked on top of them. One moving company estimates that my family’s belongings collectively weigh about 8,400 pounds. I start to fantasize that the moving trailer will fall in the sea or off a cliff, and so free us from the immense weight of our household goods. But would we do anything but buy them again? What are we if not agents of our metastasized objects and objectified needs?

Even the books, for those of us working in bookish fields, become fetish objects whose inhuman spirits impel us to adopt false needs as our own — such as the need for academic work in a dehumanized world, where labor equals docility, pliability, and migration. In a rigid system whose parts don’t fit together, gnashing like mismatched gears, the individual is always asked to grease the gears with their flesh or to crush the self down into some malformed space misnamed “opportunity.” That’s why my books are en route to Cleveland, where my partner is starting a postdoc, and it’s also why I won’t be staying in Cleveland, because I’m going a few weeks later to another teaching job 8,200 miles farther away. Separation has become the condition of our continued academic labor, and we have to believe that this separation is a condition of future togetherness, a step towards solving the misnamed “two body problem.” But even my books won’t be coming on the transatlantic flight. I’ll miss them, too.

2. Ideologizing your library

In Walter Benjamin’s tragicomic essay “Unpacking my Library,” he portrayed his book collection as a mournful space of freedom. His books, he said, got more free in his private hands than they could in a public library, since in his hands each book summoned up a specific history and memory: the memory of its acquisition, the history of its writing. The book collector, for Benjamin, was quintessentially someone who knew how to take books beyond their mere use-value. For a collector, the books were not necessarily for reading, and certainly not for reselling at a profit. Instead, they constituted a world that was curiously authentic and “intimate,” a world that the collector could “disappear inside.” In this dreamy world, “he” — always he — could come to “live in” objects.

It is perhaps not coincidental that this essay dates from 1931, the year after Benjamin’s brutal divorce and his parents’ death. What would be more logical than retreating into a fetishized object world after the collapse of one’s human relationships? For Benjamin, and probably for everybody who hauls their books around, unpacking a library is an ideological compensation. The question is: a compensation for what?

3. The class character of Walter Benjamin

When Benjamin announced that his library had a non-instrumental character, this was only a half truth. In fact, Benjamin was economically dependent on his library. It constituted one of his only economic assets: he had to sell part of it to pay his divorce settlement. Later, he saved much of it from the Nazis in Germany only to see it seized by the Gestapo in Paris. Hannah Arendt suggests that the seizure of Benjamin’s library was among the reasons for his famous suicide on the Spanish border: “How was he to live without a library, how could he earn a living without the extensive collection of quotations and excerpts among his manuscripts?” (Illuminations 17). No doubt Benjamin felt magical while unpacking his library, as he proclaimed. But the books were also a prime tool of his trade — writing — and he couldn’t not need them. Far from escaping the forces of instrumentalism, Benjamin depended on his books’ use value as much as on their exchange value.

A little materialism is in order, even in the face of someone who likened a certain historical materialism to a “Turkish puppet.” The fact is that Benjamin grew up a rich kid, culturally encouraged to disregard material concerns. Arendt calls him “typical of an entire generation of German-Jewish intellectuals”: the progeny of “successful businessmen who did not think too highly of their own achievements and whose dream it was that their sons were destined for higher things” (26). Thus Benjamin’s dad subsidized him into his thirties; he lived at home because he would not get a job; and he mooched his wife’s journalistic income. Arendt, who also grew up in a wealthy German Jewish household, excuses Benjamin’s behavior by alluding to his class habitus: “It is reasonable to assume that it is just as hard for rich people grown poor to believe in their poverty as it is for poor people turned rich to believe in their wealth” (25-26). Everyone is a prisoner of their habitus, it’s true. But the important point about Benjamin is less the rich kid origins per se than the life trajectory that it facilitated. A general trajectory of precarious downward mobility was Benjamin’s lot in life, culminating ultimately in his suicide.

4. The very center of a misfortune

Whether or not Benjamin was the first precarious intellectual to commit suicide, it is certain he was not the last. The newspapers are full of them, like the unknown adjunct teacher whose body was “found at the bottom of a cliff in the Blue Mountains” last year in Australia, or the American adjunct at Temple University who recently declared: “Suicide is my retirement plan.” Benjamin precociously sabotaged his possible academic career by criticizing the wrong people, and never got paid much for his own journalism. As Arendt put it: “Like Proust, he was wholly incapable of changing ‘his life’s conditions even when they were about to crush him.’” And she added: “With a precision suggesting a sleepwalker his clumsiness invariably guided him to the very center of a misfortune” (7). Benjamin was destined for an immense solitude. “No one was more isolated than Benjamin, so utterly alone” (9).

Precarious intellectual work is often misunderstood as the exception to a rule, and never more than in our fantasies. Maybe I can still get a tenured job. Maybe I can cross the border. Maybe I can escape my lot. But to twist an Arendtian phrase, precarious life is always the very center of a misfortune. And centers (like margins) are places of collective experience; thus Benjamin’s misfortunes are less singular than they appear. He was far from the only German Jew to commit suicide: someone in my family did the same thing when the Gestapo arrived at her door. And I doubt that Benjamin’s loneliness was really so much greater than that of the melancholy old adjunct who worked last year at the desk next to mine, barely speaking to anyone, even less being spoken to, and dousing himself repeatedly with cigarette smoke. I would not say my colleague was more isolated than Benjamin — only that he was not less.

Still, I understand why Arendt describes Benjamin’s experience with superlatives. Strategic quintessentialism, if that’s the word for it, becomes a useful strategy for representing precarious experiences that usually aren’t allowed to matter. In a world indifferent to loneliness, for example, one has to say something hyperbolic, like “no one is more isolated than X,” to make any impression. Benjamin himself suggested enigmatically in 1931 that “solitude is a privilege of the rich, or, at least, of economically secure beings.”

What’s superlative about Benjamin is just that he illuminates the center of precarious misfortune. And if we want to leave our misfortune, before we can leave it practically, we must first leave it ideologically.

5. Walter Benjamin is the problem, not the solution

Somehow Walter Benjamin has acquired a special place in the intellectual landscape. The fetishists love him, consciously or unconsciously; as with Nietzsche, the marriage of cryptic writing and ambiguous politics lends itself to all sorts of reappropriations. Benjamin’s prose is fungible today because it is so evocative. Its imagistic, essentializing, dialogical, magical character makes it exceptionally functional as an accent in high-end prose spaces. If you need an argument from magical authority, Benjamin’s prose is pre-organized into deployable aphorisms. If you want to edge towards “radical” (perhaps post-Marxist) politics without being dirtied by political realities, the imaginary angel of history always loves to hover over your shoulder.

