Search Results for: education crisis

Ghostlier demarcations: On the posthumous edition of Althusser’s writings

...nd soon enough it was Marxism and Althusserianism that were experiencing a crisis. Brief encounters, or a throw of the dice In an undelivered conference paper of 1976, published without permission in 1983 (WP, pp. 85–104), Althusser had retracted his ratification of Lacan (the points de capiton did not, after all, furnish ʻanchorage pointsʼ). The following year, he proclaimed the ʻcrisis of Marxismʼ at an Il Manifesto gathering in Venice. The ʻhour...

Incomplete Modernity: Ulrich Beck's Risk Society

...prevalence of oppression and scarcity with a more generic idea of systemic crisis, and especially ecological crisis. This is held to have emerged because of the imbalance between technological power (deployed to transform our biological conditions of life, the natural environment and the social world) and human 9 I capacities to reflect upon and make deliberative choices about its use. Here, critique is both of the unequal access of citizens to kn...

Nihilism and faith: Rose, Bernstein and the future of Critical Theory

...eason over all aspects of social life in modernity has produced an ongoing crisis of nihilism. The manifest symptom of this crisis is an almost universal condition of ʻaffective scepticismʼ – a disjunction between values (which no longer have [objective] validity) and ends (which no longer have [objective] value). [34] As a result, the ʻmaterial inferencesʼ [35] that connect ethical demands to ethical responses, the very grounds of our practicalra...

The Narration of an Unhappy Consciousness: Lukács, Marxism, the Novel, and Beyond

...tory is doomed to meet a similar fate. Thus Bernstein writes: ‘Sentimental Education may be “a novel about nothing”, but it is written from a determinate perspective which makes its very meaninglessness, its denial of meaning, significant. Not to take this step outside the experience of the novel is to accede to Flaubert’s ideological perspective, to treat the moment of 1848 and its failure as nature’s givens rather than as moments of history’ (p....

Long Live Literature?: Englit, Radical Criticism and Cultural Studies

...addresses. I have learned a lot through teaching and designing Continuing Education courses with my colleague Nannette Aldred. I am much indebted to Kate Soper, for her scepticism as well as her support during many conversations on the themes ofthis essay. I am also grateful to those who commented critically on the original version of this article as submitted to RP. Here I focus exclusively on this aspect of the ‘crisis in English studies’ and d...

Futures present: Lite, dark and missing

Dossier: Future Stasis

...ns. Augé remains true to this genre by ending with a countervailing pious ‘Educational Utopia’ (as he did in Où est passé l’avenir?). ‘The educational utopia is the only remaining hope of redirecting human history towards its ends’, we are told (F, 86). It is characteristic of the theoretical slackness of the text that what is presented is not actually a Utopia in anything approaching the usual political, philosophical and literary senses, involvi...

Political theology, religious fundamentalism and modern politics

...beginning a process of public debt known as fiscal deficit or the ‘fiscal crisis of the state’. This crisis worsened with the internationalization of production, since multinational oligopolies do not send overseas profits to their own country, and consequently do not nurture the nation’s public funds, which continue to finance capital and the workforce. Neoliberalism is by no means simply a belief in the rationality of the market, the decline of...

Social reproduction and empire in an Egyptian century

Dossier: Social reproduction theory

..., broken, and leaking water into their neighbour’s apartment, leading to a crisis in the family. After a visit to a couple who had been her university friends and who are now evidently wealthy, Dhat comes away feeling even worse about her own apartment, and specifically her bathroom. It is only after Dhat uses her own money – which she saved through exhausting sewing work late at night – that the bathroom is fixed and rendered respectable. The bat...

The rationality of life: On the organismic metaphor of the state

...s well as Schiller, Humboldt, Herder and the early Romantics, saw cultural education (Bildung or Kultur) as important to progress and freedom, and, more specifically, to the political state. Indeed, some of them regarded education as the stateʼs most important task. My point here is not only that these philosophers and thinkers, who were shocked by the atrocities and violence of the French Terror, regarded spiritual education as an essential precon...

Academic boycott as international solidarity: The academic boycott of Israel

...e as an ideal this may be an admirable goal, in reality the bulk of higher education and its academics never escape politics. In the United States during the Vietnam War, various government agencies quickly recruited an array of academic departments and individuals, ranging from chemists to sociologists, to support their war effort. The intimidation and bribery directed at the rest of the academy to remain quiet and loyal was effective until the w...

