What is the work of art? How does art work as art? Andrew Benjamin contends that the only way to address these questions is by developing a radically new materialist philosophy of art, and by rethinking the history of art from within that perspective. A materialist philosophy of art starts with the contention that meaning is only ever the after-effect of the way in which materials work. Art’s Philosophical Work develops such an approach through engagements with the thought of Benjamin, Heidegger and Derrida and the works of
Nicholas Poussin, Albrecht Dürer, Georg Baselitz, El Lissitsky and Karel Appel.

With response from Matthew Charles on Colour, David Cunningham on Relationality, and Kaja Marczewska on Iteration

In an early definition of education, Walter Benjamin insists that you cannot teach by example, only through a mutual transformation of learner, educator and the learnt in a medium of transmission. The task of education is therefore to make teachings transmissible for each new generation, a conception that has much in common with that of the storyteller, who appropriately joins the ranks of teachers and sages in Benjamin’s writings. If Kafka’s stories provide one exemplary location in which a modern crisis of “transmissibility” manifests itself

in the epoch of mass media, they simultaneously provide models for the pedagogic reconstruction of such media. How might the deformative power of technological media and some of the affects of its users (boredom, distraction, frustration, resistance) be thought of in terms of a destructive force or agency that provokes such transmission? And to what extent does this, in a reversal of our usual pedagogic assumptions, involve a positive transformation not so much of the learner as the educator and their teachings?

A HEAT (Higher Education & Theory) Symposium, with John Beck and Matthew Cornford (The Art School and the Culture Shed), David J. Blacker (The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame), and Nina Power (One-Dimensional Woman).

David J. Blacker defines educational eliminationism as a state of affairs in which elites no longer find it necessary to utilize mass schooling as a first link in the long chain of the process of the extraction of workers’ surplus labour value but instead cut their losses and abandon public schooling altogether.

John Beck and Matthew Cornford have charted the decline of local art schools and concordant rise of the 'destination' art gallery, and asked what this tells us about the changing relationship between the function of education and art in the new creative economy.

Nina Power argues that current attacks on the education system are part and parcel of a broader war on cognitive and immaterial labour, upon which the art world provides a peculiarly privileged vantage point.

Drawing on the etymological and political association between culture and colonization, this symposium seeks to investigate the currently shifting relationship between education and culture through the themes of eliminationism and colonization.


John Beck is Professor in English Literature at the University of Westminster, director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (IMCC), and author of 'Dirty wars: landscape, power, and waste in Western American literature' and (with Matthew Cornford) 'The Art School and the Culture Shed'.

David J. Blacker is a Professor of Philosophy of Education and Legal Studies at the University of Delaware, editor of Education Review, edrev.info., and author of 'The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame' and 'Democratic Education Stretched thin: How Complexity Challenges a Democratic Ideal'.

Matthew Cornford is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Brighton, has a longstanding collaborative art practice with David Cross, and author (with John Beck) of 'The Art School and the Culture Shed'.

Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, regularly writes for the Guardian and New Humanist, co-editor of Alain Badiou's 'On Beckett' and author of 'One-Dimensional Woman'.

…subjects that have long been investigated and appropriated by scholars need to be emancipated from the forms in which such scholarly acquisition took place, if they are still to have any value and any defined character today. [...] The whole pernicious spectrum of critical methods must disappear to make way for more enterprising researchers, on the one hand, and above all for a less banal, more considered learning, on the other. In these areas, in short, we should not look to research to lead a revival in teaching; instead it is more important to strive with a certain intransigence for an – albeit very indirect – improvement in research to emerge from the teaching. [...] And if the alternative approach adumbrated above will be able to deliver the goods, this will only be because in principle teaching is capable of adapting to new strata of students in such a way that a rearrangement of the subject matter would give rise to entirely new forms of knowledge. (Walter Benjamin, SW2, pp.419-20)

‘The dead are “multiform” and exist in many places on the earth at the same time. For this reason, people must very seriously concern themselves, during their lifetime, with the betterment of the earth’ (L. J. B. Toureil, quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p5a, 2)

‘Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.’ (Charles Péguy, Notre Jeunesse)

The retrieval of the utopian imagination within contemporary theory and culture responds to the political impasse of a “capitalist realism”. Yet this attentiveness to what Ernst Bloch called the Utopian function in art and literature, now stripped of any Utopia, can only manifest itself as a liberal inversion of the conservative valorization of the past. Against the proliferation of Utopian visions of workless play and sentimental communality, this paper instead seeks to draw on Walter Benjamin’s concept of history to construct and utilise a pragmatic understanding of what I term the Catastrophic function as a way of interrogating the ideological dimensions of historicity within contemporary culture.

Having introduced and defended the present usefulness of the Catastrophic function, this idea will be put to work, first to delineate “the dead” as a political category within 19th and 20th century literature, and then to contrast this with a shift in the most recent representations of the “undead” within contemporary film and television, a shift symptomatic of broader changes with contemporary social and political life. What is catastrophic about contemporary representations of catastrophe, it will conclude, is that they are too utopian: that is, not catastrophic enough.