Even my friends at the Modern Language Association, radical critics of the academic status quo, seem to idealize Benjamin a little in their marvelous recent parody, Feces on the philosophy of history. They comment, at one point, that “Hope for the future, as Benjamin reminds us, requires a belief in the failure of the present” (388). It would be more exact to say that hope for the future requires a belief in the failures of Walter Benjamin, and an analysis of their causes. I cannot agree that Benjamin reminds us of how to believe in a future without precarity. Rather Benjamin suffered precarity. He was precarity — to the death. He fell headlong through precarity like a dream world from which books offered an imaginary waking. And this falling, this precarious trajectory, is perfectly understandable. Benjamin’s failure, though, was his belief that unpacking one’s library is possible.

6. Precariousness within and without

To make sense of packing and unpacking, we need some account of precarious subjects and their object worlds. With only a slight effort of overinterpretation, we can extract one from Benjamin’s own comments about precariousness in a little-known passage of “Unpacking my library.”

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

Let us read this as an allegory about precarious intellectual labor. As such, it is above all a tale of bad options — psychosis or criminality — that are always lurking as a set of calamitous last resorts for precarious workers, who end up organized, like Benjamin’s collector, by a dialectic of passion and chaos. Passion leads them on, these précaires, and chaos keeps them down. At any moment, their “attachment to books” — itself a stand-in for the internalized will to work, for habitual epistemophilia, for libidinal investments in academic objects and fantasies — at any moment, says Benjamin, this attachment may break down into a loss that makes you sick or gets you locked up. Whether by loss of your books or loss of your job, you are always at risk of getting shattered in an event that emerges suddenly from beneath the cloak of habits that otherwise veil your inner disorders, making them “appear as order.” Precariousness describes the order of our things, our books, because it describes the balancing act of our work: it is inside us because first it was outside us; it is outside us because first it was within us. And this balancing act, insists Benjamin, is not something you can depend on. It might get you killed.

Benjamin is wrong, though, when he likens our ambient chaos to “chance” or “fate.” Today we still invest in such a misidentification every time we talk about jobs as a matter of luck (“I’m lucky to have a job”) or fate (“this job is a perfect fit for me,” “the job gods aligned in your favor”). This mythological discourse — where magical thinking pretends to resolve structural nightmares — only blinds us to the relentless incompatibility between a diabolical machine and its damaged inhabitants. Worse still, it makes us forget that the ambient chaos is not a space of good and bad luck, but just a banal tool for managing the reserve army of intellectual labor. It’s hard to bargain collectively when you’re packing your library yet again, when you can’t find your shoes because they’re lost in the moving boxes. You stick to the script when your whole world is so unsteady that a mythological order is better than none. And on the other side of the table, the people who are buying labor never complain too much about the buyer’s market.

But I digress. Benjamin gives us a marvelous image of a precarity whose “accustomed confusion” is as much within as without, a structural instability which at any moment could erupt into calamity, crime, psychosis or suicide. This precarious life then gets re-organized by compensatory investments in objects (like books) motivated (at least partly) by an inner desperation which mainly appears in silhouette, under threat of loss.

7. Books and the experience of dislocation

All that got a bit abstruse. Let us ask again: Just why was Benjamin unpacking his library?

It’s simple: he had to unpack his library because he had to move. Frequently. After his divorce, Benjamin had to get his own apartment, where he promptly found himself faced with a “ridiculous variety of projects… undertaken simultaneously.” But even as he felt a certain pleasure in his new home, his correspondence shows that he was vocally dissatisfied with the experience of living there, complaining about the rent, the neighbors’ piano, and the “constriction of the space in which I live and write.” When here is anywhere, nowhere or wherever, it makes sense to flee into the books, so that the stability of fantasy can buffer the cacophony of rented rooms.

So we can answer our earlier question. Book collecting is a compensation for the experience of dislocation. But it is not only compensation; it is also a projection of the order of life into the order of things. By hauling the books from one unstable dwelling to the next, the forced march of the books is made to mirror the forced dislocation of the self. “If I have to go, the books have to go too!” The books’ presence thus becomes deeply ambiguous. They index the disorder of precarious existence. But they also index the persistence of a self who cares for something (the books) and who can discover tenderness in the memory banks. They reveal a marvelous capacity for self-reenchantment in the face of loss. They reflect the desolation of a past and the promise of a utopian future of writing. “Of all the ways to acquire books,” Benjamin maintained, “writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.”

8. Packing and unpacking

One time I saw an ancient tenured professor, George Stocking, getting rid of his library. He had been retired for years and finally was moving out of his office, which was a warren of ancient books, a comprehensive collection of Cold War social science. For him, packing up and giving away his library was a singular event, almost a deliberate prequel to his death, which followed only a few years later. But for itinerants like me, packing is a way of living through a world suffused with malicious structure: not an event but a practice of ongoingness.

After a few years, you are always packed, no matter where you go or what percent of your books are in boxes. Unpacking, contra Benjamin, is not possible. At best you can do a simulation of unpacking, a silly theatre where you go through the motions of inhabiting a place knowing full well the imminence of future ejection. Contract ended, no more rent money! No more health insurance, no more desk in the adjunct office! And so, knowing that at any time you could be sent packing, you always have to be ready to go: pre-packed.

So there is no unpacking, only packing. An unbalanced system of precarious self-management. You get offered something (a job, a degree, a free trip); it ends; maybe you’re hurt; you pack; you go on. Packing and unpacking are inadequate words for the emotional work of dislocating, of being torn apart from yourself and asked to act whole, of pretending that every other morning you don’t wake up with nightmares and then feel so tired.

9. The impossibility of precarious feeling

Because you’re always packed, you cannot feel. Or rather: all the feelings become provisional, harried, almost distant, like lurkers in online chat. You can’t feel what’s good because of the nearness of the bad, and you can’t feel what’s bad because at any moment something good might spring out. You can’t live in the present because it’s a precarious present, but you can’t live in the future either because you know it’s a lure that mainly keeps you invested in a bad institution. Ambivalence is too good for you. You can’t muster up either of its terms, the good or the bad. You’re ambivalent, perhaps, about the impossibility of ambivalence. Like Benjamin said, any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

We’re all Walter Benjamin. It’s better to identify with him than to idealize him. And if identifying with Benjamin helps us see the false exits from the center of a misfortune — the retreat from relationships, the suicides, the fantasy overinvestments in books — then the question remains: what would be a true one?

The actual experience of sitting on the platform was surprisingly unstructured. We were far enough from the audience that people chatted to each other a good deal, often in low voices to avoid disturbing the proceedings. Everyone was provisioned with a water bottle and a program, and arranged into three long rows of seats facing the audience, behind the higher-ups. There was an amusing hierarchy of chairs, such that the Trustees had brown wooden chairs, while the faculty had white plastic ones. Longtime attendees seemed to have strong views on where to sit, and arranged themselves in the faculty marching lineup with an eye to ending up in their preferred seat. The front row had a better view, but were conversely more on display; whereas the back row was somewhat shaded from the harsh sun by a backdrop. Individuals’ seating strategies sometimes led them to depart from their place in the official lineup, which was supposed to be in rank order.

