It’s Thursday, and my last class of the week is about twelve and a half hours away. Some part of me wants to start getting revved up now, since it still feels performative to teach, taking an energy that I try to build up in advance.

But a painless and oddly physical sense of disorientation has also set in, clouding the evening clock. It remains viscerally confusing to be alone in South Africa, teaching; my family is in America while I’m out here this year, as I’ve mentioned before. (This is very hard in completely obvious ways, which I won’t elaborate just now.)

In any event, I’ve been here the past three weeks, but the days and nights never quite learn to get along. Each day there’s too much coffee or too little, too little motion or too much, and never quite enough sleep, and even that, always disorganized. Time is like an outfit that you thought would fit, but when you got home, somehow it was slightly too small.

There’s an institutional reason for this over and above the existential factors; while elsewhere teaching usually confers a stable rhythm, here it’s a bonus source of disorientation, since here my class isn’t scheduled at the same time from one day to the next. I’m just teaching one class this quarter, which meets four days a week; twice it’s at noon, one day it’s at eight in the morning, which is inconveniently early, and one day it’s at nine. The evening before the early class, an unwelcome, unsleepy energy sets in.

I’m not an anxious teacher, as these things go. And increasing experience brings some kind of dedramatization. If my offhand math is right, I’ve taught about 160 university class sessions, cumulatively. It’s enough to start to be habit-forming; I’ve started to take certain parts for granted, like the basic logistics, the classroom “learning materials,” and the grading. While other parts — how to pace the material, how to adapt to diverse learning capacities — still feel like a work in progress.

But the odd thing about teaching is that, as soon as the first day of class was over, it stopped seeming like the first week of the term. Instead, it seems to me right now — this is Day 4 — that this class commenced at the birth of the universe and will continue on, exactly like this, for at least 525,000 years from now. I actually really love this class — teaching people how to do ethnography is probably my favorite thing to teach — so I don’t think this sense of timelessness is a form of angst, escapism, or complaint. Nevertheless, I don’t remember this degree of disorientation from previous classes.

It’s lucky that I have many alarm clocks.

In the meantime, the crickets are loudly keeping time, the last light is gone from the west, and I’m thinking about how to teach my students some feminist epistemology in the morning.

Here’s what I’ll look out at when I hastily print my teaching notes in the department office:

Here’s what Whittier College looks like this time of year.

I confess I avoided a handful of passers-by in taking these photographs, but the sense of momentary social emptiness is very real nevertheless, as if emptiness was one moment at the far end of a swinging pendulum of social motion.

I recently came across the very curious Europhilosophie, which seems to group together a number of philosophy working groups (on Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Bergson, Fichte, phenomenology, materialism, and psychoanalysis, among others). An acquaintance of mine, doing a thesis on the situationists, is part of the Groupe de Recherches Matérialistes. It turns out that members of this group offer seminars in various places. For your entertainment I therefore present the course description for a seminar on “Reading Marx/Readings of Marx” (Lecture(s) de Marx). It will be offered next fall at the (very philosophically prestigious) Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris
Seminar 2009-10

Reading(s) of Marx

Place: Ecole Normale Supérieure – 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris
Contact: Guillaume Fondu

The idea for this seminar comes from a simple observation [constat] drawn from the development of last year’s university movement: that of the nonexistence, as far as students were concerned, of structures of collective reappropriation of philosophical discourse, or at least ones falling between professorial lectures and solitary meditations, which by themselves cannot constitute the horizon of a veritable philosophical engagement. Given this starting point, it seems sensible to us to constitute a reading group around a well-defined program, so as to learn to work together and to permit a labor of common theoretical elucidation. In so doing, the choice of Marx as a philosophical figure strikes us as decisive on account of the new discursive practice he set in motion: a science of the collective by the collective, and a theoretical practice inseparable from its own genesis and from its micro- as well as macro-social effects. We wish to set in motion such an enterprise, one which will devote itself above all to the study of canonical texts reassessed in their “actuality” [leur actualité, their contemporary significance] which we know does not correspond to a spatiotemporal interval but rather constitutes the untimely mark of every revolutionary project, inasmuch as it connects to the concrete not to describe it “purely and simply” (ideology) but to give it its only true political form.

Marxist discourse has not finished, neither with writing history, nor with inscribing itself in history; and no approach to Marx can ultimately economize on the successive readings and rewritings of a text that constantly wanted to reactualize itself [ré-actualiser, make itself contemporary again], according to the whims of the fluctuations of the epoch and of its immanent revolutionary potentials. Reading(s) of Marx will thus take several directions, united in the coherence of a rediscovery of the social both in theory and in practice, with Marx but sometimes also perhaps against him.

