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

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

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

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

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

Mal Langsdon/Reuters; published at liberation.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another one put its political message even more simply:

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

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

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

No to the LRU! says a figure falling into a trash can. Or is it the LRU itself that’s falling into a trash can?

“For a critical and popular university [fac]!” Apparently this is a traditional militant slogan at Toulouse.

“Get a new slogan please!” is the caption written below by someone who apparently disagrees or is simply bored.

[La fac, i.e. la faculté, is a now bureaucratically obsolete term that used to designate a college, a faculty, a division – as in the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Law, etc. It is still used in common parlance to refer to the public universities – les facultés – as opposed to other institutions of higher learning (private business schools, elite government institutes, and the like).

“For a hard and copulating university!”

This is one of those semi-untranslatable parodies. Instead of “une fac critique et populaire” we have “une fac qui trique et copulaire,” a perfect rhyme with a perfectly divergent meaning. “Triquer” is, according to a semi-reliable online source, a verb meaning “to strike” (like with a baton), which has militant connotations, but also “to get hard” and “to possess carnally.” And “copulaire” is an impromptu adjectival form of “copuler,” to copulate. So instead of a critical and popular faculty we have… well… one that gets aroused and copulates. Is anyone really advocating a sexual university, though? I guess this is mainly sheer parody, though there are long-standing and noteworthy associations between ’68 French leftism and sexuality that are in play here too. A famous slogan was, for instance, “Plus je fais l’amour, plus j’ai envie de faire la révolution. Plus je fais la révolution, plus j’ai envie de faire l’amour” – the more I make love, the more I want to make the revolution; the more I make the revolution, the more I want to make love.

Freedom in search of itself (with no compass). Seems rather ambivalent.

The muscled figure of a rather peculiar, gender-ambiguous creature, with long hair and what looks like lipstick but also with huge knees and three arms, is beating the reforms (LES REFORMES) with a yellow club.

A neat movement is a lifeless movement.

But “propre” is also an adjective signifying possession as well as propriety… so this could also be read as “a movement that’s on its own is a lifeless movement,” “a private movement is a lifeless movement.”

(At bottom, there’s something about Tunisia. Did I mention that the university is in a major immigrant neighborhood?)

Social movements are made to die.

More ambivalence here, no? Or at least ambiguity: we don’t know if this is the gleeful pronouncement of someone who hates social movements or the bittersweet musings of a militant. Does it mean that social movements are bound to accomplish nothing and end in uselessness? Or that social movements disappear when they win, transcending themselves through victory, as it were?

Free your mind [conscience, consciousness] and then you’ll be able to free your university [ta fac].

This struck me as a particularly hackneyed and empty slogan, personally, although an acquaintance in philosophy thought it was fine and not unreasonable. But I think she may not have shared my ingrained cynicism (or my sense of resonance with tiresome slogans from The Matrix).

Voilà: a trashcan with a human face! Or a face of some sort, at least, more cartoon than realistic.

I have no idea what this symbol means.

This one seems clear enough, by contrast. Always curious when French speakers choose to resort to English…

Act! Disobey! Alternative Libertaire!

Evidently this is a sticker belonging to a small libertarian socialist-anarchist organization. Their color scheme – black, red and white – and the red star are pregnant with ancient left-wing symbolism, and tend to communicate their identity more than the rather abstract slogan itself.

I rather like this one. It masquerades somewhat as another political slogan (Delirium! What a wonderful political emotion!), but turns out to be a sticker advertising a local band. (The link is in small print unreadable here.) Hence showing us yet again that political signs are vulnerable to various forms of recontextualization, reappropriation and culture jamming.

Women take back the night on March 7th!

The fine print is worth reading here too:
“Marre de la domination masculine” (Sick of masculine domination)
“Marre qu’on contrôle notre sexualité” (Sick of them controlling our sexuality)
“Marre des violences faites aux femmes” (Sick of violence against women)
“Marre d’être les premières victimes de la crise” (Sick of being the first victims of the crisis)

And then in the torn part of the page: “Manifestation non-mixte,” i.e. a non-mixed-sex demonstration for women only. With a curious icon in the background: set upon the traditional symbol for women, we find, reaching out of it, the figure of a woman (whose femininity appears to be indicated essentially by long hair and context) raising up her fist. An interesting icon, I think, because it reappropriates the raised fist, such a traditional symbol of leftist, revolutionary masculine power.

Looking back over this post… I see that I am not halfway through my collection of these images, but I suppose I should save the rest for a new post, lest this one grow any longer, and I miss dinner because of my blog. Which is a distinct possibility.