"Critical reflection on the vocation of the humanities today must extend beyond the “cultural turn” (and its declining relevance within the transformed spaces of globalized, multicultural educational institutions) to include theoretical contextualisation of the emergence of a specific “pedagogical turn” tied to the emergence and subsequent crisis of mass education within late capitalist societies. Whilst the ongoing transformation of the humanities might be understood, negatively, through an Adornian notion of The Education Industry, a critical theory of Mass Education that draws on the work of Walter Benjamin would also remain attentive to moments of emancipator possibility opened up by the contradictions inherent to the crisis of mass education today.

This paper outlines such a theory by tracing the figure of the child across Benjamin’s writings, examining how the figure of the child from Benjamin’s early politics of youth is, in his later work, transposed from the Nietzschean context of the cultured individual to the Brechtian one of a collectivized “pedagogical materialism”. The consequences of such a politics may be extrapolated in two ways: (i) contained within Benjamin’s thought, we find a pedagogically inflected understanding of revolutionary politics; (ii) developed out of and beyond his work (which pursues such themes within the sphere of the twentieth century crisis of art and culture) there lies a politics of education.

The latter provides critical insight for rethinking pedagogical issues in the context of the comparable transformation of the humanities in the twenty-first century, with specific regards to ideas concerning the formation of character, the interplay between technology and culture, and issues of disciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Considering, in particular, the relation between child-like destruction and the Unmensch in Benjamin’s essays on ‘Karl Kraus’, ‘The Destructive Character’, and ‘The Author as Producer’ – and more broadly the Brechtian inversion of Nietzsche’s figure of the Übermensch – this paper concludes that a critical theory of mass education must involve a “refunctioning” (Umfunktionierung) of pedagogy, the consequences of which might be polemically postulated as a development of the “Inhumanities”.  "

Critical reflection upon academia and the humanities must include historical contextualisation of the emergence of a specific “pedagogical turn,” predicated upon the ideological waning of the “cultural turn” and the emergence of and subsequent neoliberal attack upon mass education within late capitalist societies. In this context, Education has become the ideologically fetishized locus of contemporary ideology, increasingly separated from its previous relation to Religion and Culture and called upon as a secularized but miraculous sociological force in its own right. Across the political spectrum Education has become, in Barthes’ sense, a myth. In a demythologizing vein, this paper proposes to develop a critical theory of Mass Education that draws upon the work of Walter Benjamin to attend to the moments of emancipatory potential opened up by the contradictions inherent to the crisis of education today.

Informed by the Angel of History’s vision of catastrophic disaster, but developed beyond Benjamin’s own work (which pursues its political themes within the twentieth-century crisis of art and culture), such a “pedagogical materialism” provides critical insight for rethinking educational issues in the context of the comparable transformation of the humanities in the twenty-first century, with regard to the interplay between technology and humanity, discipline and disciplinarity, but in particular the bourgeois pedagogical goals of citizenship and character formation. Invoking Benjamin’s concept of the Unmensch or Inhuman – understood as a Brechtian inversion of Nietzsche’s own pedagogically informed ideal of the Übermensch – this paper suggests that a critical theory of Mass Education must involve the “refunctioning” (Umfunktionierung) of pedagogy, if it is to overcome the shared limitations of the neo-liberal attack upon and neo-classical defence of the humanities. The consequences of such “refunctioning” are to be polemically postulated as a development of the “Inhumanities”, whose contours in relation to the contemporary University will be traced out in the paper’s conclusion in contradistinction to the Kantian vision proposed in The Conflict of the Faculties. 

The contemporary crisis of education poses new challenges and opportunities for the politics, theory, and practice of a radical and critical pedagogy. In keeping with Walter Benjamin’s own concept of history, such a crisis also retrospectively illuminates the profound pedagogical context of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.

This stream on ‘Critical Theory and Education’ aims to bring together those interested in critical theory and critical pedagogy in order to assess the legacy and continuing productivity of theories of education influenced by (but not limited to) the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse.

We particular welcome contributions dealing with theoretical and practical tensions within and between their works, considerations of the broader historical and pedagogical context of their ideas, and reflections on the practical application of their theory.

Although the exact format of the panels will depend upon the papers and participants involved, the intention is to encourage shorter presentations as part of a roundtable discussion, in order to foster and encourage productive conversation and critical debate.

The contemporary crisis in education must be critically analysed not only with regard to the current transformation of specific institutional practices and their power to include or exclude, but also from the broader historical perspective of the changing sociological function of education per se. This paper aims to contribute to a critical discussion of the latter by proposing that a reified concept of Education has become the fetishized locus of contemporary English ideology; not merely (as Althusser suggested) in its fusion with the secularized function of culture in the reproduction of the State, but – within the contemporary contexts of globalized multiculturalism and the quantitative expansion brought about by the "massification" of education – as an intensified site of potential struggle and redemption in its own right.

As such, the recent pedagogical turn marks a stage in the ideological drift from religion, to culture, to education; a shift that can be read as symptomatic of the very crisis of education itself. Drawing on the critical theory of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who addressed a comparable but distinct crisis engendered by "mass culture", this paper will outline how a critical theory of mass education must remain attentive to the contradictions inherent within this ideological shift, in order to assess fully the possibilities of a truly inclusive "mass education" within the more general historical emergence of The Education Industry.

In Brecht and Method, Fredric Jameson makes a case for the contemporary usefulness of a specifically Brechtian modernism, one that unfolds from the sphere of art into that of education. This paper expands on this claim from the perspective of a recent pedagogical turn in theory, proposing that one way to understand this usefulness is - in the spirit of Nietzsche's essay on 'Schopenhauer as Educator' - through an analysis of the influence of the "Brecht circle" in the development of the philosophy of Walter Benjamin.

