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Slow attempts at making sense: Oslo 22/7

Published on July 30, 2011 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Other

People meditating the sea of flowers outside Oslo Cathedral a week after the bomb blast and massacre

This research diary has until now exclusively treated the various facets of my PhD research project in Paris. When the numbness began to lose its grip, I started to realise why I feel so terribly concerned. Of course, I think most Norwegians, many Europeans and even many, many fellow world citizens feel deep concern when an atrocity like this strikes, even when they or their closest aren’t struck personally. This concerns us as fellow humans (of both the victims and the perpetrator…), and it concerns us as political beings. But I also realised that this concerns me profoundly in terms of the career I’ve chosen: What good is it to devote my professional life to understanding nationalism, belonging, community cohesion, conceptions of difference and the like when I have done nothing to prevent the worst thinkable acts of violence to take place in my own country? Especially since I think – or I’m sure – that I’ve felt there was a need for worry (but of course, not to this unconceivable degree…). For several days now I’ve been thinking about how I can contribute. How can I contribute in the best way with my knowledge (of living with difference in Europe), my concern (for the future of us all) and my devotion (to work for a better world)? I know need to think much more about this in the coming days and weeks, and I know that I need to act.

When I very soon finish my present project, I will – hopefully – be able to do research in Oslo. And there are few places on earth than here I’d rather do this kind of research right now. I don’ think there’s a coincidence that the last huge act of terrorism in Europe was committed by a rightwing nationalist in the name of anti-Islamism. And I even don’t think it was that big a coincidence that it happened in Scandinavia.

Now, after eight days of numbness (and reading of philosophy of difference) it’s time to get back to the main task: finishing the Paris project and get on with life. (Or rather, get on with life and finish the Paris project.)

People meditating the sea of flowers outside Oslo Cathedral a week after the bomb blast and massacre

This research diary has until now exclusively treated the various facets of my PhD research project in Paris. When the numbness began to lose…

Pieces into place 2

Published on June 19, 2011 by cicilie Posted in Blogging, Cicilie among the Parisians, Politics, Writing

Now, all but one chapter have found their final form, with only minor polishing and weaving together left to do. As this blog has helped me to keep a more coherent and exterior perspective on what I’m doing throughout the various stages of the project, I would very much have liked to keep this diary updated as the nuts and bolts, long lines and small steps took shape. But although this final phase has been all about making sense of and making accessible all the preceding work – thus the writing of the small posts in this research blog writ large – it’s been difficult to find time to write here. Since August last year the writing has been flowing almost seamlessly (after I lost my presentation due to a ridiculous back-up mistake the day before I headed off to a conference, and I had no choice but to speed up considerably and quickly fill the gaps with top-of-the-head translations of French slam poetry). And the pieces have fallen into place with astonishing precision. – Here comes a few examples, from the remaining chapter which I’m working on now and which is still in a mess: The seemingly low level of education has puzzled me (although none of the people I asked about it agreed that it was particularly low). Then I – a bit late perhaps, but some differences are less obvious to look out for than others – found out that there’s a far lower percentage of university degrees and even final general high school exams in France than in both the US and Norway. In the same book where I read this – The Dignity of Working Men, a comparison of working class moral boundaries in the US and France – I also learnt that class solidarity and class struggle are still overwhelmingly present in France, despite the decline of the communist parties and the exceptionally low percentage of labour union membership. This puts the emphasis on solidarity and equality of the slam sessions into a far broader context than I initially thought and lead me to re-read The Distinction by P. Bourdieu. And oh my, what exhilarating surprises! Almost on every page there were things to enter into discussion with, and I started to wonder if the slam milieu could provide an example of an community and art form of liquid modernity (Z. Bauman) – thus were coherent boundaries have dissolved – but which has retained a strong sense of (class) solidarity… Well, well, more on this later when the bits and pieces of this chapter also find their place.

The point of this post was to state that I’m still here, thinking about this fieldwork and writing up blog has followed me through thick and thin of the last five, soon six, years. Now, it’s no more than a few months left, and I hope to be able to leave a trace of this final phase, as the last threads find their places in the tapestry.

