Articles

The student and staff walk out at UCLA in September 2009 in response to announcements of fee hikes, cuts and layoffs sparked a wave of protests at universities across California that lasted months. In an article written in the spring of 2010, Evan Calder Williams considers connections between the financialisation of the university and communisation – “a practice of secession from capital that doesn’t wait for a communist revolution”.

In the UK, pressure from government to transform university programmes outside elite institutions into vocational training programmes creates a situation where “employability” becomes the sole goal of higher education, writes Jeremy Gilbert in an article first published in January 2010. What is offered under the guise of “university education” will soon be no more than a form of tertiary training for the service, retail and media industries.

In Germany, scientific and professional bodies acting on behalf of the state have traditionally mediated between the academic and professional sectors in order to keep academia and the commercial sector separate. Now, independent accreditation agencies certify BA and MA courses according to market-based criteria. The result of the exposure of German universities to purely economic demands will, like elsewhere, be an increasing hierarchization of educational institutions.

Caught on a bus in rush-hour Tokyo, Anthony Head wonders whether Schopenhauer was right that immunity to noise is proof of idiocy. Could the impassive facades of his fellow travellers be concealing something more spiritual?

Using culture to reshape and renew our declining cities is a nice idea – or is it? Dragan Klaic looks at the successes and failures of urban projects, assesses the value of “regeneration through culture” and challenges some of the more conventional assumptions with a revolutionary recipe for cultural development.

The hopes for African footballing success raised by Cameroon’s performance in the 1990 World Cup have yet to be fulfilled. However African football has long since stepped out of the shadow of its colonial origins, writes Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling. All that remains is for an African nation to capture football’s most coveted trophy.

Modernity in eastern Europe tends to be seen either as the partial opening up of a region characterized by traditional forms of societal self-understanding, or as a disfigured and radicalized adaptation of western modernity that prioritizes closure. Paul Blokker, in an article focusing on Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Hungary, argues that both views need to be combined.

Some common notions about analytic philosophy – that it is uniformly anti-metaphysical or indifferent to the history of philosophy – are clearly misconceived. However the impression that analytic philosophers are essentially linguistic philosophers is not entirely false and hence less easy to refute, writes Pierre Wagner.

Asked to compare the Hungarian city of Pécs to his own birthplace, author Peteris Puritis is at a loss: he was only there once. Instead, he gives an unofficial guided tour of the many Soviet-era monuments in the Latvian town of his childhood, recalling some of the cheeky uses he and his friends found for them…

Viktor Horváth’s novel “Török tükör” [Turkish Mirror] portrays everyday life in sixteenth century Hungary, when it was a suzerainty of the Sultan Suleyman. The narrator, an old Muslim man, addresses the reader throughout as “my heir to the true faith”, assuming that by the time his words are read, the Hungarians will have assimilated with their conquerors – an ingenious reversal that runs throughout the book and gives it its special charm. The excerpt translated here describes the market town of Pécs.

Tough materialism and existential frankness, an awareness of one’s mortality balanced by the refusal to talk bullshit: George Blecher selects three works of fiction that sum up the New York attitude.

The “open society” to which Soviet existence is often claimed to have been opposed resembles the old idea of “the free world”. A non-moralistic approach to group relations in the Soviet Union moves beyond the simplistic link between modernisation and openness, writes Catriona Kelly.

Marx’s comment that history advances by the “bad side” has inspired an apocalyptic strand of anti-capitalism that supposes history is “on our side”. Benjamin Noys takes issue with the “accelerationist” view that welcomes apocalypse as the decisive moment.

Attacks on scientific consensus employ the simulacra of scholarship and a deceptively readable idiom. Those who debunk the deniers tend to be old-fashioned rationalists or committed activists. Neither group are particularly well suited to looking at the deeper reasons behind denialism, warns Keith Kahn-Harris.