Good to see some responses on the strike stuff. The big news now is that there are two more actions planned. The Student Society of McGill University is going on another 1-day strike on Thursday the 24th and there’s some big province-wide thing on Wednesday the 30th. I was downtown on Saturday and it seemed like there was a big march — but I wasn’t close enough to know if it was a strike-related event or something else. I have no idea if anything’s working more than it was before, but I will say that it’s pretty exciting. I heard that one of the French papers estimated the march I attended Wednesday at 80,000 people.
As for McGill students, I assumed that the reputation was a result of the internationality of the student body and their relatively higher class status with respect to students at other schools in town. But I’m also cautious enough to wonder if that’s a stereotype or if it’s true. I think some are striking out of solidarity or, maybe for the really young ones, just flexing their political muscles and seeing what it’s like. I’m sure there are others affected by the cuts. Bottom line is that the thing seems to have taken on a life of its own. In other words, even though the CEGEP and the McGill students may have “not that much in common” they recognize some shred of common interest, or it looks to them like by banding together they can actually make a difference for the better, which might be just enough motivation sometimes. Who knows? Anyway, it’s clear to me that the students are in the right on this one, and it’s really outstanding to see mass outrage at big cuts to education after years of watching cuts with little reaction in the United States.
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I can’t escape this original/copy thing. I saw a paper this weekend (thank you Ted Striphas!) that convinced me that it’s actually central to the current intellectual property debates, which I’m currently working through in order to get a grip for my mp3 book this summer (which, I must assert, is NOT about intellectual property law but about sound, technology and music). What’s interesting to me is how much American law mimics the conservative strain in cultural criticism that is so concerned about copies circulating in some form unmoored from the original. I don’t know what to do with it except to point it out for now and to say it’s one more reason why I don’t like that formulation. As for Benjamin, I pretty much stand by my original point from TAP: the footnote on the auratic status of a painting of the Madonna pretty much undoes the whole transhistorical thesis of the essay. Then again, Benjamin’s is a messianic philosophy and mine isn’t. That said, I’ll still probably teach that one in my repetition seminar next fall unless someone else covered it in prosem or something.