Gonzo Critique of Bourgeois Conceptualizations of Universality: Meditations From the Sunday Before Bastille Day

Here, it is not possible to forget that subjectivity and knowledge are situated in, are produced by, time and location. The point has been made by every social theorist from Hegel to Marx to Althusser to Derrida to Donna Haraway. It is not new. But here, finally, I feel the texture of it. The effect is dizzying. I think it is the reason that the country is so different from the city. In the country, one can easily forget time, place, location, being lost in a slow lull bounded by seasons, stars, trees. Indeed, that is part of the appeal of rural life. Forgetting.
I’m in café in Place Maubert, once the site of some of the worst rioting during the events of May ’68. I sit here, an American wearing a tank top made in Thailand that I bought at a horse show in Ohio that reads “Rock and Roll Cowgirl.” Here, its meaning changes. It seems aggressively American, western; or ironic and a la mode. Depending. I am reading a book in English about “l’affair du foulard,” the controversies surrounding prohibitions against Muslim girls wearing the veil in French public schools, and the ways in which it problematizes the idea of “universal man.” In the background I hear a marching band practicing for Bastille Day, the celebration of the French revolution; universality and all the rest. The band incongruously follows Abba’s “Don’t Go Wasting Your Emotions” with a stirring rendition of “Les Marseillaise.” From inside the café behind me comes Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean.” The French, along with everyone else, are playing MJ’s music obsessively in the wake of his death. My Midwestern students, both Catholic and non, have gone back to Notre Dame again today to go to a full mass, drawn, I suppose, to the drama of the great cathedral. Me, I have eaten a lunch of Greek food from a shop down the corner whose owners came here during the military coup in the 60’s. I will walk back to the apartment I am subletting from an Italian architect who is now in Madrid then on to Dubai and who, apparently, has a taste for the music of Jacques Brel, and more than a passing interest in the sinking of the Titanic. I plan to call back to the U.S. to talk to some close friends in at least 3 states. One is about to leave to bring her children to a summer camp in Holland. Tomorrow, I want to go to see some restored versions of films from the French New Wave – films I first saw in New York City, decades ago, in the Village, where so many cafes, bars and newspapers bear the names of places from the Latin Quarter where I now sit, in Paris.
And each line of each sentence I have written has more stories attached, stories I could tell if I had time and if I were not violating the privacy of others. We are produced by and implicated in the interplay of the stories that all converge in each single moment, saturated with times, places and interpretive gazes. I am part of a vast flow of economies of capital and economies of meaning.
That last is too Deleuzian for my tastes, but there you are.
And, by the way, I am having a nice day. It is raining.