The Utopia Workshop Ltd
Adult Community Education and Arts
directed by Robin Sivapalan, an adult education organiser based in London
The Utopia Workshop's programme for educators and leaders in any field living in Kingsbury and the surrounding areas of northwest London.
March - October 2027
£420 minimum fee
Groupwork: in literature, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, theatre & education, with a special focus on France.
The programme involves 6 months intense exploratory reading and discussion, working through three (of twenty) curated reading lists concurrently in well-facilitated, self-managed groups; 2 months collectively producing a play in conjunction with public educational workshops.
An affordable way for passionate local educators to belong to an advanced dialogic learning community in the humanities.
"One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power. If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn't use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That's why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities." -Marie-Louise von Franz’s book Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales
Sous les feux d'artifice:
in the clair-obscur of Europe's lost library, gathering
Programme
1. C18 Enlightenment: the long century casting its even longer shadow
A pivotal century of emulation and revolution in scientific and religious thought, literary expression, and social, economic and industrial organisation. Europe, in the name of Reason, enlarges its envergure across the world's surface and the interior terrain of the human mind. A constantly re-written chapter defined by the political rivalry - and intellectual symbiosis - of Britain and France. Infant America, fed by both, decides to break free. Across Europe, from faculty to faculty, the century differs in its beginnings and endings; it is altogether more studied in France despite Britain's clear political victory by 1815. It's the era where the Republic of Letters courts the Enlightened despots, in music it's bookended by Handel-Bach and Mozart-Haydn. The academy shifts to the centre of the emerging modern state and the foundations are laid for the near-universal literacy achieved the following century. Locke's writings re-weaponises the old blank slate concept to challenge the notion of "innate ideas", implanted by God, the flimsy prop of the Divine Right of Kings to rule. A vision of universal potential crystallises, education is enthroned as arbiter of right. The novel is born, populariser of subjectivity and adventure. Subscription-based libraries spring up; at coffee-houses people in-gather to spread ideas, to rally.
2. 'Utopian Thought in The Western World': a folie à deux festschrift to fantasy
Standing strong, still, today at 912 large luminous pages, 'Utopian Thought in The Western World' was the magnus opus of Frank E. Manuel, historian and philologist, co-written with his wife Fritzie over a quarter of a century, published in 1980, winning several prestigious awards. It features exhilarating psychological portraits of utopian thinkers and weaves an astounding tapestry of Utopian ideas from the renaissance to the 20th century, with their Greek and Biblical wellsprings. Their writing is replete with personality; the variety of approaches taken for each major figure, period or theme has an overarching intelligence that makes their subjective choices and their especial homages intrinsic to the delight of their whole edifice. Turgot & Condorcet form an organic unity; Leibniz, Rousseau and Kant receive the global treatment their minds deserve; the English Civil War and the milieu that produced Erasmus, More & Rabelais come to life as two atmospheres of ideas; Fourier emerges as their clear pet Utopian. The book is critical celebration of the persistence of the obsessive-utopian propensity in humankind; a tour de force where educational concerns are the centre of the manifestoes; erudition manifest in the glory of their book..
3. Go tell it on the mountain:
God's verbs, the nation's Biblia, and the endless exegesis
The most widely distributed book in the world, translated into 6-10 times as many languages as its nearest rival (Le Petit Prince), the enigmatic main character God - Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh - displays a dubious, but always compelling, range of personality traits / mood disorders. He demanding adulation and awe from an immense supporting cast of actors, mere mirrors, off-shoots of a creation he always was gnarly about. Then Jesus, inscribed in the Greek. A centuries' old education in the intricacies of translation, interpretation and application, with real world and literary ramifications - it's a must read before you give up the ghost. Truly, believe it or not, against the thinness of the street corner pamphleeter, the boredom of the Sunday sermon, the picayune platitudes of promise that Jesus loves you, there's gravitas, there's poetry (alongside pedantry) and passion.
