Applicants Wanted for the New MA in Consumption, Culture & Marketing

Are you a perfect applicant for our Masters programmes? We are looking for students who have a 2.1 degree (or national equivalent) in a related subject area which might include business but could include such subject areas as history, philosophy, sociology, culture studies, classics, music, geography, English literature, etc. Most of all, we want students who are fascinated in the topic, who will accept the challenge of trying to engage with difficult-to-read texts, who are willing to stay up all night long with class mates discussing new ideas.

In addition, the following type of person is especially welcome:

"decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie: vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème"

also,"pushy femmes, radical fairies, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldagers, divas, Snap! Queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian identified men or lesbians who sleep with men", 

also "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan- sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war" 

also "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars"

also "nihilists converted to Marxism and Marxists converted to shit, every kind of chip on the shoulder: sexual, political, economic, psychological, social, cultural, sporting and electronic; practising Zen Buddhists, Catholics, witches, voodoists, Islamists, santeria animists, a Mormon and two Jews, a pitcher from the Industriales team who pitches and bats with either hand; fans of Pablo Milanes and enemies of Silvio Rodriguez, expert oracles who know who will be the next Nobel Prize for Literature as well as Gorbachev's secret intentions, the last pretty boy adopted as nephew by the Famous Person in the Higher Echelons, or the price of a pound of coffee in Baracoa; seekers after temporary or permanent visas, dreamers, femmes and hommes, hyper-realists, abstract artists and socialist realists who'd reneged on their aesthetic past; a Latinist; the repatriated and the patriotic; people expelled from everywhere one can be expelled from; a blind man who saw, disillusioned and deceivers, opportunists and philosophers, feminists and optimists, followers of Lezama, disciples of Virilio, Carpentier, Marti and one adept of Anton Arrufat; Cubans and foreigners; singers of boleros; breeders of fighting dogs, alcoholics, rheumatics, dogmatists and head-cases; smokers and non-smokers; and one macho-Stalinst heterosexual"

also "Born Again Losers and the Lavender Boozers and some crack team from Washington Heights, the boys from Avenue B and the girls from Avenue D, a Tinkerbell in tights"

also "Postgraduates who never finished their studies, who broke themselves against the texts of Heidegger and Derrida and Delueze... Undergraduate geniuses, brighter than a thousand suns, who never received funding for postgraduate study... thinkers who were kept outside the university, obscure Judes who lived their entire lives in employment precarity; thinkers of unimaginable integrity, unimaginable will, reading Leibniz in their lunchbreaks, reading Canguilhem on the commuter train... thinkers too mad to think, institutionalised thinkers; alcoholic thinkers lying ruined on park benches, who were never given a chance."

and if at all possible "Thinkers who hate other thinkers. Thinkers who'd broken with old friends over intellectual matters. Over political matters. Thinkers at war, for whom philosophical enmity had become personal enmity, had become name-calling, and hair-pulling. Thinkers who'd shot away half their faces in despair, W. says. Thinkers with deep scars across their wrists. Thinkers who wept as they spoke. Thinkers whose pauses were longer than their talks. Thinkers in breakdown, their lives careening. Thinkers who spoke frankly about the misery of their existence.  Thinkers who told of why they couldn't think, why thought was impossible, why the end had come: their end and the end of the world. Wild thinkers. Drunk thinkers. High thinkers, nostrils flared, pupils tiny, staying up for whole weeks at a time. Thinkers with missing teeth. With missing eyes. Thinkers with missing fingers, and with great clumps of their hair torn out. Thinkers with terrible rashes around their mouths. Sick thinkers, walking with two sticks, W. says. Coughing thinkers, who could hardly get out a word. Thinkers who spoke too quietly to be heard. Thinkers who spoke too loudly, half-deafening the front row. Think-declaimers, thinker-prophets who might as well have set themselves on fire in the seminar room. Exiled thinkers, forced out of their home countries for crimes of thought. Lost thinkers, left over from vanished intellectual movements. Bereaved thinkers, in mourning for dead thinker-partners. Betrayed thinkers, who spoke of backstabbing and purgings, of auto-critiques and revolutionary punishment. Thinkers with neck-kerchiefs, W. says. Thinkers with cravats. Thinkers with Hawaiian shirts. Thinkers in plus-fours. Thin thinkers, in roll-neck sweaters, with sharp cheekbones and shaved heads. Tubby thinkers, epicureans full of joy, with great, jolly faces and think folds of fat at the back of their necks and spadelike hands, who'd laboured alongside others in the fields and the mines. Serene thinkers, half godly, looking into eternity with widely-spaced eyes. Laughing thinkers, who laughed because could think, because they were free to think. Thinkers who'd escaped from imprisonment and war. Saintly thinkers, of unimaginable integrity, of absolute purity. Nomadic thinkers, who, like swifts, never touched down, moving only from conference to conference as invited speakers. Traveller thinkers, who had forsaken the lecture circuit for private voyages through jungles and deserts. Ascetic thinkers, who spoke of great solitudes, great retreats. Thinkers who had seen things, lived things that were greater than they were. Thinkers who knew what it meant to live. Thinkers who served life. Thinkers who thought in order to live, to be alive. Thinkers who spoke of the ecstasy of thinking after their talks, in the student bar. Thinkers who spoke of the beatitude of thought, tears glittering in their eyes. Thinkers who said, the only thing that mattered was to think. Bearded thinkers, with great bushy beards like Marx's, or tidy, trim beards like Lenin's, or goatees like Trotsky's, or - very rare - neckbeards like William Empsom's. Nonagenarian thinkers. Centenarian thinkers! And thinker-youths, no more than 20 years old, mere pups, with minds like steep traps. Thinkers who'd been imprisoned for thinking, W. says. Thinkers who'd been half-crucified for blasphemies of thought. Thinkers whose tongues had been ripped from their throats. Mute thinkers, whose papers were read for them. Thinkers whose voices were hoarse from screaming. Thinkers who refused to think, out of shame, and refused to read their own paper, out of modesty. Humanist thinkers, dripping with pathos, W. says. Anti-humanist thinkers, siding with viruses, siding with plagues, waiting for the demise of 'man'. Thinker-fanatics, full of hatreds and ecstasies. 'Your kind', W. says."

In short, this MA is "for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream"

(Above links bring you to the original sources from Marx, Sedgewick, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Padura, Reed, Iyer and Herzog)