In a sign of the times, a lot of faculty people were on their smartphones during the ceremony. Most people didn’t use their phones the entire time, but did consult them at least every few minutes. If you look carefully at the above picture, the professor with the pink hood has her phone out, possibly taking a photo of the audience.

The ceremony had previously been represented to me as “the most required faculty event of the year,” and I received numerous emails over the course of the Spring semester reminding me that my presence was obligatory, informing me that absences had to be approved by the Dean, and so on. The reality was much more casual: no one seemed to keep track of who actually showed up or how they presented themselves. “Can’t you stand in a straight line?” the Dean shouted out to us mock-seriously as we stood in a ragged file to greet the students. I also noticed that many faculty opted for sun hats rather than the official academic caps.

As the phone usage suggests, not everyone was completely attentive the whole time. “Is it done?” I heard someone ask plaintively during the lengthy presentation of diplomas. At the same time, though, many faculty carefully watched the graduating students going by, often clapping enthusiastically for students they knew personally. There was an obvious social hierarchy encoded in the amount of applause from the audience — the more popular students received more cheers (sometimes supported by their fraternities or sororities). Meanwhile, some relative “outcasts” (often male) received practically no applause.

Where I went to college, the graduating class was far too large to hand out diplomas individually during the ceremony; instead the diplomas were handed out separately at small per-department functions. I must say that handing out hundreds of diplomas individually in front of a huge crowd is an inefficient process, in spite of the obvious efforts at efficiency by the diploma presenters. The graduates were arranged in a queue at stage right and, when their names were called out by the Dean, they walked across the stage, were handed their diploma, shook hands with the President, and exited stage left. A crew of senior faculty was responsible for making sure the diplomas were handed out in the correct order, and they did their task with nearly machinic efficiency. (The process presumed that the graduates had been correctly lined up in a pre-given order, matching the order of diplomas in piles.)

It struck me, watching the process, that the distribution of diplomas was a perfect icon of “education as pipeline.” Everyone has their place in the queue; they all go through the same physical motions; they all end up with the same ritual result (being socially recognized as graduates).

Yet within this visual representation of the education pipeline, there was also this odd, evanescent moment of individuality. You get to have your name read out ritually to a huge audience. Some of the students strutted or struck poses for the audience. Others tripped or dropped their hats as they traversed the stage. This added a minor degree of drama.

Meanwhile, the faculty on stage followed along by reading the alphabetical list of graduates in the program. Alas, a typo appeared over and over at the bottom of almost every page of the program, under the graduates’ names. “Academic Disctinction” somehow slipped past the copyeditor.

This didn’t surprise me too much, because only a few days earlier, a sad email from the campus bookstore had apologized profusely for having stocked a t-shirt where “Whittier” was misspelled. At least one faculty person at graduation pointed out that this shirt would probably have become a collectors’ item if they had decided to keep selling it.

There was in any event something poignant about having the graduation become, in effect, the “firing hall” for faculty whose contracts are up. One normally thinks of graduation as being about the departures of the students, but at places like Whittier where there are plenty of temporary faculty, it’s also a scene of the departure of precarious faculty. (Adjuncts aren’t required to attend, but visiting faculty and postdocs — everyone technically on the “faculty” list — do have to.) “It’s a lot of people’s last day,” one tenured faculty member told me. Behind every ritual, there’s a labor politics.

As I left the ceremony, I decided to walk home through the nature trail that goes uphill from the Whittier football stadium. The parking lot rapidly dies down into dust; you can see the dots of the crowd through the fence at right.

Even from among the leaves, you could still hear the brass band playing exit music.

First she comments on the poverty wages and immense structural sexism that characterizes the post-PhD situation:

… a whole generation of junior academics is exposed to an ever growing casualization of labor. In Ireland alone, as a study of the collective Third Level Workplace Watch shows, a growing number of casual academics win on average 10 000 € annual income for an average of eight and a half years after finishing their PhD. In 63% of the cases this income is generated by hourly paid work, done in 62% of the cases by women. In Ireland again, a recent study by the Higher Academic Authority has shown that men still get 70% of all permanent academic positions in all seven universities in the country. The situation is similar in other countries where despite the fact that women make for the majority of completed PhD dissertations, the ratio of employment is still at their detriment. Women are particularly exposed to vulnerability with less access to permanent positions, and more emotional labor and care-giving functions both in and out of the academy. While those who have children feel losing the academic game because of the domestic burden of care in ever decreasing welfare conditions, those who do not have children feel deprived of private life due to growing imperative to do replacement teaching and administrative work.

Ivancheva subsequently remarks on the increasingly cruel norm of labor mobility that precarity and underemployment impose:

Beyond national trends, a growing “internationalization” (i.e. transnational flexibilization) of academic work makes it a difficult subject of both research and organized resistance. To stay in the academic game after finishing a PhD, in an English language research institution, one is usually required to put up with flexibility and recurrent migration. Those who get to do a post-doc or get a full-time fixed-contract teaching position are usually pressed to find time out of work in order to turn their PhD into publications. The shorter the time of the contract the higher the probability is that they return unprepared to the ever more competitive job-market.

Finally, she succinctly notes the costs of this mobility norm:

On the road of celebrated “internationalization” many are pressed to curtail their previous social and professional networks, and change countries every few months or years, if lucky. Many suffer loneliness and depression while others have to take on the responsibility of moving their whole families along or commuting across regional or national borders to make ends meet. The others, who – out of choice, or often out of necessity – opt out of the game of transnational mobility, fall easily in the trap of zero-hour teaching and precarious research arrangements in order to stay afloat. Both groups are dependent on local or international clan-like arrangements of loyalty and hierarchy. While university administrations outnumber academic faculty, academics do ever-growing amount of administrative work of (self-) evaluation to fit the demands of the ‘global knowledge economy’. Individualized contractual arrangements and access to benefits and resources encourages cruel competition among colleagues and friends, and breaks all solidarity.

In particular, her emphasis on “cruel competition among friends” fits my own disciplinary milieu (U.S.  cultural anthropology) all too exactly. The question of how to reinvent professional solidarity among people forced to compete with each other for scarce jobs remains, in my opinion, one of the major challenges facing academic labor organizers.

