I’ve been trying to get my head around the interesting contemporary theoretical work of Brian Holmes (more about him here). I learned of Holmes’ work through my friend Stephanie Rothenberg (see the Woodstock Digital Media Festival post below) who has gone with him on ‘derives’ that he leads through various cities (I think Stephanie said they visited several cities in mainland China together). Holmes has been involved with student activism (see this interview) and is a strong proponent of education for social change.

Early this year, he made this post about Marcuse’s dialectics of liberation in University education, and I just have to re-blog this excerpt:

Education today must involve the mind and the body, reason and imagination, the intellectual and the instinctual needs, because our entire existence has become the subject/object of politics, of social engineering. I emphasize, it is not a question of making the schools and universities, of making the educational system political. The educational system is political already. I need only remind you of the incredible degree to which (I am speaking of the United States) universities are involved in huge research grants (the nature of which you know in many cases) by the government and the various quasi-governmental agencies.

The educational system is political, so it is not we who want to politicize the educational system. What we want is a counter-policy against the established policy. And in this sense we must meet this society on its own ground of total mobilization. We must confront indoctrination in servitude with indoctrination in freedom. We must each of us generate in ourselves, and try to generate in others, the instinctual need for a life without fear, without brutality, and without stupidity.