Occupation at University of Amsterdam Challenges the Logic of Market-Driven Education

By James Anderson, Truthout | News Analysis

TRUTHOUT - Thursday, 09 April 2015

When students kicked in the door of the main administrative building, the Maagdenuis, at the University of Amsterdam on February 25, the "New University" - or "De Nieuwe Universiteit" - movement introduced a new aesthetic dimension of protest.
The Maagdenhuis occupation, a protest against the financialization of higher education and against the concentration of decision-making power at the university, disrupted the everyday flow of doing, changing the normal organization of human sense experience on campus. By taking a building and reorganizing human activity inside, with emphasis on dialogue, deliberation and shared decision-making, occupiers created new aesthetic conditions necessary for a new politics, as philosopher Jacques Rancière, who recently visited the Maagdenhuis to show solidarity with UvA students, suggests.
Politics remains "aesthetic in principle," Rancière, once wrote. By blurring boundaries between the expressible and ineffable, Rancière argues that aesthetics affirms antagonisms that the administrative order would rather see reconciled under its own imposed expectations.

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