Articles

Les Back learns a few lessons about the importance of paying attention from the examples of Primo Levi, radioman Studs Terkel and literary traveller Flemming Røgilds. They animate an alternative way to live, achieved through two people hearing each other. This active listening can create another set of social relations and ultimately a new kind of society.

“There is no need for the western political artist, too often a disaster tourist, to sail the seven seas looking for injustices to denounce. Inequality and exploitation saturate the ground on which we stand, they are in the grain of everyday life.” Conceptual artist Victor Burgin launches an excoriating attack on documentary art as the “new doxa”.

The digitisation of the book has brought a new balance of power in the trade, with established publishers locked in struggle with the new digital distributors for control of production. Pascal Fouché, author of an encyclopaedia of the book, discusses whether publishers are prepared for the challenge posed by the dematerialisation of the printed word.

Lithuania’s capital is close to the heart of many different groups and nationalities who have at one time or another called it “home”. Better that they unite in their love of the city than fight for isolated fragments of its magical, multi-layered past, writes Tomas Venclova.

During the twentieth anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a symbolic wall consisting of dominoes was toppled. The dominoes were painted on both sides, something that could only have been done with a great deal of forgetting, writes Jacob Kimvall. In reality, there was graffiti only on the western side of the Wall, and that was put there illegally; but during the anniversary, unity seems to be more important than historical accuracy.

The much anticipated US finance regulatory bill, passed at the end of last month, is a compromise between government regulators and Wall Street, writes George Blecher. As for solving the even more pressing problems of the US economy, the bill offers no new solutions.

Between 1941 and 1989, Hungary’s hand-tied politicians were at the mercy of the Great Powers and their struggle for hegemony in Europe. A study of US diplomatic documents shows the extent to which realpolitik determined US policy on Hungarian national independence.

It’s ironic, says a Latvian art critic, that the current saturation of the visual world by infinitely reproducible images via the Internet has driven artists back to older forms of representation.

The Bologna Process is typical of a new dynamic of inclusion and exclusion in the post-national politics of the Europe Union, writes Marion von Osten. Not only must the assumption be challenged that access to knowledge can be controlled via patenting and monetization, it is also necessary to place the higher education reforms in the context of the European border regime and its selective admission of “highly qualified” migrants.

The Bologna reforms reverse the achievements of Austrian universities policy of the 1970s, when higher education was made available at a mass level, write Martin Konecny and Hanna Lichtenberger. Just as Austria’s entry into the common market consolidated the neoliberal transformation of society, so its implementation of the Bologna reforms cedes mechanisms of national control to the supra-national level. In both cases, the result is the same: inequality and lack democratic accountability.

What for the US has been a tradition of collaborating with a prosperous private business world, for the Europeans risks turning into an acceptance of the dictates of the economy. Romanian academic Ioana Bot on the “entrepreneurial university” and other myths of Bologna.

The decentralization of French Universities has forced individual faculties to cede control to the university management, and has met with opposition from teaching staff, says Yves Lichtenberger. The new culture of assessment has been particularly resisted by humanities departments, which object to being judged on the criteria of the physical sciences. Yet critics have suggested that this sense of having to defend a broad cultural education against business is somewhat exaggerated and unrealistic. Is it not the case that while centralized but remote state control favoured opaque compromises, local control challenges long laid-down university habits?

Jacques Rancière’s “utopian rationalism” invokes the possibility of a radically de-institutionalized autodidacticism that predicates all learning merely on the basis of the will of those desiring to learn. Ultimately, however, it may be that the modern university is antithetical to any possibility of establishing true equality among its players, writes Nina Power.

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.