It will argue that Brecht reconnects Benjamin's work back to an earlier politics of Youth, one immersed in the pedagogical writings of Nietzsche. But this immersion demands a political confrontation with and inversion of Nietzsche's critique of mass education, whose Brechtian consequences contain useful lessons for a critical theory the current crisis of the humanities.

This paper begins from the proposition that the current crisis in higher education must be understood in the context of the contradictions inherent to contemporary “mass education”. These contradictions may be explored in relation to the divisions between and within academic disciplines, the hierarchical divisions between teachers/researchers and students, and the social, economic, and political ones between the academic and “the outside world”. Framing the debate in this way permits a critical movement beyond the limitation of neo-liberal and “classical liberal” ideologies and their conception of the “public”, by focusing attention to the historical and material conditions of pedagogical theory and practice. Drawing on the work of Bill Readings, Jacques Rancière, and Walter Benjamin, it seek to confront and think through the Brechtian possibility that, if the concept of “education” can no longer be applied to that which will emerge once transformed into a commodity, we may have to eliminate this concept with due caution but without fear, lest we liquidate the function of the very thing as well.

"This paper argues that Benjamin’s appropriation of Marx’s thought must be understood within the framework of his early philosophical writings on the youth movement: as the historical and collective radicalization of a specific metaphysics of youth deployed in those early works. The philosophical relationship between the two central ideas that Benjamin takes from Marx – historical materialism and communism – is not, therefore, a Marxist one. Rather, Benjamin appropriates Marx’s ideas to develop a fundamentally pedagogical proposition concerning the relation between humanity, technology, and nature. Here, it is neither youth nor specifically the proletariat that is charged with the duty of liberating the future but the historical Weltkind (or, in Benjamin’s own translation of the theses ‘On the Concept of History’, les enfants du siècle), whose task is, according to the Arcades Project, to ‘bring the new world into symbolic space’ (K1a, 3).

This claim will be developed through the explication of two interrelated concepts in Benjamin’s thought: education and technology. It will conclude that, on the one hand, what Benjamin adds to Marxism is a pedagogical distinction between concepts of first and second technology, and, on the other, the recognition of this pedagogically materialist context constitutes the specific afterlife of Benjamin’s work in the context of a contemporary crisis of education. "

My paper aims to (1) consider the neoliberal assault on education & the classical-liberal reaction, (2) propose this as a historical "afterlife" for Benjamin's philosophy, re-presented as systematically pedagogical in its orientation, (3) propose a dialectical materialist model of the refunctioning of education.

With each failure of the world to transform itself “rationally”, a (postmodern) scepticism and (modernist) response to the need for a metaphysics of history resurfaces. At the turn of the twenty-first century, whilst postmodern objections towards any project of historical totalization have collapsed with an awareness of their complicity with the totalizing conditions of capitalist modernity (foregoing the possibility of critical scrutiny) and the internal contradictions of their own status (as a meta-“metanarrative”), contemporary reformulations of the neo-Hegelian and neo-Kantian response to this problem rehearse the equally problematic tendency either to eternalize the present moment or to transform the “new” into an infinitely deferred Idea, purified of empirical and historical content.

My interest in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy arises from the belief that (1) a critical cultural, sociological or historical investigation of the recent past requires an adequately metaphysical philosophy of history, (2) that the central problem for a metaphysics of history is theorizing a speculative concept of historical experience, and (3) that Benjamin’s work continues to provide the best resource for developing such a concept. Within this context of the metaphysics of history, this discussion will focus on the importance of two concepts developed from Benjamin’s philosophy: a speculative theory of signification grounded in the “Name” and an imperative towards “transdisciplinarity” that results from this. My argument is that, far from being merely the vestige of Benjamin’s outmoded theological interests, his account of “Naming” represents an ontology of signification that remains pertinent for historical experience, and that its theological formulation itself represents an important gesture beyond the problems of disciplinarity in the social sciences.

The reclamation of the Utopian and its attended understanding of the futural in recent anglophone interpretations of culture draw heavily upon the theory of the “Utopian impulse” contained in the work of Bloch. For Bloch, the darkness of the lived moment is illuminated by the anticipatory daydreams of the “not-yet-conscious”, which contain a ‘cultural surplus’ or excess of intention whose implicit futural dimension overshoots the ideological workings of false, mystified consciousness. Likewise, Benjamin’s earliest notes for the ‘Arcades Project’ speak of securing “what Bloch recognises as the darkness of the lived moment...on the level of the historical, and collectively”, assuming as its motto: “Each epoch dreams the one to follow”.

This paper seeks to emphasise the importance of Benjamin’s later critical correction of this slogan for any contemporary recuperation of Bloch: “Each epoch dreams of itself annihilated by catastrophes”. At stake in this reworking is the dialectical supplementation of Bloch’s utopian hermeneutics of the “not-yet”, with a concept of the catastrophic. What catastrophe codes for here, in its dialectical relation to Utopianism, is a rejection of the one-sided and undifferentiating account of historical significance contained in Bloch’s futurally orientated phemomenology of anticipatory consciousness: not (merely) as some empirical and dystopian possibility, but the hermeneutical intrusion of a metaphysical concept of totality. In Benjamin’s account of the non-intentional, a materialist attention to the totality of things helps rescue contemporary “Utopian Studies” from merely inverting, in its liberal and futural aspect, the conservative valorization of the past.

