The gilets jaunes or “yellow vests” protests, driven by rural poverty and general economic stress, continue across France more than three months after they began. Policy adjustments put forward by the government have not succeeded in quelling the unrest. Rejecting these measures as insufficient, protesters contend that French President Emmanuel Macron is blind, uncaring, and/or out of touch with their concerns. Macron’s nationally televised address on the protests only reinforced this perception. He gave it from the ornately decorated salon doré, the “golden lounge” of the Élysée Palace, formerly a residence of French nobility.
This image of Macron parallels the one discussed in part one of this series (see below also). There, a smiling woman sat in a Burger King looking out onto the riots as she supposedly snapped a selfie. That image spread widely and was identified as emblematic of the “spirit of the times.” Likewise, Macron’s choice of setting was considered remarkably tone deaf and indicative of his inability to grasp the true scope and nature of the tensions driving the protests. In both cases, figures that should be quite aware of what’s going on around them appear hopelessly blind, rooted in a perspective that reflects their own position rather than engaging those they purport to see.
This blindness is not visual or informational. Rather it is a self-seeing that is both all-encompassing and impoverished. Such self-seeing sees the riots in the streets perfectly well. It may even understand the perspective of the rioters. But even when face to face with the rioter, or face to numbers with sophisticated socio-economic analyses, such seeing does not change the position of the seer. The other remains the other and the self remains the self. Self and other, even and especially in their collective dimensions (e.g., class), can communicate and empathize with near perfection and still remain in fundamentally different places with different conditions. Macron calmly explains his thinking from the salon doré of the Élysée Palace while the woman sits smiling under the protection of the Burger King. They both see quite clearly.
What to do? How to get through to those who see themselves, or at least through themselves, when they look at others? How can one understand the blindness of such self-seeing in such a way as to transform it? By way of answer, a question: where else to start but with the self itself? Perhaps I am just as blind as those whose blindness I decry. Perhaps I sit within my own salon doré, my own Burger King. If so, that would be a good place to start.
The images above portray the apartment I occupied for a short stay as I observed the protests in Paris. Located in the 20th arrondisement, I found it through Airbnb. With respect to the question at hand, this condition of my seeing opens up a line of investigation, for it shows that I may well participate, if only in a small way, in the social dynamic driving the protests.
One of the criticisms of Airbnb is that it has exacerbated the rise in rents in urban tourist destinations by encouraging the conversion of long-term rentals into short-term ones. In cities such as Paris, New York, and San Francisco, among others, thousands of short-term rentals have opened up, competing strongly with hotels for price, location, and quality and taking potential apartments off the market for those who live and work (but cannot afford to buy) in those and similarly cosmopolitan cities. This dynamic magnifies pre-existing trends of gentrification that make housing in major metropolises increasingly unaffordable. That’s part of the reason why people move away from the city and become dependent on cars. Cars are a relatively inexpensive way to match affordable housing with employment opportunities. But as driving becomes more expensive (e.g., fuel taxes, emissions requirements) and jobs scarcer at lower wages and/or fewer benefits (whether privately or publicly provided), those of a certain class feel increasingly squeezed. Such a dynamic is exacerbated by rising rents in places where one can more easily utilize public transportation.
Does this decision to stay in an Airbnb in Paris blind me to the experience of others whose well-being is affected by my decision? With respect to one particular other, the answer is no.