4. Soul-analysis: Freud and friends and their epigones, on the fence.
From the performative hysteria at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, studying under Charcot, to the intimacy of his consulting room-cum-womb-tomb, Freud's staking out of the field of psychoanalysis - and the talking cure - is surely the greatest, most curious achievement of the C20. A psychological drama itself as fledgling movement, Freud's tight steer over practice, publication - and excommunication - to determine the destiny of the field also reflected the (ongoing) contest between medical and philosophic approaches to the mapping the human psyche. His was an effort, painstakingly justified in his writings, to straddle the two. A trained neurologist he wanted his method to have the rigour of the natural sciences, but acknowledged his practice as an the art of interpretation, noting that his case studies read like novellas. "Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me." The encyclopaedic scope of his writings - a circle of learning - has won him devotees among eminent historians and literary critics who borrow these tools to make the past and the text speak the unspoken, more than they knew they were saying. Casting a light on so many aspects of human experience, he stalks almost every room in the next section's courses, clipboard and pen in hand.
Monumental Marx, his musketeers and the Many: reaping the full fruits of our global force of labour
"Je ne suis pas un marxiste.", said Marx. Like Hamlet, the tragedy was that he knew would never be understood, try as he might. He was relentlessly coruscating in the corrections he issued - that barb was to his own son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, chief among the phrase-mongering French, where Marx saw his method of analysis being turned (already!) in to a form of dogmatism. It took Marx some twenty years to produce his masterwork Das Kapital, from the initial research, though his 800-page Grundrisse foundational notebooks, to the "finished" text, that is, of Volume 1. With self aware irony, he referenced Balzac's story 'The Masterpiece' as he finally handed over the manuscript to Engels for the publishers, wherein the painter's constant reworking of his chef d'oeuvre obliterates it to all but his own eyes. With the maximalist's obsessiveness, Marx grappled with all available knowledge in the tradition of the universalist polymath, famously crediting England for its political-economy, Germany for its philosophy, France for its utopian socialism. His method could be called dialectical - or historical - materialism, and he is reluctantly included among the pantheon of western historians: that class struggle a motive force in human history is a point of analytic departure none since can ignore. The short, sharp bullet of the Communist Manifesto is the most widely translated political text of all time. Almost of third of the world's population in 1980 lived under states claiming to be Marxist-Leninist. The place that Marx and the early Marxists earn on this course, is not just due to political legacy. They were deeply cultured people: Marx was a huge fan of Cervantes, Diderot and Sterne (who you'll see grouped together in the next section of courses) and even tried to emulate Sterne's style. He loved Shakespeare and Goethe, and saw his writing to be his life-work, an artist's labour. This literary predilection, the concern with cultural issues, characterises the generation that followed, but it divided between the academy and the party today.
1922: Wandering Jews, Mourning, Melancholia, Penelope's Work & the Epic
'The Remembrance of Things Past': C.K. Scott Moncrieff's English translation was almost as lengthy a labour of love as Marcel Proust's original writing, fellow gays in the closet. Proust was a contemporary and rival of Joyce - a span of decades vs that of a day, duchesses vs chambermaids. In the same letter, September ‘22, Virginia Woolf said of Proust: "How at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance?" but of Ulysses that "Genius it has, I admit; but of the inferior water" Yet her diary concedes four days later that "what I am doing is probably being better done by Mr. Joyce" and elsewhere that "he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame." And so in 1922, when Proust died, when Ulyssees was published (in Paris) and Jacob's Room, and T.S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, there's poor Walter Benjamin. He announced but failed to launch Angelus Novus, a journal of literary criticism; he too undertook the labour of translating Proust, the first to appear in German, though the manuscript Sodome et Gomorrhe was lost or destroyed during his flight from the Nazis. "I must say that I am poisoned by it, and yet I also find in it a very significant schooling for my own work." And lastly, all four looked back to Homer; the first edition of Ulysses bound in "Aegean Blue" while adopting the theory that Homer was of Semitic stock, hence casting Leopold Bloom as a Jew. Woolf (married to a Jew but somewhat antisemitic) on the Greeks: " it is the solidity of their sorrow that strikes us. ... "It is a sorrow that has been clarified; it is not, as with us [moderns] mixed with a thousand other things"... ] Freud 1917 (via Riviere in English in 1924) "In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself."
founders, foundations
adult education for another world
Contact us
E-mail: robin@theutopiaworkshop.co.uk