A specific strand of utopianism has emerged in the anglophone world over the last three decades that is now undergoing a process of institionalisation as a distinct discipline of 'Utopian Studies'. Two historical conditions of this emergence are relevant in this context: (1) the recuperation of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s phenomenology of utopian impulses via the first English translations of his major works; (2) a liberal reaction to the political crises which have undermined both left and right wing formulations of the “end of history”, which results in a predominantly aesthetic and ahistorical reception of Bloch’s work.

Within ‘Utopian Studies’ this produces a specific commitment to openness and pluralism which tends to neglect any reflection upon concepts of closure and totality. Yet this neglect produces an impasse when it comes to analysing cultural production in terms of its historical significance. This problem cannot simply be resolved, as ‘Utopian Studies’ typically does, by maintaining Bloch’s utopian impulse but rejecting his historical belief in the USSR as an actually existing Utopia. For the problem ultimately derives from the theory of intentionality that underlies his account of “anticipatory consciousness”. Whilst earlier notes from Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project” incorporate Bloch’s utopianism under the slogan, ‘Each epoch dreams the one to follow’, later fragments adopt Theodor Adorno’s critical reformulation of this phrase: ‘Each epoch dreams of itself as annihilated by catastrophes’. Benjamin’s critical rejection of the phenomenological account of intentionality lies at the heart of this understanding of historical significance. Here the catastrophic does not merely stand in for a real, empirical possibility, but represents the hermeneutical intrusion of an immanent totality. This provides a dialectical correction to Bloch’s pan-utopianism, one that needs to be absorbed by ‘Utopian Studies’ through an understanding the philosophical relationship between communism and the historical Absolute.

My paper is concerned with exploring Benjamin's practice of what he calls literary-historical pragmatism in relation to the archive, and how this is informed by a messianic humanism.

The critic Gundolf describes the archival material of literary criticism as a mountain, stratified into the foothills of conversations, the lower slopes of correspondences, and the peaks of the creative works themselves. In line with his theory of criticism, Benjamin subverts Gundolf's metaphor by describing those glacial peaks as problematically frozen and fixed by the dominant historical method of contemporary interpretation. To resist such historical reification, Benjamin turns to what he calls the "snow line" of the archive, the letters and correspondences in which the dominant cultural reception begins to thaw and is amenable to new modes of cultural reception.

Such an approach is put into practice in Benjamin's subversive collection of letters from 19th century German Classicism, German Men and Women. Its aim is to enact what, in the Arcades Project, he calls the "Copernican turn" in historical remembrance, by subjugating the past to the pragmatic interests of present and future human suffering.

I want to develop this idea of the archive's 'snow line' by considering it in relation to the place of translations in the archive. Indeed Benjamin's theory of translation allows us to begin to philosophically articulate his pragmatic conception of archival criticism. This will be illustrated through consideration of Gerard de Nerval's French prose translation of Goethe's Faust, and its place in what should be understood as the messianic humanism of Benjamin's One-Way Street and Arcades Project.

The hypothesis of my discussion today is that "youth" as an ambiguous configuration of individuals under a collective identity, and as a specific periodization of a time of life deserves our critical attention:

(1) As a topic within the history of philosophy, at least from Socrates onwards, but one which has received little critical reflection or systematic focus by historians of philosophy.
(2) As the collective subject of a temporal period which is in part configured and produced through such philosophical discussion.

This relationship between philosophy and youth therefore has a double aspect: the young as those in transition between childhood and adulthood appear as a problem *in* the history of philosophy, and "youth" as the collective subject of such a period is produced as a solution by a certain philosophy of history, which can therefore be said to actualise or manifest itself *through* youth.

I will briefly sketch an embryonic example of what I mean by the first aspect of this relationship in the opening section of my paper, by considering the "problem" of the young as it appears in the life and thought of Socrates and Plato. I want to emphasis how the idea of the "academy" or "university" arises in response to this problem, and therefore mediates the relationship between philosophy and the young.

The second part is then concerned with the more complicated and tentative suggestion that philosophy has produced young people as "youth" via the mediation of the university. I am less interested in specific social structures here, and more interested with interrogating this philosophical determination of "youth" from the standpoint of a "politics of time", one which I investigate through Kant's idea of the Enlightenment. My suggestion is that the way the future is philosophically "presented" or "presenced" - in the sense of both the way the future is represented, and the way the future is represented in relation to the present - has certain political features, which therefore manifest themselves in a specific concept of "youth". Through this configuration in the university, "youth" is produced as the subject of history at the point of a mediation between the particular individual and the social universal.

I'll then conclude with some rather more speculative reflections drawn from the early writings of Walter Benjamin, on how a different politics of time might produce an alternative image of youth as the subject of history.

NOTE: This original entry from 2011 has been updated in a 2015 revision by the authors, available on the SEP website.

Walter Benjamin's importance as a philosopher and critical theorist can be gauged by the diversity of his intellectual influence and the continuing productivity of his thought. Primarily regarded as a literary critic and essayist, the philosophical basis of Benjamin's writings is increasingly acknowledged. They were a decisive influence upon Theodor W. Adorno's conception of philosophy's actuality or adequacy to the present (Adorno 1931). In the 1930s, Benjamin's efforts to develop a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulus for both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht.