Hotels sometimes put paintings up on the wall to give the rooms the feel of a human touch. They never fool anyone. But this apartment is undeniably, overwhelmingly, someone’s apartment. It has a certain distinctive personality that hotel rooms cannot have no matter how artfully and conscientiously they are designed. Numerous touches indicate the kind of sustained nest-feathering that a designer cannot approach when outfitting twenty rooms. Cardamom, a Tibetan prayer bell, a lamp made from a vintage Lucas headlight, spherical thumb-push salt and pepper grinders, and so many other similarly tasteful possessions that one can acquire only with years of attentive concern. But, for me, the books offer the most telling indicator of personality. Treating only the books in the living room, and only four of the eight shelves, here is a list of the titles and authors with whom I have some familiarity (these are all in French; I have provided the titles of English versions where available for the convenience of anglophone readers):
Helene Cixous, Hyperdream
Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed and another whose title is obscured
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future
Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language and The Order of Things
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
Friedrich Nietzsche, Mauvaises pensées choisies and Antichrist
Frederic Pajak, Nietzsche and his Father
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Georges Bataille, My Mother
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Herman Hesse, Éloge de la vieillesse
Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
James Joyce, Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Letter to My Father
Rabindranath Tagore, De l’aube au crépuscule
Alain Robbe Grillet, The Erasers
The degree to which some of these works and authors have influenced me, my desire to know these works and authors much better than I do, and the knowledge that all this is only a fraction of the library in this apartment, all leaves me with an impression. I have a PhD, have studied continental philosophy, and consider myself relatively well-read. This person may be more well-read than I am. Put another way, according to my own standards, this person is classier than I am. Not only do I now have a personal connection that I could never have in a hotel, and not only do I have an experience of culture and class in my lodgings and not just when I leave my room, but my temporary housing gives me an experience and possibility for upward class mobility. The classiness of the whole apartment is above me. I am elevated by it. And I won’t give it up--i.e., pay for a generic hotel room so as to not contribute to the reduced availability of long-term rentals—out of abstract solidarity with the français moyen.
With respect to the housing question, my experience of Airbnb is both interpersonal and specific as well as general and class-based. The second is grounded in the first. Whatever value commitments I have with respect to class-based inequalities (e.g., the ones that say “not everyone has been in the position to study continental philosophy and literature, so I will not consider knowledge of such as justification for economic inequality”), when met with the commitments that come from personal connection, the latter take priority. I want to support the person who reads Kundera and Foucault and Bulgakov.
Moreover, that sense of personal connection is based in economic inequality, i.e., class. I have the economic means to travel for short periods of time, both domestically and internationally. I have had the privilege of a university education in the humanities, including foreign language training. I can travel to France and get a lot more out of the experience than a person who does not speak French and who has no prior knowledge of French history and culture (e.g., “Ah! The grand boulevards—in the nineteenth century Hausmann destroyed the working-class neighborhoods and replaced them with monumental architecture and grand mansions”; “Ah! Pere Lachaise—the communards lost their revolution and made their last stand here in 1871.”) My knowledge and personal history make a trip to Paris more worthwhile for me, makes my life richer in a way unavailable to those who have not had my privilege. In this way I am invested in the social structure, including Airbnb, that affords such travel opportunities to me and people like me (people of means with a certain education), even as I see clearly that the rioters have a point. This is why I can see the protesters, even see the world through their eyes, and still remain right where I am.
All of which brings me to The Housing Question itself. The social and economic tensions currently playing out in the streets of Paris are not new. They are not ancient, either. They can be traced to the industrial revolution and the advent of market capitalism. As industry mechanized and capital accumulated through trade, millions of people had to give up their lives in the countryside and come to the city to work for a wage. Housing was expensive—almost always rentals—and the living conditions were cramped and unsanitary. In this context reformers in the nineteenth century debated the question of housing: how can the social order adapt or be reformed to more equitably provide for all its members? This debate played out in periodicals, for which Friedrich Engels had taken the responsibility of articulating the communist position (thereby freeing up Karl Marx to work out the more comprehensive, long-form analysis that appeared in Das Kapital).
Readers reading The Housing Question for an answer to the housing question will encounter a certain ironic frustration as they delve into the complexity and detail of Engels’ analysis. There is no answer to the housing question. Or more properly, there is no answer to the housing question that is separable from a much larger question of the foundations of society as a whole. Arrange for all workers to own their own homes? It doesn’t work and makes their situation worse. Arrange the laws to reflect universal justice rather than the economic interest of any one class? That’s not how law has ever worked and it won’t start working that way now. Appeal to the moral conscience and care for the collective good among the powerful? Now you’re just being silly. While often vituperative, Engels was by no means flip or casual in his dismissals. On the contrary, he brought a strict sense of analytical rigor to each of his arguments. These include a granular engagement with the social and economic geography of industrializing Europe as well as a broader theoretical and rhetorical insistence on conceptual clarity and consideration of counter arguments. He applied his analytical deconstructions as rigorously, and with just as much vitriol, to the (in his view, misguided) proposals of those who stood on the side of the working class as much as to those who represented the bourgeoisie.
