Learning from Vancouver -- In dialogue:Bik Van der Pol and Urban Subjects
The second archival image is of Herbert Marcuse as he speaks to 1,300 students at Simon Fraser University on Tuesday, March 25, 1969. Marcuse was on campus in the wake of the November 1968 student-takeover of the administration that the RCMP ended; he was invited by radical professors and the Department of Politics, Sociology, and Anthropology that was purged following its push to democratize the university. At the time, Marcuse, a leading public intellectual, theorized everyday life within a “totally administered society”. But he was also a theorist of the transformation of society, which of course was what the students were looking to grasp as well. Perhaps these two images can represent the dialectic of closure and possibility in the public sphere in Vancouver as well as materially marking events that speak to our present moment of mega-event exception.