The delayed appearance of Benjamin's collected writings has determined and sustained the Anglophone reception of his work. (A two-volume selection was published in German in 1955, with a full edition not appearing until 1972–89; English anthologies first appeared in 1968 and 1978; the four-volume Selected Writings, 1996–2003.) Originally received in the context of literary theory and aesthetics, the philosophical depth and cultural breadth of Benjamin's thought have only recently begun to be fully appreciated. Despite the voluminous size of the secondary literature that it has produced, his work remains a continuing source of productivity. An understanding of the intellectual context of his work has contributed to the recent philosophical revival of Early German Romanticism. His essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ remains a major theoretical text for film theory. One-Way Street and the work arising from his unfinished research on nineteenth century Paris (The Arcades Project), provide a theoretical stimulus for cultural theory and philosophical concepts of the modern. Benjamin's messianic understanding of history has been an enduring source of theoretical fascination and frustration for a diverse range of recent philosophical thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and, in a critical context, Jürgen Habermas. The ‘Critique of Violence’ and ‘On the Concept of History’ are important sources for Derrida's discussion of messianicity, which has been influential, along with Paul de Man's discussion of allegory, for the poststructuralist reception of Benjamin's writings. Aspects of Benjamin's thought have also been associated with the recent revival of political theology, although it is doubtful this reception is true to the tendencies of Benjamin's own political thought.

"My thesis explicates and defends what I term an implicit Goetheanism present in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin.

It begins by examining Benjamin’s early critique of the Kantian and neo-Kantian concept of experience and argues that a Goethean theory of the primal phenomenon provides the phenomenological model for Benjamin’s radical transformation of the neo-Kantian Idea. I analyse the importance of Goethe’s aesthetics of science for Benjamin’s critical development of Early German Romanticism and suggest that Goethe’s tender empiricism provides the intellectual backdrop to Benjamin’s later materialism. The chromatic-linguistic model of experience which informs Benjamin’s earliest writings is shown to develop into a dialectics of refractive expression, one that has important consequences for his concept of history and his unorthodox version of cultural materialism.

My final chapter examines the influence of Goethe upon what it argues is Benjamin’s quasi-Jungian criticism of Marxism, defending the importance of Jung’s semiotic critique of Freud’s theory of dream symbolism and its relevance for a materialist interpretation of ideology. The relationship between the Goethean and Jungian concepts of synthesis explains Benjamin’s proximity to a Jungian concept of the unconscious, it is argued, which is justified on the condition that a critique of Jung distinguishes the archaic image from Benjamin’s dialectical image. This is performed in the final chapter through a consideration of the allegorical and the technological in Jung and Benjamin’s differing receptions of Goethe’s Faust. The existential component of Goethe’s speculative concept of experience provides Benjamin with the resources for thinking of a dialectic of historical completion and incompletion, it is concluded, which is necessary for a philosophical informed cultural materialism."

Andrew McGettigan’s analysis of the financial transformations of higher education (‘Who Let the Dogs Out? The Privatization of Higher Education’, RP 174) is important for comprehending the complexity of the changes universities are undergoing and their implications. As he argues, ‘it is mass higher education in England’ that is now under attack and adequately responding to this requires the development of new habits and new forms of thought.1 It is also necessary to contextualize this attack in relation to comparable changes occurring in other educational sectors in England, not least because it is through control of the points of intersection between primary, secondary, and tertiary education that the government’s political intent is being most effectively realized. An analysis of these changes reveals the broader nature of the attack on the idea and practice of mass education itself.

Whilst the importance of Goethe’s thought in the work of the philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin has been acknowledged, less attention has been paid to the specific Faustian imagery that resurfaces in his final essays. This article examines Benjamin’s lifelong interest in Goethe, and suggests that the Faustian motifs of his last theses On the Concept of History may have been prompted by the French poet Paul Valéry’s decision to undertake a “third” version of Faust in 1940. It then offers an interpretation of Goethe’s Faust II – in accordance with an emphasis on a pragmatic conception of history developed in relation to an Anglophone reading of Gervinus in the first section – that draws on the cinematic afterlife of Goethe’s poem, to argue that its specific “greatness” for Benjamin may reside in the expression of a cinematic ontology that underpins his own mature philosophy.

The institutionalization of Utopia Studies in the last decade is premised upon a specifically aesthetic reception of Ernst Bloch’s theory of the “utopian impulse” during the 1980s and 1990s. A postmodern uneasiness to both left and right formulations of the "End of History" during this period imposes a resistance to concepts of historical and political closure or totality, resulting in a "Utopianism without Utopia". For all the attractiveness of this pan-utopianism, its failure to consider the relation between historical representation and fulfillment renders it consummate with liberalism as a merely inverted conservatism.

In contrast to this specific recuperation of a Bloch, the continuing importance of Walter Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image and the speculative concept of historical experience which underlies it becomes apparent. The intrusion of the historical Absolute is coded throughout Benjamin’s thought as the eruptive and mortuary figure of catastrophe, which stands as the dialectical counterpart to the utopian wish images of the collective dream. Indeed, the motto under which the Arcades Project was to be constructed derives from Adorno: “Each epoch dreams of itself as annihilated by catastrophe”.