For now, I’m thinking of this collection of images as an incoherent political landscape, a collection of traces of contradictory political projects, commercial projects, rhetorical disagreements, nihilistic skepticism, comic optimism. I guess, in this presentation of images isolated photographically from their architectural and spatial contexts, one loses a sense of how the images become part of the buildings, blend into the walls or jump out from them, form a piece of everyday life. Walking around the university, no one besides me was looking at these messages. They become part of the background. The ambiance of the place. There’s an interesting paradox in these messages: their various cries for attention and urgency become reduced in daily life to a kind of vague institutional atmosphere. They signify student intervention in academic space even as they signify the impotence of this intervention as it turns to mere ambiance, something that appears to be largely felt rather than seen, ignored rather than heard. Of course, as types of media, graffiti and signage are remarkably unidirectional, leaving no indication even of their authors’ identities, much less a way of offering a response, aside from scrawling one’s own message (which creates an apparent dialogue between graffiti tags or signs without necessarily reaching the original authors). Unless some kind of contact info is given in the message (the occasional URLs, for example), these signs are just there, provoking reaction without affording any obvious possibility for interpersonal contact.

At times, the mold approaches the complexity of mountaintop lichens, or perhaps it’s more like a spontaneous display of abstract art.

At any rate, I’m taking the liberty of reposting the photos here with English translation, because I don’t think it would have much impact just to give the translation without the images. Obviously, the images belong to their photographers, who unfortunately remain anonymous.

The photos that follow are the result of a photography contest organized at a university in the south of France, calling on students to testify about their working conditions.

Thus here you have the daily life of the students at this university. Some basic rules of survival impose themselves.

Rule number 1: Never hug the walls.

[It is dangerous to approach the foot of these buildings.]

Rule number 2: To enter a classroom takes courage.

… but the light is at the end of the corridor.

Rule number 3: Once in class, try to abstract from the environment and concentrate solely on the teacher.

Rule number 4: Expect to bring warm clothes in winter.

Rule number 5: The toilets are at the bottom of the stairs. Don’t go there unless you absolutely need to, and even then not without psychological preparations.

Rule number 6: If the atmosphere is too oppressive, don’t hesitate to get some air on a terrace…

… sit down at a cafe for a while…

… or play sports for a bit.

Rule number 7: Make sure to locate the emergency exits.

[i.e.: For safety reasons, the emergency exit is closed.]

In this context one would like to be able to believe the statements of our leaders:

Nicolas Sarkozy (speech of Jan 22, 2009)
“Higher education, research and innovation are our absolute priority.”
“I firmly believe that the universities should benefit from full ownership of their heritage.” Thanks!

Valérie Pécresse (from http://premierministre.gouv.fr)
“The year 2009 is distinguished by an unprecedented raise in the university budgets: every one of them is seeing its budget rise by at least ten percent.”
“The universities have seen a 43% rise in their safety budgets compared to 2008.”

However in this university:

The budget has risen less than inflation in 2009 while the university has assumed new costs within the framework of university autonomy.

Seven lines for technical and administrative jobs will be cut in 2009.

To continue thinking a bit about the visual culture of French universities, we have here a particularly interesting metacommentary on the physical environment, because it’s so clear here that the conditions of the buildings are a major concern for the locals. The unstated prerequisite of this commentary is approximately: “our buildings are falling apart and that is outrageous.” But here the sarcastic tone serves to re-emphasize the condemnation of the physical environment’s decrepitude, and in passing, at the end, to further condemn the Sarkozy government’s treatment of universities. Towards this end, the decrepit bathroom sink becomes a political signifier. The ludicrous signs – the emergency exit “closed for safety reasons” – are recontextualized as products of the government’s apparent political hypocrisy.

Oddly, there are almost no people in these photographs – the most we see is a long finger that apparently has just wiped some dust off a radiator, a photographer’s sneaker in the bottom of a frame. It’s as if the universities were abandoned as well as decrepit. I won’t pretend that I’m not a little shocked myself when I see this degree of physical decay, especially in comparison to the ostentatiously pristine environment of wealthy American universities, but it’s nonetheless interesting to trace how the built environment erupts into local political consciousness. If the decay of these buildings is recognized locally as a scandal, as an exception to the norms of academic space, then this seems to pose the inverse question as to what kinds of academic space are unmarked and pass as normal, acceptable. Does it have to be the traditional architecture of the Sorbonne? Or is it just necessary to have academic space without visible signs of decay?