Engels’ answer to the housing question, such as there is one, came in remarkably brief statements not meant to stand on their own, but on Karl Marx’s analysis of economy and society to which Engels reverently directed the reader. Of these statements, the most voluminous is only two sentences long: “As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the lot of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of subsistence and instruments of labour by the working class itself” (74).
The validity of the Marxist analysis and prescription is, of course, arguable. I cite it here not for its particular validity, but for the scope of its call. Engels’ argument boils down to the contention that the entire system is at fault and must be replaced. The call to replace it, however, is not primarily moral and by no means individual. Marxist analysis claims that the resolution of social tensions is inexorable, even if individuals can hasten or delay that resolution through their actions. When social tensions are this radical, arguments concerning the proper way to view and perhaps ameliorate these tensions take on a particular character. First, there is a level at which one’s behavior and point of view don’t matter. Sure, it might be more moral to work against one’s class interest so as to pursue a vision of universal justice. But so long as the system is set up to favor one class over another, the vast majority of people will behave in accordance with their class interest and not in the interest of society as a whole, and this tendency is decisive. Second, and correlated to the first, proposed solutions that address small fractions of the larger problem are doomed to fail no matter how rational and caring they may be. That’s why Macron can’t get past this. He still represents a social order that favors certain people in certain situations rather than others. When those others start to kick in the way that they are doing now, communication (and least of all a “national conversation”) will lead to nothing, at least not to resolution. Those involved in the communication may come to see themselves and their interests more clearly. That’s fine, but it still leaves them right where they are. Clear-eyed rationalists as the French are in their most sophisticated mode, they see the futility of such conversation even if they are not ready to offer a productive alternative.
So what does all this have to do with my choice to stay in an Airbnb in Paris as I wrote about the protests of those who cannot afford the rents in Paris? Nothing and everything. Nothing in that ethico-moral calculation never escapes the penetration of socio-economic structures into individual experience. Everything in that those structures are reinforced by the individual experiences that they make possible—until the strain and imbalance of the system reaches a tipping point and everything changes.
This is not to say that all of this is a wash for the question of individual action. Rather it is to say that radical critique of the socio-economic order shifts the terrain from the question of proper behavior to the question of proper analysis. Individual choice can flow from there.
Analysis is itself a form of behavior and it is available to all, especially in self-reflection. If there is an ethico-moral call that stems from analysis of these protests, it is a call to self-analysis of one’s socio-economic being. Put in imperative form, don’t worry about what you should do in terms of the righteousness of your actions. Worry about who you are in your interests and relationships with others. You can still be moral when you do this. You can go against your self-interest in the interest of the greater good of all. But don’t invest such decisions with the weight of responsibility for particular outcomes with respect to the general order of society. Yes, those decisions and the decisions of millions of others will combine to determine such outcomes for greater society. But in the amalgamation and concatenation of those decisions, made by thousands or even millions of people, concern for the greater good will not outweigh the concerns to please and be pleased by intimates, or at least the familiar—those who more than likely are of the same class.
There is much room to argue this point. Some may say that collective self-sacrifice has historically been an effective agent of social change. I would very much like to see analyses of historical examples that support such a position. But adjudication of the validity of such arguments is tricky and very involved. Even more than such debate, I would love to see how people analyze their own self-interested place in the broader social movements currently on the rise. Simple confessions of bias are the cheapest and least sophisticated forms of such analysis. Self-interest is by no means a simple calculation! Self-reflection requires questioning, narrative, details of experience—of pleasures, insecurities, decisions, indecisions—all the stuff of life. These, too, are keys to understanding what is going on around the world, if such self-reflection identifies which side the self is on as tensions play out in larger society.
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