"The average Westerner … was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields" (Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906)

The controversy that erupted in March over the publication of Charles Pellegrino’s account of the atomic bombings of Japan, The Last Train from Hiroshima, suggests that the historical legacy of the first military use of atomic weaponry is still fiercely contested in the USA. The spat is merely the latest conflict in a long war over the significance of the bombings, which resurfaces with each new book, exhibition or programme that appears. When the ruins of the Genbaku (Atomic Bomb) Dome – formerly the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall – were nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, the United States objected on the basis of concerns over a ‘lack of historical perspective’, arguing that the ‘events antecedent to the United States’ use of atomic weapons to end World War II are key to understanding the tragedy of Hiroshima’. The appeal to historical facts by both US diplomats and, more recently, military veterans contrasts with the dehistoricized emphasis of other Western cultural responses to Hiroshima. But what both kinds of reception share is an occlusion of the prehistory of capitalist liberalism, colonialism and imperialism which produces Japanese modernity, a prehistory which is itself built into the Genbaku Dome’s concrete structure, and an afterlife of nuclear pacification which produces the global context of terrorism as the continuation of war by other means.

The renewed interest in analytical psychology by academics working in the humanities has lead to the emergence of a post-Jungian field of cultural criticism, at the theoretical core of which stands Jung’s theory of symbolism. This article examines the centrality of symbolism to both Freud and Jung’s psychology, and explains how the differing concepts of the symbol lead to their divergent theories of interpretation in psychology and art criticism. Acknowledging the advantages of Jung’s more expansive account of the symbol, it argues that Walter Benjamin’s critical engagement with Jung nonetheless provides a useful correction to the problematic conservatism inherent to his concept of the symbol and its contemporary application.

A well-orchestrated public relations campaign led primarily by educational charity The Philosophy Shop has helped raise the profile of the philosophy for children movement in the UK significantly over the last few years. Whilst The Philosophy Shop has been promoting its ‘Four Rs’ campaign to make ‘Reasoning’ a central feature of the National Curriculum since 2009, the publication of founder Peter Worley’s teaching guide The If Machine this March and the ‘Roundtable on Philosophy for Children’ hosted by the Forum for European Philosophy in June suggest there is now confidence in the broad intellectual support of educational practitioners and philosophers alongside the political will necessary to achieve the aspirations of this project.1 An interview with Worley appears in the May/June issue of Philosophy Now magazine, alongside a special section on ‘doing philosophy with children’ dedicated to Matthew Lipman. Lipman, who pioneered the philosophy for children and communities (‘P4C’) movement in the USA during the 1970s, died at the end of last year. It was his work that inspired the foundation of the educational charity SAPERE (Society for Advancing Philosophy Enquiry and Reflection in Education) in 1992, which also held its own ‘Introduction to Philosophy for Children’ event in July.

It is significant that this joint push for basic philosophical teaching for children coincides with the growing popularity of philosophy at A-level. In contrast, applications to study the subject at degree level have dropped in the last year (along with less vocational humanities subjects in general, a trend we might expect to continue with the trebling of tuition fees), whilst philosophy programmes in higher education seem to have been bearing the particular brunt of hasty and often brutal attempts to rationalize resources and cut costs. Over the last year protests against the announced closures of philosophy at Liverpool and Keele have forced managerial reversals, whilst the purging of philosophy courses at Middlesex, Greenwich, London Met and, most recently, Northampton continues. It is the context of this broader crisis that demands our attention here, not least because a popular drive towards philosophy may be a symptom either of a revitalization that could spread into higher education or of its regression and eventual expiration.

On 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts and Education announced the decision to close recruitment to all undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, including research degrees in the highly regarded Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) – the top research-rated unit in the University. News
of the announcement quickly generated a widespread outpouring of concern and support. Within days an online petition demanding the reversal of the decision had already received several thousand signatures, whilst a ‘Save Middlesex Philosophy’ Facebook group set up by students had begun attracting members, garnering messages of solidarity from other departments and institutions –notably, in the UK, from similar campaigns at Sussex, Essex and King’s College London – and organizing campaign meetings. At the time of writing (9 June), the group has over 13,500 members and the petition has in excess of 18,000 signatures.

"‘On the Idea of Communism’, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, 13–15 March 2009

This conference’s political conditions had been staked out in advance, on behalf of all the speakers, by Alain Badiou’s essay ‘The Communist Hypothesis’. These were the collapse of the Old Left of the Communist Party and state, and the demise of the social-democratic project. The financial crisis that has since intervened featured as an additional element and a frequent point of reference for speakers and audience. But if, as a result of the apparent ideological capitulation of free-market capitalism, ‘we are [supposedly] all socialists now’, then the imperative for communism to further distance itself from the Party, the generalities of the Left, and even from socialism itself as a continuation of the capitalist project, marks the latest high-water mark of a pessimistic position.

In this respect, the current situation is resolutely modern and represents not the stalling of capitalism but the obverse face of a triumphant capitalist Third Way over an already outdated model of free-market economics. Those participants of the conference who urged the speakers to find something optimistic in re-nationalization or government-backed co-operative schemes were offered little other than sympathetic platitudes. At one point Slavoj Žižek invoked Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine thesis with reference to the Cultural Revolution, but the current crisis has already proved to be an opportunity for further consolidations of the newest forms of capitalist organization and power.