Paris
April 28, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christine Coënon

Commentary
Just a few quick notes here:

• The basic economic problems of adjunct work are recited here with perfect clarity: you’re underpaid with respect to the cost of living, underpaid in relation to permanent staff, have no certainty of keeping your job, no benefits, and no employment contract (which seems to mean, in this case, that you promise your employer that you’ll work while they don’t promise you anything).
• The bad pedagogical consequences of paying teachers by the hour also emerge: notably in the thorny question of whether one should still interact with students “off the clock.” It’s not clear that that is part of one’s job… Is one getting paid nothing for grading students? For mentoring them? And, as Coënon notes, the teaching conditions deteriorate as class sizes rise.
• The bad relationship with the administration is also quite apparent: the administration seems to set an arbitrary and unequal pay scale, and to justify it, when asked, with fairly irrational explanations (e.g. “your pay is less than X’s because we’re taking the administrative overhead out of yours and not theirs…”).
• There’s a whole subtext here about the relationship between money and respect, and an equally important reminder that, as the 2010 national study on precarity showed, many precarious people hate their precarity but — paradoxically — really want to stay in higher education. In case anyone needed a reminder, there are reasons other than strictly economic rationality driving people to work at universities. A pity that this attitude seems to make them all the easier to exploit.
• It would be good to say something here too about what’s signified by the use of art, and in particular the re-use of that poetic text by John Cage, but I don’t have time today to really think this through… It’s a rather poetic form of public desperation that we have here. Is the aestheticization of this text supposed to help make its hostility and resentment seem less blunt? Is it supposed to be a way of reminding the reader that the author is a cultivated person? Is it a claim that the artist can make art even out of the worst situations? Is art a way of making a more powerful political claim on, say, your job? Or is it that things get aestheticized as a way of compensating symbolically for an impending defeat?

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

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

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

It’s worth noting, in passing, that the word “proletariat” itself only came into the English language in the 1840s (according to the OED), so we can infer that it only took a few decades for it to be extended metaphorically to refer to intellectuals as well. At any rate, Davenport’s language sounds eerily similar to contemporary discourses on the impracticality of university education, and it certainly echoes the contemporary desire to make universities more economically useful. I notice that there is nothing directly political about this discourse; while “overeducation” and unemployed elites are sometimes perceived as a political threat, here they are merely characterized as a lost economic opportunity for the nation.

It is, nonetheless, unsurprising that the term “intellectual proletariat” was also used early on by overtly left-wing writers. As early as 1909, the politically complicated American socialist leader Morris Hillquit argued that “intellectual proletarians” formed part of the working class. From his book ‘Socialism in theory and practice‘:

The word Proletarian signifies a workingman who does not own his tools of labor, a wage worker; but in its wider application it embraces the entire propertyless class of workers. Thus we speak not only of the “industrial” proletarian, but also of the “agricultural” proletarian, the farmer who does not own his land, or the hired farm hand; and even of the “intellectual” proletarian, the professional who depends upon an unsteady and uncertain hiring out of his talents for a living.

That sounds like a pretty contemporary description of precarious faculty to me: “the professional who depends on an unsteady and uncertain hiring out of his [or her] talents for a living.” At the time, though, it appears that American faculty at this point weren’t particularly conscious of their status as “intellectual proletarians.” A couple of years earlier, around 1905 (but only published in 1918), Thorstein Veblen had described the labor situation in American universities thus:

There is no trades-union among university teachers, and no collective bargaining. There appears to be a feeling prevalent among them that their salaries are not of the nature of wages, and that there would be a species of moral obliquity implied in overtly so dealing with the matter. And in the individual bargaining by which the rate of pay is determined the directorate may easily be tempted to seek an economical way out, by offering a low rate of pay coupled with a higher academic rank. The plea is always ready to hand that the university is in want of the necessary funds and is constrained to economize where it can. So an advance in nominal rank is made to serve in place of an advance in salary, the former being the less costly commodity for the time being. Indeed, so frequent are such departures from the normal scale as to have given rise to the (no doubt ill-advised) suggestion that this may be one of the chief uses of the adopted schedule of normal salaries. So an employee of the university may not infrequently find himself constrained to accept, as part payment, an expensive increment of dignity attaching to a higher rank than his salary account would indicate. Such an outcome of individual bargaining is all the more likely in the academic community, since there is no settled code of professional ethics governing the conduct of business enterprise in academic management, as contrasted with the traffic of ordinary competitive business.

It seems that this moral norm of being “above” collective bargaining broke down slightly over the next few decades. As Zach has discovered in a great bit of archival research, by the 1930s faculty were thinking about unionization. From a 1931 article in a Minneapolis labor journal:

Forces beyond their control are driving university professors to the status of employees and are forcing them to the point where they must form “a guild or a union,” declared Professor Randall Henderson, president Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors, in his annual report.

Professor Henderson is shocked at the prospect, but he can see no alternate to cope with the industrialization of universities that are now being ruled from above. He warns the controlling factors of American universities that a guild or a union is inevitable unless there is a reform in methods of administration.

The universities, he said, have become industrialized and are now being operated on the factory system. The old New England type of college government is impossible, he said.

In spite of this early discussion of academic “industrialization,” I am obliged to remark that there is an ongoing conflict, even to this day, about whether American university faculty are “workers” and, if so, what kind of workers they are. I can testify from experience that many elite faculty in the humanities don’t see themselves as “workers,” having instead an artisanal, connoisseurial, artistic or even amateur relationship to their labor. And thanks to the 1980 Yeshiva vs. NLRB decision, private university faculty are classified legally as having managerial status and hence not being eligible for collective bargaining rights. At the same time, of course, academic labor activists continue to claim that “we are workers.” One is tempted to remark that current American debates over academic labor haven’t much evolved, in terms of their framing, over the last 80 years.

But one has to observe, at the same time, that these debates on the intellectual proletariat weren’t limited to the United States. As it turns out, they were also happening in Germany in the 30s. The other day I was reading some (very harsh) comments by Theodor Adorno on Karl Mannheim’s “sociology of knowledge”; Adorno summarizes a book that Mannheim had published in German in 1935, translated into English in 1940, called Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. I haven’t read that, but I gather that Mannheim was commenting on the intellectual situation in inter-war Germany (1920s or early 1930s), and Adorno’s gloss on Mannheim’s analysis makes it sound like a very familiar situation.

Mannheim speaks of a “proletarianization of the intelligentsia.” He is correct in calling attention to the fact that the cultural market is flooded; there are, he observes, more culturally qualified (from the standpoint of formal education, that is) people available than there are suitable positions for them. This situation, however, is supposed to lead to a drop in the social value of culture, since it is ”a sociological law that the social value of cultural goods is a function of the social status of those who produce them.”

At the same time, he continues, the “social value” of culture necessarily declines because the recruiting of new members of the intelligentsia extends increasingly to lower social strata, especially that of the petty officialdom. Thus, the notion of the proletarian is formalized; it appears as a mere structure of consciousness, as with the upper bourgeoisie, which condemns anyone not familiar with the rules as a “prole.” The genesis of this process is not considered and as a result is falsified. By calling attention to a “structural” assimilation of consciousness to that of the lowest strata of society, he implicitly shifts the blame to the members of those strata and their alleged emancipation in mass democracy. Yet stultification is caused not by the oppressed but by oppression, and it affects not only the oppressed but, in their essentials, the oppressors as well, a fact to which Mannheim paid little attention. The flooding of intellectual vocations is due to the flooding of economic occupations as such, basically, to technological unemployment. It has nothing to do with Mannheim’s democratization of the elites, and the reserve army of intellectuals is the last to influence them.