The seminar will meet weekly, and will be split in two parts, devoting alternate weeks to Marx’s early texts and to the study of Capital, so as to permit everyone to get involved at their own pace. The year will begin with a presentation and a discussion of the seminar’s practical details, and the first sessions will be organized by the conveners [les responsables], dedicated to a reading of Marx’s early Critique of Hegel’s Political Philosophy, and to an immediate start on Capital in the second week. One can only hope that the rest will follow.

The dates and the room for the seminar meetings will be announced at the start of the academic year.

At an earlier point I think I would have been interested in how a document like this incorporates a subtext of classroom power relations. So for instance one can observe that this document contains a tension between the desire to produce a collective of apparent equals and the obvious assumption of pedagogical agency and authority by the teacher. Not to mention that the intellectual subtext is in certain respects marked as secondary; bold text (in the original) is used to give practical directions about how to find out where to show up and whom to contact for more information, rather than to emphasize, say, some intellectual point.

Although these hidden dynamics and contradictions of authority are certainly active here (and the pedagogical contradictions of leftist philosophers have in fact been the object of explicit reflection by French students, which I will come back to sometime), this sort of analysis now seems to me a trifle predictable. (My paper on literary theory classrooms goes into some detail on this topic.) What seems now more interesting is the organizer’s intense sense of the relation between a philosophy – Marx’s work for example – and its presence in the present, its “actuality” as they put it.

Marxism is cast here in the temporal frame of a going concern, not of (say) a dead doctrine. It has the temporality of the “untimely” (intempestive), of the unfinished. That is, the temporality of constantly bringing itself back to the present, of constant reflexive re-involvement in its genesis and effects, in its fluctuating “revolutionary” potentials. The political horizons of the course appear to be both radically Marxist and also radically academic: although it proposes to delve into Marx in order to offer students a philosophical engagement with the present, it also proposes no concrete form of political practice beyond reading and seminar participation. For that matter, even its pedagogical form remains somewhat indeterminate. The unfinished nature of Marxism apparently corresponds to the unfinished nature of the proposed seminar: its details are left uncertain, filled for the present only by the “hope” that “the rest will follow.”

Have been reading Sartre lately, the Search for a Method (which so far seems to be a grumpy critique of Marxist orthodoxy), and I’ve been struck by his insistence on delving into the specifics of particular social forms, his insistence on sociological and psychoanalytic detail in the analysis of any particular historical phenomenon (petit bourgeois authors for example). I have often felt unsatisfied with what feels like a refusal, by sociologists of knowledge, to enter the interior of the intellectual worlds they analyze, by their privileging of social form over conceptual content. I’m hoping, in examining French philosophy courses this year, to avoid this kind of mistake; which means, among other things, thinking more closely about the urge to make philosophy, as in this course description, a means for a “veritable philosophical engagement” with the present. What kind of intellectual future is implied in a hope to make philosophy fully present at a time when it seems out of sync with its moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Wolin, in “America’s Tolerance for French Radicalism,” attempts to describe the complementary histories of French poststructuralism in France and America. Making no distinction between the American nation and American academic culture, he argues that american pluralism and “democracy’s historical strengths” made it possible to assimilate post-structuralism as “merely another framework to choose from amid the ever-expanding marketplace of ideas.” Let’s leave aside the claims that America is democratic and pluralistic through and through, and that our intellectual world forms a free marketplace. These platitudes need not detain us. What’s more interesting is the claim that the intellectual world is “ever-expanding.” Here we have a more complex spatio-temporal image of the intellectual world: to be ever-expanding is to be growing in space as it progresses through time.

This sounds like a coy analogy with the astronomers’ hypothesis of an ever-expanding universe. Yet while Wolin apparently imagines the expanding marketplace of ideas as an endless intellectual bounty, the astronomers have envisioned a world whose infinite expansion will end not in unlimited light, but in indefinite cold and darkness. We might ask Wolin, is an endless marketplace really anything but a stultifying dream? And there’s something more directly debilitating about Wolin’s spatial image of the intellectual world. He views intellectual exchange as fundamentally bounded by national borders, walled off into separate French and American worlds. This leads him to homogenize French and American intellectual spheres. While he equates America with liberal pluralism, he equates France with an unstable radical-authoritarianism. He can’t recognize the immense internal differentiation of the French intellectual field, the profound differences between Derrida’s and Foucault’s institutional careers, the separation of French philosophy into small avant-gardes, numerous sub-specialties, and many different institutional milieux. (Foucault, far from being forgotten in France, is now taught, contra Wolin, in French lycées.) And even as Wolin denounces the category of “post-structuralism” as an American invention, he employs it unwittingly himself, describing a homogeneous American response to poststructuralism unsettled only by a few “committed disciples.”