These actual political conditions imposed certain rhetorical constraints upon Badiou and the other participants, a collection of predominantly European thinkers whose combined celebrity status had ensured the event was both well publicized and extremely well attended. (The location had to be changed twice to accommodate the audience of nine hundred.) It also imposed specific constraints upon the possibility of what they continued to identify as ‘the Communist Hypothesis’, even as the elasticity of the concept was tested to its limit. It was not merely the rejection of the state, in both its capitalist and socialist forms, that was demanded by many, but even the assumption that, as Žižek remarked, history is on our side. As a number of speakers emphasized, Marx’s theorization of history as the history of class struggle is not itself a communist or even necessarily a radical proposition. Badiou’s summation that our political problems are closer to those of the nineteenth century than to the twentieth reflected the philosophical retreat of some of the speakers back to the emancipatory humanism of the early 1840s. Here they sought to find a solid ground from which to think alternative trajectories for the ‘Communist Hypothesis’ than that of twentieth-century ‘Marxism’ with its supposed attendant ‘Hegelianism’. For the socialism that Marx diagnosed in the Paris Manuscripts as ‘crude communism’ can no longer even be regarded as a stage of transition towards the true communist end. In Žižek’s case this necessitated distinguishing the ‘Haitian Hegel’ (as invoked in Susan Buck-Morss’s recent work) from the ‘Japanese Hegel’ identified with ‘capitalism with Asian values’. However, none of the other speakers dared, as Terry Eagleton remarked, to do anything so embarrassing as to talk about Hegel.

The trajectories opened up for a nominalist concept of communism by these retreats may be schematized as follows: (1) a focus on voluntarism and self-organization in the emergence of new political subjectivities; (2) a rethinking of proletarianization in accordance with new analysis of class contradictions; (3) a call for philosophical critique as a political orientation in response to depoliticization. The questions and concerns raised by such positions are well rehearsed, but worth repeating. At stake is the capacity to theorize socio-political change without resorting to a bourgeois concept of freedom."

Amidst the recent flood of lachrymose reports on the neoliberal assault upon education, this book stands out for its unflinching survey of the extent of the impending catastrophe and the astute way it gleefully sets about puncturing the few remaining life rafts. The consolation of Blacker’s philosophy? ‘[E]ducational activism does not matter and is a waste of time’, and ‘those within educational institutions have very little choice but to strap themselves in … for a continuation of a very scary and uncertain ride that probably ends in death’.

One element of the reforms of English higher education that has received less attention than others is the overhaul of teaching training. Whilst the Conservative’s flagship Free Schools are, like independent schools, at liberty to employ unqualified teachers, changes made last year to the model funding agreement of Academy schools (directly funded by central government, typically supported by external sponsorship, and independent of local government control) and to the conditions of recruitment for comprehensives have now granted the same entitlement to schools across the sector. The Department for Education has simultaneously introduced a school-centred teacher training scheme, shifting around a quarter of current funding for training away from universities to an expanding network of teaching schools (of which over half are Academies).

These changes are intended to impact upon not only the economics of secondary and higher education (as increased competition between schools and universities over recruitment leads to the closure of education departments in HE) but also how teaching is taught and the kind of academic research that informs it. For Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, this comprises part of a sustained attack on what – borrowing from the neoconservatism of the US Culture Wars – he calls The Blob:

the network of educational gurus in and around our universities who … drew gifted young teachers away from their vocation and instead directed them towards ideologically driven theory.

In returning to an apprenticeship model the government seeks to reverse the professionalization of teaching, expressed in recommendations from 1884 ‘that what English Schoolmasters now stand in need of is theory; and further that the universities have special advantages for meeting this need’. It is this hostility towards theory that has led it to champion both school-based practical training and ‘evidence-based research’ in educational studies.

The inauguration of Routledge’s Theorizing Education Series is a satisfying counterblast to this retrogression.

'Benjamin’s Library' is bookended by one of his lesser-known images: contemporary literary historians are like mercenaries occupying the well-constructed house of poetry; they care not for the order and inventory of its treasures since it only offers a strategic position for bombarding the enemy’s defences. For Jane Newman, this provides an allegory of the reception of Benjamin’s œuvre itself. As a scholar of the Baroque she proposes to put one important room (overrun by theological, Marxist, and postmodernist opportunists) straight, resituating the 'Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels' within a library of texts from and about the Baroque that became central to narratives of German nationalism and modernity in the period around the First World War.

This philological ressourcement of the book back into its ‘thicker’ intertextual world (absent from the otherwise extensive scholarly apparatus of the German and English collections of Benjamin’s writings) generates a number of important insights. Its detailed analyses of the plays of the Second Silesian school and of the
Kulturkampf and the ‘war theology’ it gives rise to provide an enormous service for our comprehension of the Lutheran legacies of the Baroque and for the central sections of the Ursprung. Newman also contributes to a useful demythologizing of
Benjamin’s own supposed martyrdom, rejecting the fetishization of failure in the contexts not only of his life and career but also of his book’s objects themselves.