Moreover, the sociological law which makes the so-called status of culture dependent on that of those who produce it is a textbook example of a false generalization. One need only recall the music of the eighteenth century, the cultural relevance of which in the Germany of the time stands beyond all doubt. Musicians, except for the maestri, primadonnas and castrati attached to the courts, were held in low esteem; Bach lived as a subordinate church official and the young Hayden as a servant. Musicians attained social status only when their products were no longer suitable for immediate consumption, when the composer set himself against society as his own master — with Beethoven.

Beyond the important comparative interest of an early 20th-century German debate on this question, Adorno raises some important theoretical questions. How do we explain the existence of an intellectual proletariat? For Mannheim, this was supposedly an effect of elites becoming increasingly influenced by proletarian culture; Adorno, on the other hand, argues that it was just one example of a general underemployment caused by mechanization. And what is the cultural significance of underemployed intellectuals? Adorno makes what would seem – to 21st century postmodernist intellectuals – the obvious claim that there is no necessary correlation between the social status of cultural producers and the cultural status of their products. But I’m not entirely convinced by his example of 18th-century German musicians; he seems to reduce social status to institutional role (“a subordinate church official”). It comes to mind that in fact there have been any number of intellectuals whose relatively minor institutional roles didn’t seem to constitute low social standing per se. (Jacques Derrida comes to mind.) Adorno is no doubt right that there is some looseness in the relation between cultural producer and cultural product; but a more adequate theory of the relationship between class structure and intellectual production remains for another day. Or another post.

At any rate, the bottom line is this: the intellectual proletariat or precariat is older than people think. As is the critical discourse that goes with it.

College students who turn more or less consciously and hopefully to philosophy for enlightenment are, at bottom, in search of a satisfying life. They may have a pretty clear idea of what this includes. “It means,” said a football man whom I asked what he meant by a satisfying life, “employment, a fair income, the prospect of a family, and the chance to do something for people on a larger scale than just yourself or your family.” But they feel profoundly insecure as they contemplate the conditions under which this satisfying life must be sought. This feeling of insecurity is due not only to the threat of portentous on-going affairs, but to their own lack of a positive philosophy of life with which to face the world.

This statement doesn’t come from the present or the recent past; it comes from 1939, from a curious little American text by one M. C. Otto called “College Students and Philosophy.” Otto’s main aim is to excoriate his fellow philosophy professors for their anti-instrumentalist view of their discipline, that is, for their rejection of their students’ desires for a philosophy that would be useful in the world. For a short text, it has quite a long attack on philosophy professors’ urges to retreat into the sanctity of pure concepts and “esoteric wisdom.”

But what I think is fascinating here is mainly the early emphasis on precarity or insecurity (as they apparently called it then). Otto reminds us that insecurity is scarcely a uniquely contemporary phenomena, in spite of what one may be tempted to imagine in light of the pervasive sense (in France and the U.S.) that ordinary life is newly troubled. And Otto points out that precarity is not only a matter of economic and material problems but also of available intellectual resources, of “a positive philosophy of life with which to face the world.” Of course, Otto probably underestimates the effect of “portentous on-going affairs” on collective consciousness. I’m no expert on the U.S. in 1939, but I imagine it wasn’t the most cheerful geopolitical moment. (I’m suddenly wishing my grandparents were still alive so I could ask them about this.) But Otto, even if he may push the point out of perspective, does have the great merit of suggesting that disciplinary education may play an important role in forming consciousness and hence in shaping students’ cognitive relationships to the world.

Now Otto seems to have some very un-contemporary notions about forming consciousness, about educating the whole person, about being educated as a general state of being that helps one live through a fluctuating and incomprehensible circumstances. Today education is often considered a matter of isolable and measurable competences, of transferable skills, of favorable position in social networks, of positive career outcomes. Interestingly, even many of the most anti-establishment professors tend to accept this framework insofar as they often fall back on trying to teach skills like “critical thinking.” Or should I say: on trying to teach critical thinking as if it were an isolable skill.

This brings us to a point that’s worth pondering today. I repeat that Otto was nothing if not pro-pragmatic in his approach to education; he scorned the academic retreat into the scholarly “life of the mind.” But for him, the most pragmatic form of education was one that provided the most general form of intellectual relationship to the world, the most pragmatic form of education was one that imparted (or helped students to create) a “positive philosophy of life.” He would have thought it a very poor pragmatism that did no more than teach a limited set of discrete skills with nothing knitting them together into a worldview. His pragmatism was rather holistic, existential, “philosophical.” In reading Otto, one discovers that currently prevalent notions of pragmatism tend to be in essence technical pragmatisms, ones which rule out more existentialist pragmatisms that might offer philosophies of life that go beyond a series of coping mechanisms or career plans.

Otto reminds us that there may be dramatically unconventional forms of educational pragmatisms that would deserve defending. Note that Otto’s idea of pragmatism is one that is almost definitionally incompatible with a standardized test: there can be no such thing as an adequate standardized test of an existential relationship with the world. But this only shows us (as French academics love to remind us) that contemporary pragmatism is itself often based on impractical ideological presuppositions. Indeed, by Otto’s notion of pragmatism, there could be nothing less pragmatic than a standardized test, because a standardized test would accomplish nothing other than delaying the time when the real pragmatic work of maintaining a philosophical relationship to life could get done. I feel a certain sense of personal sympathy with Otto’s view, because I have the feeling that the best thing I got from college was an anthropological worldview.

And there’s something about his rhetoric of intellectual precarity that still seems oddly contemporary to me. “College students in this sliding, slithering contemporary world, so hard to make sense of, need a little place for their feet,” Otto asserts in closing. But then he concludes that “It should be our privilege [that is, the privilege of the professors] to help them gain it.” And it strikes me that part of Otto’s image of education, which amounts to trying to construct a philosophical relation between inchoate self and uncertain world, involves a rather confident notion of the teacher’s role. I’m not sure that most teachers nowadays view themselves as able (leaving aside willing) to help students escape a state of intellectual precarity in a “slithering” world. After all, if there are no coherent selves to begin with, there can be no question of wholesale formation of said selves… No doubt it’s much easier, in today’s humanities, to resign oneself to a quasi-postmodern world where the teacher’s role is about articulating differences and contradictions rather than resolving them.