François Cusset, on the other hand, in “French Theory’s American Adventures,” takes a much more subtle view of theory’s spatial and historical situation. He asks about theory’s future, about the convergence of theory and activism, about the intellectual transformations that theory met as it crossed from France to America. He does see an inversion between the political fate of theory in France and in the U.S., but less ahistorically than does Wolin:

“What we are facing here is a symmetrically reversed situation: on the one hand, a society run by a new wave of conservatives, but whose intellectual field, limited to isolated campuses, enjoys a proliferation of radical discourses, minority theories, and bold textual innovations, with little effect on the rest of America’s public space; on the other hand, a country run by a new wave of liberals (François Mitterrand’s “socialists”), but whose broad intellectual field, occupying a central role in the public space, has just been taken over by a herd of young center-left humanists, with the result of sweeping away leftist and radical tendencies and replacing them with a universalist moral blackmail still on the front stage in today’s France.”

That is, while a conservative American government faces a segregated but lively subculture of campus leftism, a liberal French government is accompanied more harmoniously by a widespread culture of “center-left humanism” that actively suppresses more radical leftist discourse. Hence, in contrast to Wolin, for Cusset it’s America that’s more politically bipolar and France that’s more oppressively and homogeneously liberal. And Cusset foresees new possibilities for the spatiotemporal flow of poststructuralist theory:

“French society is now at a time when all those American intellectual currents, forbidden for import over the last three decades, can finally be put to use in making sense of an unprecedented situation. Indeed, universities and independent publishers are working hard these days to make cultural studies, minority theories, “pop” philosophy, gender analyses, and the postcolonial paradigm not only better known in France (the only major country where prominent theorists behind such currents had not yet been translated), but also critically reformulated to better address specifically French issues… [French theory authors,] their texts, and the endless interpretations they inspire (together forming one cultural continuum) can still help us fashion a future of struggles and world making — within but also beyond higher education, in the United States but also throughout the rest of the world.”

In other words, while Jeff Williams laments that theory is being reprinted and memorialized in the U.S., Cusset informs us that American cultural and theoretical critiques are now being imported into France with renewed intellectual vigor. (For example, Judith Butler’s 1990 classic, Gender Trouble, was recently published in France, in 2005.) Wolin, for his part, rejects “poststructuralism” as irredeemable irrationality even as he rather cheerfully characterizes it as one more competing product in the intellectual market, as if he’s uncertain whether to give it a philosophical thrashing or to compliment it on its market share. Cusset, on the other hand, says that we need to get beyond blithe reenactment or crude rejection of theory, taking a more critical historicist approach:

“If theory is to be of any use nowadays, the many tricks and games implied by its cultural metamorphoses should be taken seriously: by addressing the American identity of French theory, and even by pondering the strange feedback effect of a recent return of French theory to France.”

In other words, if we are to critically reappropriate theory, if we are to make use of it in the present or future, we must first analyze its history, examine its flows through time and space, and more generally, put spatiality and temporality at the center of our theoretical consciousness. Such an analysis, for Cusset, is necessary for making theory again relevant to social struggle and transformation. One might say that Cusset is advocating a dialectical and historical – maybe even Marxist – approach to theory as a historical phenomenon and an intellectual avenue for political change.

The prevalence of rhetorics of time and space in academic texts has intrigued me for some time (“here I’ll demonstrate that x…”; “we must begin anew”; “we must go back to Freud”; “we have transcended Freud”; I hear frequent talk of intellectual “moves” on an intellectual “terrain” of “positions”). These peculiar spatiotemporal strategies and rhetorics, curious in themselves, are also perhaps revealing of the fantasy structure of academic labor, in which immaterial, abstract intellectual activity is humanized and rationalized by way of familiar schemas of place and time. I suppose it goes without saying that such strategies often serve as conduits for academic power and debate and struggle: to call something passé, say, is most certainly to denigrate it. And it may be that academic construals of time and space have some more buried ideological function, deserving of further scrutiny.

But on a less abstract level, I wonder whether a critical reappropriation of 60s radical philosophy is really the best intellectual task we could set for ourselves. I often suspect that today we lack the sense of intellectual excitement that was present once, elsewhere. Perhaps it would be better to form new theories and intellectual collectivities, rejecting aspirations for thorough mastery of the intellectual past. We needn’t consign ourselves to the endless rereadings of Marx and Adorno that define a group like Chicago’s Platypus. Should we take the path advocated by Hiro Miyazaki, in which we generate intellectual hope for ourselves by re-enacting the hope of others on a new terrain? Or is the intellectual future something that we discover by undoing the world around us rather than trying to imitate it?