Pieces into place: Décroissance, another life and another politics – And making sense of the data

Published on April 11, 2011 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, Distinctions, Paris, Politics, Slam/Performance poetry

(Writing is progressing so fast now, that I’m not able to keep up here. This post I wrote several weeks ago, but haven’t found a free moment to post it before now. I’ll try to find some more time to keep up the blog in this final stage, as it would be good to document this part of the project as well. I’ll see what I can manage.)

Smaller and larger parts of the puzzle find their place at the moment. Phenomena that have only flickered past my attention in a superficial, disconnected manner suddenly add up to a larger picture.[teaserbreak] The last of these epiphanies was triggered by a request to hold a seminar at National Institute of Consumer Research (SIFO). They asked me because they’ve a project running on migration and consumption, and certainly, migration is relevant in my research on Paris as postcolonial. On consumption on the other hand, I wasn’t so sure what I could come up with. When I discussed some bland idea I’d got with a fellow anthropologist, he said right away that it’s exactly the lack of consumption in one of the large consumer countries of the west that it interesting here. Of course! One of the definitions of French slam is that it should be for free.

About the same time, a Norwegian journal published an article on the French Décroissance (Degrowth) movement. Although I had noticed the thought-provoking term around, for instance in demonstrations, I wasn’t aware that it concerned a socio-political movement. I started wondering if parts of the slam milieu was inspired by this movement, as several texts make similar statements to their “live better consume less” ideas, as well as mocking contradiction in terms like a “fair trade” (J’aime ma planète, j’achète, “I love my planet, so I buy it” by Zéor, for instance).

“Productivisme – deadly dangerous: Let’s enter degrowth”
From a demonstration in Paris in October 2005

I had also noticed the relatively low material standard of living (without going into detail) many slammers lived under. These observations had made an impression on me, but they didn’t start to make sense before I read Sociologie de Paris (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot) and connected them to the brute reality of the cost of life in Paris proper compared to the poorer suburbs: Even in the cheapest arrondissments in the north and east of the city is the price per square metre double compared to in the suburban towns in Seine-Saint-Denis.

But the observations still weren’t more than signs of relative poverty in an affluent society, added perhaps some traits of degrowth-ideas present in some texts. Until I was told (by a man almost double my age, what a humiliation!) that I had to free my analysis because what I was observing seems much more radical than old ways of thinking about politics. He commented on another part of the thesis (republicanism and cosmopolitanism), but it’s pertinent in relation to the question of consumption as well. From this perspective, all these disparate observations click together in the puzzle to such a degree that it all seems utterly banal, and how come I haven’t seen it before? Maybe particularly since I’ve even proclaimed here before that I recognise in the slam scene something of Foucault’s dictum (1982) to refuse what we are and find new subjectivities liberated from the state and its individualisation.

A life with less material goods is certainly not only “relative poverty”, it is also part of larger ethical questions on local and global solidarity, ecology, how to lead the good life and so on. The Décroissance movement and the slam phenomenon are probably just different expressions of larger currents in French and western society. Suddenly, I see the slam scene as even deeper situated within a long and broad history of poetic and eventful rebellion. And the great thing for the progress of my thesis is that all these recent epiphanies don’t seem to broaden the scope of my work, spreading it out in unmanageable directions. Quite the contrary, they tie the loose ends into a nuanced and detailed tapestry and click seemingly unfitting pieces into the puzzle.

"Productivisme - deadly dangerous: Let's enter degrowth"

Manifesto for faster writing and shorter workdays

Published on January 10, 2011 by cicilie Posted in Academic life and family, Cicilie among the Parisians, Writing

To my surprise I discovered that it was easy to change my way of writing and even my way of working more generally. The writing came easiest. When I wrote my master thesis, on very good days I could produce half a page. I could file and mould every sentence for hours, a technique I think contributed to the far too dense structure. Not only is the fluency easily lost, but I also started to find it a boring way to work.
[teaserbreak]
I then read a tip that helped me out of it right away. Now, regularly write at least a 1000 words on a regular workday. It’s just to write on, without any censorship – don’t erase anything, just switch paragraph – and preferably no checking of sources during the first draft. [Write everything you want like to check in square brackets]. One should start first thing in the day (or rather, in the work day, for us with children) and keep it going for two hours. Often it goes so well that it is just to continue. They way I wrote earlier made me so fed up with my own text that I never rewrote and hardly even read through it. – But even then I had to restructure the text, both within and between chapters. Now, this editing work is much easier on all levels. It’s far easier to delete since my sentences and paragraphs haven’t had the time to become particularly dear darlings, and it is far easier to rewrite and restructure.

