Student Demonstrations

I welcome student demonstrations against tuition fee increases, and looming cuts to university spending. Besides individual hardship, it means the demise of liberal humanities, as universities are shaped for marketability - of courses and qualifications.

Now the movement is overflowing into protests outside businesses which evade taxes – while the poor have benefits slashed and jobs cut.

Recently, students were derided as lazy. Now they are, thankfully, re-politicised. A possibility arises of the renewal of critique. Perhaps an opening may be generated for radical, systemic opposition. If we reject the ideology of consumerism, commercialism and capitalism.

Many students are among the privileged. But not all. Many will suffer massive debts. It’s part of the roll-back in welfare generally. Now extreme cuts are demanded of local government, undermining essential financial support for any so-called ‘big society’. We, in Paddington, will feel the effects of this on local organisations.

The danger, however, is that any opposition movement will remain thoroughly defensive or reactive, and fail to move on to a positive vision of an alternative.

Will students be inspired to ‘think’, to read – more widely than their courses require? Will this immanent opposition lead to a transcendent reaching out beyond the everyday?

French Theory

Why have French Christian thinkers influenced urban theory?

Jacques Ellul wrote a seminal critique of technological society, how technics controls our lives, shaping our thinking. He exposed Cain’s negative foundations of urbanism in violence, murder, militarism & imperialism.

Michel de Certeau examined ‘everyday life’; how people create their own city through their own practice. He detailed how new opportunities and subjectivities were opened up through walking the city. He demonstrated how mysticism breaks through rationalist control to transcendence.

Like De Certeau, Gaston Bachelard recognised still-extant possibilities for creation within urban determinisms. He depicted the poetics of space and reverie. How subjectivity relates through imagination to the external world, including the physical materiality of cities.

Paul Virilio, still alive, is an expert on urbanism: its origins in militarism, and speed’s dominance in our technologically-driven lives. A self-conscious heir of Ellul, he repeats the depiction of closure, the prevalence of catastrophe, accident, within panic's city.

These writers are pregnant with suggestions, concepts for theorising, influential on many critical and urban theorists.

What role has their faith played in their analysis, both of the closures and openings within the city? Does it matter that they are Catholic, with Ellul the only Protestant?