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 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.
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, a giant of history and philology, co-written with his wife Fritzie over a quarter of a century. It won several prestigious awards, and features exhilarating psychological portraits of utopian thinkers and a closely woven tapestry of Utopian ideas through the renaissance to th 19th century, and their Greek and Biblical wellsprings. The writing is full of personality and flair - their favourite word is felicitous - and their varied approaches to people and periods have an intelligence that makes their subjective choices and their especia homages intrinsic to the delight of their edifice.
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 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 movement, with Freud's tight steer over practice, publication - and excommunication - determining the destiny of the field, it reflected the (ongoing) conflict between medical and philosophic approaches to the mapping the psyche - and, no doubt, enacting his inner conflicts too. A trained neurologist, he saw his practice an the art of interpretation and noted his case studies read more like novellas than science. "Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me." The encyclopaedic scope of his writings - a veritable 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. Probably about sex and death.
Monumental Marx, his musketeers and the many: reaping the full fruits of our global force of labour
Je ne suis pas un Marxist. Like Hamlet, the tragedy was that he knew would never be understood, try as he might. He was might and he tried. Some twenty years to produce his masterwork Das Kapital, from initial research, to his 800 pages Grundrisse foundational notebooks, with the obsessive maximalist's
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