The legacy of Benjamin’s own contribution to this fashionable debate, Newman argues, is a version of the ‘German Baroque’ that enabled a textualized moment of continuity between pre- and post-war nationalism, provocatively defended as a ‘National Socialist Benjamin’ (p.186). Here, however, Newman’s philological
meticulousness is a hindrance to grasping the political pragmatism of Benjamin’s own methodological interventions...
own methodological interventions. A

This translated collection of forty-five of Benjamin’s early writings begins with his first published work, a poem that appeared pseudonymously just before his eighteenth birthday, and follows the tempestuous period of his immersion in and break from the Youth Movement, before drawing to a close with the poetic commentaries of a 25-year-old on the verge of marriage, fatherhood and a short but productive academic spell. There is grist for the mill of the cynic here. About a fifth of these translations have already appeared in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, whose chronological span overlaps that of the Early Writings, 1910–1917 by five years. Most of the significant works from this period of Benjamin’s studies in Berlin, Freiburg and Munich are therefore already available to the anglophone reader. Although the important exclusion from the Selected Writings of Benjamin’s 1915 dialogue on ‘The Rainbow’ – discovered by Giorgio Agamben in 1977 – and its associated fragment has been rectified here, these have been previously translated in the appendix to Peter Fenves’s recent The Messianic Reduction (reviewed by Andrew McGettigan in RP 168). This arouses the suspicion that further delving into the early archive might perhaps only serve the interests of Harvard University Press’s profits, the aura of biographical completeness, or the strategic ‘de-Marxification’ of Benjamin’s thought.

The conceptual poles that orient the collection of
essays edited by Des Freedman and Michael Bailey in
The Assault on Universities are, on the one hand, an
insistence on higher education as a public good, with
public benefits and to be supported as a public service,
and, on the other, a governmental policy – partially
initiated prior to the current coalition government, but
now pursued with an unprecedented speed, aggression
and intensity – set on the thoroughgoing privatization
of that sector. These poles are schematized in
Freedman’s introduction as the ‘reformers’ towards
privatization versus a campaign of ‘resistance’ that
seeks to defend what is most progressive about the
existing public education system.

[...]

These questions come to bear on the function
and possibility of the public university. If cuts to the
public sector and the services they support are merely
ideological (the result of choices about taxation versus
welfare), it is assumed there is no underlying contradiction
between the social-democratic ideal of the mass,
public universities of the future and the systematic
functioning of late capitalism. If, as Nick Stevenson
argues, the ‘third way’ emphasis upon democracy and
civil society sought to mask the extent to which the
class structure and capitalism were inhospitable to
these ideals, we must therefore go further than Nick
Couldry’s insistence that neoliberal democracy is a
paradoxical oxymoron and confront the possibility that
a fundamental contradiction exists between capitalism
(and not merely its neoliberal version) and a mass,
modern and public higher education system. It may be
untimely to formulate the experiment ahead in such
starkly Brechtian terms, but if the concept of ‘higher
education’ can no longer be applied to the thing transformed
into a commodity, we may have to eliminate
this concept with due caution but without fear, lest we
liquidate the function of the very thing as well.

Those ideas normally considered irreconcilable in Benjamin’s thought are historical materialism and theology, embodied by the contrasting figures of Brecht and Gershom Scholem. Wizisla’s subtitle might suggest a balancing response to the latter’s ‘Story of a Friendship’ and a re-evaluation of Scholem’s verdict that the influence of Brecht upon Benjamin’s thought was ‘baleful’ and ‘disastrous’. Instead, and in spite of the meekness of its philological exactness and theoretical reserve, the book threatens the complete annihilation of Scholem’s inadequate biographical concept of friendship and the intellectual claim upon Benjamin that this grounds. Wizisla draws attention to a remark, taken from the archived minutes of the editorial meetings for the aborted 1931 journal Crisis and Criticism, which form the centrepiece of this book, that indicates the relationship between theology and materialism within Benjamin’s thought: ‘There have always been movements, formerly predominantly religious ones which, like Marx did, start out with the radical demolition of icons. Two research methods: (i) theology; (ii) materialist dialectic.’ That the refusal to attempt their juxaposition is more dangerous than the risk associated with failing is a principle that underpins Benjamin’s whole philosophy.

Nussbaum's model of education is one structured not ‘for profit’ but ‘for democracy’. Problems emerge, however, as she reveals the extent of the values essential for democracy and therefore the myopia of her democratic vision. Although she injects a more strenuous cosmopolitanism into the account, her developmental narrative largely conforms to a bourgeois pedagogic theory of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberalism, starting out from the psychological assumption of an essentially narcissistic infant and orientated towards the political task of producing autonomous, responsible and tolerant citizens necessary for a stable, global democracy.

Yet Nussbaum’s political understanding is rooted in a classical liberalism whose limitations have already been exposed in Marx’s critique of the secular division drawn between political community and civil society in what he calls the ‘perfect democratic state’. Of her narrative of pedagogic development we might therefore ask, with Marx: what kind of emancipation is demanded and what conditions follow from this?

Within the English reception of Benjamin’s work, the importance of this study lies in the attention it devotes to, and the skill with which it illuminates, the presentational form of Benjamin’s philosophy. This reinvigorates it beyond the cramped confines of older debates about Benjamin’s disciplinarity or more recent
interest in his intellectual lineage (although Weber provides persuasive answers for both). Weber is exemplary when this presentational form is the specific concern of both his and Benjamin’s attention, most notably where their shared subject is translatability, allowing him to clarify through demonstration both Benjamin’s theory of translation and the particular problematic of ignoring it with respect to translating Benjamin’s own work. Elsewhere though, too many of these essays rehearse the generality of this form across its various contexts, without thereby producing any distinctive contemporary content, not least of a political kind.