This writing exercise also helped me with the more challenging task to change work habits. When it suddenly was necessary for me to get as much work done as possible, it almost seemed like I needed to change personality. Until then, for as long as I can remember my way of working can be likened to a heavy, heavy steam engine setting off from last chance saloon. I could (can) spend hours getting started. I’ve waited until the absolute deadline, than procrastinated a little longer before slowly pulling my forces together, in order to finally work for a loooong, looooong time with an increasing speed and enthusiasm. Then of course, after a period of intense effort and concentration, some kind of break is desperately needed, and it will once again take a long time – and usually a last call – to get the steam engine going again.

Then circumstances just came and changed the pattern. Circumstances demand that I get a minimum of 6-7 hours of sleep every night (if not things can get very nasty between Mrs Surpæt [untranslatable old dialect related to ‘grumpy’] and her offspring. Circumstances also demand that (at least the first part of) the office day must end around 15H. That leaves me with no more than 5-6 successive work hours, something which was unthinkable under my previous regime. I sometimes force myself to take a lunch break, and I still rarely write less than my 1000 pages. – If it is not one of these awful, annoying, aggravating days that keep me from getting on with the writing right from the beginning. Because, the thing is, if I get hung up in some petty task of searching for something or clearing some space on my desk or some administration of some kind, I’m almost certainly unable to recover that day’s work spirit.

But if I’ve prepared rightly and know where to start (either by thinking it through the day before or on the way to work), and I sit down without too much fuss, it’s almost as if the fewer work hours I have in front of me, the more I get done. Down to a certain limit of course, but working concentrated for around 5-6 hours (with or without a break, is really perfect). This scheme worked amazingly well for more than four months in the autumn, a very lengthy leg which it would have been impossible to beat under earlier circumstances.

Now the question is: My thesis needs about 33 000 more words. Can I get them written in 33 days (divided on 4 days a week, – also due to certain circumstances), thus a little less than two months?

Create expectations for the reader

Published on January 7, 2011 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Paris, Writing

I wrote about my expectations of Hemingway’s little book from his early years in Paris, A moveable feast, a while ago. Silly me thought I would find the reason why it was particularly hard to write about Paris in his book, as he wrote so evocatively: [teaserbreak]

Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually (A moveable feast, 2007, p. 4).

It took me quite a while – silly me – after finishing the book to understand what kind of answer he had given, because the answer wasn’t straight, as I had hoped it to be. It was in Paris that he decided to quit reportage and journalism, at which he seemed quite successful, and test his luck in literature – despite having a wife and child to support. And it was in Paris he acquired his characteristic style of writing and building up a story:

Then I started to think in Lipp’s [he’s writing in the old cafés in the old artist and intellectual quarters at the west bank :-)] about when I had first been able to write a story after losing everything. … It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season! And I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood (A moveable feast, 2007, 43).

Of course he wouldn’t answer my question, I realised. Merde. Now I have to figure it out myself, and that would probably take me a whole lifetime. Because, after all:

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast (Hemingway, in a letter to a friend

On the more positive side, I got an excellent lesson in the important skill of creating expectations for the reader. Before Christmas, the feedback I got on one of the core chapters in my thesis surprised me to the extent of first annoy and discourage me, then – and I hope I’m there now – spurring me on to produce better texts. I had described in detail a slam session where I highlighted a handful of texts and people in order to go more in depth. But what had grasped people’s attention was not at all what I had found interesting when being present that night, neither what I had wanted to convey to the readers. If I had managed to create any expectations at all through my chapter, it had certainly been the wrong ones…

After some days of gloomy afterthought, I came to the conclusion that the whole core of the thesis needed to be restructured. I don’t think it’s very much work, but it will alter the way people read my argument (if there is any?!) fundamentally. And readers’ expectations and their gradual fulfilment (which in the case of literature can be days, weeks or even years after you finished the book) are everything.

I wrote about my expectations of Hemingway’s little book from his early years in Paris, A moveable feast, a while ago. Silly me thought I would find the reason why it was particularly hard to write about Paris in his…