Paris, February 22, 2010

Madame Minister,

I’ve decided to write to you to offer my personal testimony about the current conditions of doctoral students in France. It is exactly 10:30pm, and after a day of full-time work (to make ends meet), I’m starting the second part of my day, the part dedicated to my research work. In the fourth year of my dissertation, I should be putting real effort into writing up my thesis, but given the lack of time and resources, I’m just trying to keep these activities afloat. Some days, my will to continue emerges from my intrinsic interest in research; other days, I’m remotivated by the long years I’ve already spent on my work. And on other days still, I work double shifts because of the 552 euros I had to pay at the start of the academic year. In the end, on certain evenings like this, I find it hard to see the sense in this situation. I’ll sum things up: I had a good academic record, oriented towards professionalization (with publications, conference talks, fieldwork, teaching…), with encouraging results; but in spite of all this work, all this willpower spent, I don’t know how, materially speaking, I’m going to be able to finish my thesis.

I’m from the silent majority that doesn’t have a research grant, that juggles between paid work and self-financed studies. I’m from the silent majority that has no real status: as a student and a worker at once, I get neither the advantages of workers nor the advantages of students (discounts and such…). I’m from the silent majority whose future opportunities look like a dense fog. This last sentiment is particularly strong among my colleagues in human sciences, in spite of the fact that, when it comes time for a debate on national identity or some other media polemic, people go straight to the researchers in human sciences — to historians, sociologists, anthropologists — to take the pulse of our society. I am one of these future PhDs in human sciences, I’m eight years into university studies and, when I find I can’t trade a job as a receptionist for a better job in administration somewhere, I find myself worrying about finding the nth next short-term contract — the idea of a paid vacation not yet being part of doctoral students’ vocabulary. We hear talk about billions of euros that the government is about to release for higher education and research. Me, I’d just like to know how to pay my bills and defend my thesis. That said, I don’t mean to draw an intentionally miserable picture of my situation. I made the choice to get involved in research, and I made it with conviction. I believe in my abilities and competences as a young researcher, and in those of many of my colleagues; I believe in the quality of francophone research and of its scientific results. I’m only wondering about what’s becoming of it. What is happening, Madame Minister, when ultimately the only option that presents itself to new French PhDs is to look abroad if they hope to make a living in their fields?

I am not a renowned researcher or recognized specialist; I am only a doctoral student among many others; I am not up to date on the latest figures, statistics and predictions that your Ministry has available; I have nothing but a few figures I’ve discovered, my coping strategies, and a lack of visibility on the horizon. But I’ll keep going tomorrow, keep working on my research project somehow, not just so I can frame my diploma on the wall, nor even to open up new job opportunities. I’ll keep going tomorrow because I believe in my work. The one thing I deplore is simply that in France, the country of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, I find myself faced daily with the echo of Precarity. And in thanking you very sincerely for your attention, I hope you will accept, Madame Minister, this expression of my best regards.

Klara Boyer-Rossol
PhD Candidate in History, University of Paris-VII

I’m really not sure I’ve captured the prose style of the original, its peculiar mix of bluntly personal revelation with courteous formalities; and I worry that this blog is becoming more of a private translation laboratory than a useful resource. The more I translate, the more it feels like translation is a craft of its own demanding a long labor of apprenticeship. There’s no choice there, of course, but to keep doing it and see if things get better; though I do find that publishing, even here on this blog, is a good minimal guarantee of quality assurance. The thought of having a reader is a good motive for proofreading…

Analytically speaking, I’m struck by the strong rhetoric of French national-scientific virtues that comes out in the last paragraph. It’s as if, as the conclusion of the letter drew near, it suddenly wasn’t enough to base a moral critique of the institution on the fact that it produces precarious, anxious, inefficient actors; and it suddenly became necessary to make a further appeal to apparent contradictions in national ideology. In other words the argument here isn’t just precarity is unlivable but also that precarity is out of place in the revered French national image.

I guess I’m just much more cynical than this author, but I’m also struck here by the rhetoric of sincerity (a term which also rhymes with “precarity,” by the way). In particular, I’m interested in the moment where the author says: I assure you, I actually do believe deeply in my work. This reminds me a lot of the general conclusion drawn by the national report on precarity I wrote about a few weeks ago: there too the general contradiction was that many people believe that their precarious work is unlivable and yet they remain deeply committed to it. Maybe one of these days I should find out what philosophy folks of my acquaintance are talking about in their incessant references to La Boétie’s “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.”

Moderator: We have all been precarious at one time or another… perhaps not all but many of us. We have picked a few people who represent the different categories [of precarious work] we presented a moment ago, with all their complications. Our precarious colleagues aren’t here to cry over their lot… Do you want to introduce yourself?

“Aurélie Legrand, I’m 33 years old, I’m at the master’s level in my studies [bac+5], with a decade of professional experience in the private sector. It’s been a little more than a year that I’ve been a contract worker at the university, and so I’m part of what they call the precarious workers of higher education. So I work on a short-term contract (CDD) as a research engineer (ingénieur d’études) in a social science lab at the university. The post became available on May 1st, 2008. I came to apply for it in December 2008, and… I can tell you that it was a little bit hard for me to accept this post, even though it did represent a good opportunity for me at the time. It was hard to accept because they offered me a very short-term contract. So, I had an interview in December, and they offered me a short-term contract (CDD) from the beginning of January 2009 to May 1st 2009, so a 4-month contract, because the permanent occupant of the job who went to the private sector on May 1st of the year before could return to their job on May 1st the year after. So… I had to leave the region where I was coming from because [unclear], anyway for this 4-month contract.

“Finally I accepted this offer, and the permanent person [titulaire] didn’t take the job back on May 1st in 2009, so they had me sign a second short-term contract from May 1st to June 30th. A two-month contract. It had a gap of two months built in for the summer. So honestly the situation wasn’t really good at all. But finally, when they brought me in to sign this second short-term contract, they realized it was a category A job, so there wouldn’t be a break in the contract. So they extended the contract to August 31st 2009. And… what else was I going to tell you… so during that summer, sometime around mid-July, I got a letter from human resources indicating that I was summoned on September 1st, in the early morning, to sign a new contract, this time from September 1st until August 31st — so a year-long contract. So I was brought in to sign this new contract and things more or less worked out because that was the end of this deal with the two-month summer interruptions.

“That said, I was pretty much astonished by the way the human resources people had us sign the contracts. We were brought in collectively, all the contract workers summoned on September 1st. They had us in a room that might be about the same as this auditorium. There was no real group welcome, everyone waited in their own corner, and finally two people came in with the contracts. The group was divided in two, maybe from the letter A to the letter L on one side and the rest on the other, and everyone lined up to sign their contract. So you didn’t have the time to really read all the conditions in the contract; you signed, and if you had questions it was pretty hard to ask them, to have any personal discussion of your work contract. Voilà.