Socialism and Democracy: Beyond State and Civil Society

...rm~.:. Critical Debates, J. B. Thompson and D. Held (eds.), – Legitimation Crisis, J. Habermas, Heinemann, 1976. – The Philosophy Press, 1967 £!. Right, Uegel, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford University . SC – The Social Contract, Rousseau SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE An Essay on the Nature and Limits ofSocial Science PAUL MATT/CK JNR Paul Mattick Jnr’s SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE breaks new ground. The author brings together two familiar themes (Is scientific knowledge of so...

Decolonizing revolution with C.L.R. James: or, What is to be done with Eurocentrism?

...engler announces the full decay of the West. … Trotsky merely observes the crisis of bourgeois culture, and the overcoming of capitalist society. This aging and wearing culture, society, vanish; a new culture and a new society emerge from its womb. [21] For James, as for Mariátegui, the socialist revolution is the end of the end of the decline, a radical new beginning of the history of (Western) civilization. The Westernization of the non-West Jam...

Dull Compulsion of the Economic: The Dominant Ideology and Social Reproduction

...mily-vocational privatism amongst a majority could lead to a ‘legitimation crisis’. ‘A legitimation crisis,’ Habermas states, ‘must be based on a motivation crisis. ,34 Thus Habermas, quite sensibly in my view, sees the legitimation of the social system as being rooted, not in the force of ideology, but positively in the support it attracts by virtue of supplying the motivational needs of the majority, and negatively through civic privatism. In co...

Revolution and Discontinuity

...p of anomaly, scientists’ commitment to their paradigm falters. A state of crisis ensues. Fundamentals are questioned, and a number of competing theories are put forward: we have entered a period of extra-ordinary science (or, in some of Kuhn’s formulations, of non-science or metaphysics} The crisis is terminated when one of the competitors 13 Kuhn, The Structure, pp97-98 14 ibid, p42 15 T.S.Kuhn, ‘Reflections on my Critics’, in Lakatos and Musgra...

The attack on civil rights in West Germany

...ndeed, comes close to declaring an emergency law status in anticipation of crisis for those employed in the public sector. It is calling for a definite degree of loyalty which is far beyond and quite apart from that which is constitutionally obligatory and will be determined by just how much crisis -threatened those in power consider themselves to be. In other words, it comes close to suspending liberal rights for members of the public sector, i....

Gillian Rose’s critique of violence

...motional economy which we cannot project and disown’ – the film ‘induces a crisis of identification’ in the viewer. [40] For it purportedly brings about an ‘active recognition in the nihilism of disowned emotions, and the personal and political depredations at stake’. [41] That is to say, it exposes the viewers to their own repressed violence, which the representation of fascism as a spectacle leaves intact. In my view, it is unlikely that the fil...

Of what is Bolsonaro the name?

Dossier: Grammars of Bolsonarismo

...sses set in motion by neoliberal globalisation and accelerated by the 2008 crisis at the root of all of these. Yet there are other components to our present ambient mood that are less salient because the changes to which they respond unfold on a timescale that is longer and less immediately obvious. Among these, I would like to focus on one in particular that provides an interesting angle on the issue of phoniness; I will call it denialism. Many h...

Racism: the New Inheritors

...and brilliant analysis of one such collapse, see Finn, Grant and Johnson: ‘Education, Social Democracy and the Crisis’, Cultural Studies 10, 1977. Certainly much of the 1950s educational sociology had behaviourist leanings, as did many community studies. 7 A Liberal RaCism?’ What has all this to do with the ‘new racis m ‘ ? Let me recall Some of the main characteristics we have seen of instinctivism. Human behaviour is naturally selfish and territ...

The political function of the intellectual

...presented in the second part. These involve the ideological aspects of the crisis in education, a critique of sociological notions of working class ‘community’, and a commentary on the problems of ideology. in marxist aesthetics. AVAILABLE APRIL 19n £1.75 CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM BIRMINGHAM 15 A Journal of Radical Perspectives on the Arts NUMBER THREE Kenneth Coutts Smith Ten Theses on the F~ilur. 0‘ Commun...

Beyond Revisionism: New Labour, socialist basics and the dynamic market economy

...o deny that a Labour government would also have been plunged into economic crisis, the Shadows contented themselves with protestations that they would have handled their crisis rather better – nothing very much has changed, in this respect, during the past five years. Given New Labour’s lack of plans to interfere with the existing mechanisms which govern resource distribution – that is, to tamper with the free market – it is unclear that any other...

154 News: Rebellion of Greek youth; Peace, legality, democracy

...s of social discontent already brewing in Greek society. First of all, the education system is in crisis. A highly competitive system of entrance exams for higher education, requiring huge amounts of study and expensive tutorial courses, leads only to a university degree that does not guarantee secure employment. The dire state of education is exacerbated by attempts to implement the so-called ‘Bologna process’ reforms, which include various downg...