[Inaudible question.]
“Yes, I found out that I was pretty privileged after all, I realized that among the contract workers of my university, well, this contract starting September 1st was what I was expecting, a contract for the same job for the whole year. On the other hand, I heard other people around me who were summoned by mail, who were brought in on September 1st to sign a contract that was only ten months long. Eventually, when they got to the table, and they got to read their contracts, they found out that they were only getting hired for three months at one site and then for four months at some other university site, which they weren’t expecting at all. Others found out that they had an initial contract one month long and after that they weren’t getting any guarantees of further work. So I saw some people refuse to sign these contracts and leave. Voilà.”

I’ve tried not to clean up the very “oral” quality of this discussion. It’s full of redundancies and not always perfectly clear. That’s as it should be, it seems to me. I should admit that the translation is a bit loose; I don’t have much practice translating oral discourses.

What we have here is a personal story that reveals a structural situation whose dry bureaucratic parameters themselves become grounds for all kinds of emotional reactions. A robot programmed like a sociologist might make the mistake of believing that the length of someone’s work contract is a purely quantitative variable, a simple matter of longer or shorter; but we can see here that, in reality, quantitative differences get magnified into local dramas. Ask yourself: what’s the difference between a 10-month and a 12-month contract? Two months, the math types will say. But they’ll be wrong, wrong; the difference between 10 and 12 months of employment, for Aurélie Legrand, is the difference between having relatively steady year-round employment and facing a huge seasonal layoff.

And we can see too that, in the algebra of precarity, the variable of “contract length” is multiplied (metaphorically speaking) by another anxiety factor: the uncertainty of contract renewal. The problem with having a succession of four or two or one-month contracts isn’t just short duration as such; it’s also the accompanying anxiety of constant contractual renegotiation and uncertainty. After a few months of such circumstances, we can see here, even a meagre year contract — itself hardly a recipe for long-term stability — comes to seem a blessing.

And farther along towards the end of this discourse, we see a new theme emerge: the theme of precarity’s place in a differentiated field of suffering, of precarity’s place in a world where some people have it worse than others. Needless to say, a peculiar feature of the panel presentation “where the precarious themselves will speak” was that the participants were publicly interpellated as precarious workers, with all the implicit stigma that that entails. Early on we can see Legrand accepting her classification among the “precarious workers of higher education”; but what’s interesting is that, by the end of this discourse, she is claiming in effect that she doesn’t have it so bad, that she ended up pretty much with what she wanted, and that it’s the others who really have it bad, the others who are really getting shafted with their 1-month contract offers, the others who need to negotiate but can’t. The most critical, outraged part of this discourse is also the part that does the most to minimize the subjectivity of the speaker, as we see her turn from describing her own circumstances to critiquing the collective misery of human resources’ assembly-line method of contract signing. As if there were after all a certain desire to ascend to a somewhat detached critical standpoint, one that would critique precarity while attempting to avoid entirely identifying oneself as its victim. The discourse on precarity is not without its internal contradictions.

The occasion marked the results of a major study on precarity in French higher education and research. Precarity, needless to say, can become a contested and complicated concept, and I want to write about this too but first I need to read more of the prior literature. But the funny part, as it turns out, is that the researchers themselves seem to have faced these very same agonies of literature review and conceptual clarification; and, wanting to avoid having to settle on a single definition of precarity, they decided to let precarity be defined by the research subjects. Hence if you considered yourself precarious, you counted as such in this survey, which had 4,409 responses and appears to be a fairly representative sample of French disciplines and institutions. In practice, I venture to add, ‘precarity’ seemed to come down to a fairly straightforward matter of having a temporary, hence unstable, job situation.

The gist of the study is that precarity is rising fairly rapidly in this sector, the non-permanent workforce having for instance increased by 15.5% at the CNRS between 2006 and 2008, and university workforces currently being estimated at about 23% precarious (looking across all categories of university staff). The major findings of the report included a marked feminization of precarious jobs, a notable concentration of precarity in the social and human sciences (which Americans would call “humanities and social sciences”) in relation to the hard sciences, a definite group of young precarious workers (under 30) combined with a significant group of older “perma-temps,” a range of rather low wages (as someone put it rather sarcastically, temporary contracts are not being compensated for by better salaries), and, subjectively, a set of waves of anxiety and uncertainty about the future. As one would guess, there’s also a lot of struggling to make ends meet through multiple jobs (apparently a few even teach under assumed names, to circumvent age restrictions on some teaching assignments), a certain amount of disdain and nonrecognition from the tenured staff, and a set of inferior working conditions coupled to a lack of workplace rights in the face of the organizational hierarchy.

This has to be taken as only a quick provisional summary; the actual research report is 83 pages long, and I’ll write more about it when I’ve read it all the way through. But what I wanted to post for now was a quick translation of the political declaration announced at the end of the afternoon, after the research results were explained, after a panel of precarious workers had testified, after a distinguished roundtable had chewed things over. At the end there was a long line of academic union leaders (100% male, surely not accidentally) who sat in a row and released a joint statement. It reads as follows:

Press conference against precarity, Feb 8, 2010

Final declaration

The massive growth of precarity in research and higher education, the multiplication of “irregular” contracts, the practice of firing people just before they would legally be entitled to permanent contracts (CDI), and the degradation of working conditions for those with temporary contracts (CDD) — all this requires a large-scale response from the whole corps of academic staff, from the tenured [titulaires] and the precarious alike.

The academic unions and associations call on all academic staff to take stock of the results of the precarity study, and to meet in their workplaces to spread the word about this scandalous situation. Together, we will commit ourselves to collective actions which, this spring 2010, will bring the precarious out of their state of invisibility and inaugurate a fight for stable employment.

Universities and research centers have operated with precarious employees for too many years. But the rise in project-based research financing (in particular at the National Research Agency, ANR), the contractualization of the universities, and the policy decisions that eliminate tenured employment and accelerate deregulation have brought the spread of precarity to unacceptable levels. We demand the creation of new statutary posts with tenure [titularisation] for the long-term precarious staff, whether they work in universities or research centers. The government must stop the false promises and start negotiations.

The real situation of precarious staff must be immediately improved. Contract workers in public establishments can no longer live with so few rights. It is time to put an end to the successions of short-term contracts, to the nonrecognition of accrued experience and qualifications, to the frozen salaries and denied benefits. We call on all the forces of our unions and associations, in every establishment, in every region, and across the whole body of tenured staff to scrutinize precarity in all its concrete instances. We call on them to demand that local and national administrations put an end to the abuses, to demand that the most favorable possible policies be put in place.

It is everyone’s responsibility to help the precarious out of their state of invisibility, and without the active solidarity of the tenured staff [titulaires] this struggle will only be more difficult. We call on all our tenured colleagues to stop the discriminations that still exist in too many of our workplaces; for it is also by changing our own behavior that we can deal a final blow to all the forms of devalorization inflicted on our precarious colleagues. It is by improving their working conditions and in defending them in front of management that we can improve working conditions for all.

Together, we will begin collective efforts to fight against the policies of individualization and forced competition between employees, to obtain a multi-year plan for creating statutory jobs, to put an end to precarity.

Paris, February 8, 2010

SNTRS-CGT, FERC-SUP CGT, CGT-INRA, CGT-IFREMER
SNCS-FSU, SNESUP-FSU, SNASUB-FSU, SNEP-FSU, SNETAP-FSU
SGEN-CFDT Rechercher EPST
SUP’RECHERCHE-UNSA, SNPTES-UNSA
CFTC-Recherche
SUD Education, SUD Recherche EPST, SUD Etudiant
UNEF
SLR
SLU

I don’t post this text as a literary masterpiece or a window into anyone’s subjective experience but rather to give you a sense of the kind of collective political declarations that get made in Paris. This one, as you can see, is co-signed by a veritable forest of symbols, or rather a thicket of acronyms, each one representing a union or an association. In effect, this text is signed by a collective of collectives, one which generally refers to itself in the text as a generic “we,” the “we” of a collective social body, the “we” of a united entity (the whole corps of academic staff) that is nonetheless well aware of its internal hierarchy and fragmentation (between tenured and precarious employees).

Unlike some of the other political manifestos I’ve seen, this one walks a fine line between framing a fight against an external enemy (the government and administrators) and reprimanding its own members for their own continued discrimination against precarious employees. In advocating “changing our own behavior,” it strikes a cautious balance between critique and autocritique. But in spite of this apparent ambiguity in the text’s political target, I’m struck in reading by the sense that the very idea of “precarity” is one that serves to frame the issue in such a way as to automatically claim the moral high ground. For is there anyone who is, or even could be for precarity? Although the particular harms associated with precarious work are amply documented in the research report I described above, I get a strong sense that in this discourse precarity is construed as a self-evident wrong, one needing no further moral analysis. As if precarity set the limits of a political doxa (though perhaps I should emphasize that I say this as a purely analytic statement, not as some contrarian defense of precarious work).

One last thing to note here: it’s a text where we can see legal, procedural and contractual details getting recontextualized as features of a deeply moral, emotional and political landscape. Call it the moralization of the technical: seemingly bureaucratic French notions like the difference between a CDI and CDD (fixed-duration versus indeterminate-duration employment contract) here can be seen to be weighed down, if not indeed rather overloaded, with an intense symbolic significance. I always have to remind myself of this as an ethnographer: what seem like arcane policy details draped in ragged acronym robes so often turn out to be objects of intense concern or attachment here in France. It’s as if, the more academic life gets routinized and bureaucratized and standardized, the more we find, paradoxically, that bureaucratic procedures and impersonal frameworks themselves get re-enchanted and repoliticized and gummed up with idiosyncratic symbolism. Not that this always happens by any means — certainly sometimes the bureaucracy is just used as a technical tool and more or less taken for granted — but I’ve been struck in French universities by the degree to which academic bureaucracy becomes an object of intense disdain and bluntly political critique.

I don’t know how I’ve gone this long without discovering Inside Higher Ed, but I’m very glad I finally have. This is clearly a hugely valuable resource and I appreciate it very much. I’ve been adjuncting @ 2 institutions for just 1.5 years now, after teaching as a grad assistant for 2, and am actively trying to figure out where the hell to take my career. The article here, as the others, and especially the dialogue in the comments are hugely valuable to me, not least because they just make me feel less alone in my outrage over the “white-collar Walmart” set-up, as another commenter coined.

I looooooooooooove teaching, like crazy, and I don’t even want a PhD. It took me 9 years to complete my BS and MA altogether, I’m 36, and I’m tired. I just want to work & learn with students about textual meaning-making, and do my best to arm ’em with those literacies that will best empower them to get what they need/want.

Before this gig, I’ve been a waitress for going on 20 years, a job I loved, but needed to get out of, due to a chronic injury and a certain amount of going stir crazy within its intellectual limits. Teaching gives me everything I love about waiting, without the arthritis, crazy hours, and bathroom-cleaning. The only seriously huge glaring problem, of course, is that waiting tables, I can and have pulled in a pretty comfortable, lower middle-class income, and get health insurance and a frickin’ 401k.

Something’s gotta give, certainly. I have every confidence that somehow, I’ll make a career that works enough to avoid true abject poverty when I retire, and I’m even more positive that I will find a way to have fun while I do it. I knew what I was getting into, job-wise, when I went for the MA. But I’ll tell you what, if I hear one more tenured/tenure-track faculty at my 4-year institution cluck sympathetically at me about how awful it is that the life of an adjunct is so hard, but take absolutely no advantage of their position to advocate for any change in our treatment, I will lure them to the bar I still work at on the weekends, so I can throw a beer at them on my own turf.

(Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to link directly to a comment on Inside Higher Ed, but if you scroll around you can find the original.)

What I like about this short text is that it calls attention to the moment of surprise that sometimes occurs when someone discovers that they aren’t isolated or unique in their anxieties. What I like about this text is how clearly it illustrates the paradox of people who come to love a job that they know hurts them. That they know is unjustly underpaid. What I like about this text is that it reminds us of the relative ridiculousness of many people’s academic working conditions, worse than those in restaurants. (While I have nothing against restaurants, they’re not really known as the epitome of good working conditions.) Though paradoxically, what I also like about this text is that, in an academic world where too many people seem to subscribe to the (quasi-Thatcherite) principle that they have no viable alternative to their “intellectual” work, here the author seems happy to eschew  snotty categorical distinctions between “manual” and “mental” labor, noting that restaurants and universities can be similar in their psychic rewards. I like the Bourdieuian reminder that cultural and educational capital can at times be inversely correlated with economic capital. And I certainly empathize with the critique of those tenured faculty who only theoretically sympathize with people getting the short end of the stick.

But what worries me in this text is the blithe certainty that something’s gotta give, that somehow, I’ll make a career that works enough, that the future will turn out providential against all odds, that the future can become this imaginary space where the irresolvable contradictions of the present receive a purely fantasy resolution. The endearingly practical logic of this passage, who needs a phd when you can already do what you love, at least in teaching you don’t have to clean bathrooms, all that practicality goes up in smoke at the end of this text. The whole last paragraph is written in the register of everything will turn out be fine, but if I hear one more word of false consolation from people better off, I just might lose it, as if two futures are really being envisioned here, one where everything magically works out well and another where the psychic costs of academic labor exploitation just can’t be repressed any longer and finally they explode in the form of a beer hurled across the room.

As we’ll see soon in talking about precarity in French universities, a characteristic social and psychological paradox of precarious academic workers involves this kind of split view of the future, where people fully intend to stick by their jobs and even feel passionate attachments to their work, but are also permanently haunted by the danger of everything falling apart at any moment.