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
the clair-obscur of Europe's lost library, gathering
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. Reason sires Progress, its bequest to the century to follow.
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 a 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's 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 pamphleteer, 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. Take David and his Psalms: could I have guessed that those little throwaway faux-leatherbound wafer pages could contain so many vicissitudes of the soul (without even the concept of a soul): the exuberance, the bargaining despair and mournfulness, the abjection. The short, simple beauty of the pages of Ruth. True, my gosh, so much of the Torah is an accountant's ledger, a mania for family trees and legitimate lines of inheritance; the most exacting instructions for the tabernacle construction given several times over. Recurrence, bringing to mind anew is the warp and woof of the text - and, it seems, of the people who live by it and convey it wherever they go, passing it down above all else. Exhortation to remembrance, to God and to the people of their respective promises, the deals struck, memorial as blessing. As to the exegesis: it's driven by the questions asked. The modes the most querulous in the asking are the ones that get the gold. For, lo, God, to be sure, is an argumentative God!
(Also, was anyone else moved to ask: who on earth was Sherebiah?)
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 twentieth century. A psychological drama itself as a 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, seeing that his case studies read quite 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 the tools shaped in his consulting room, his library-museum, through his correspondence, 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, listening intently, querying, free-associating. Unfair. Because it was a dialogue, and his fundamental recognition was that the acuity of his diagnosis would change nothing for the patient. It was the process of their self-knowledge, the gradual persistent assaults on their defences, made through joint interpretation of the material that snuck past them unnoticed - the re-arranging realisations experienced and accepted by the patient, piece-meal, in accordance with what reality they could bear the witness to and incorporate - that is, what could face the light of day, that was the process of the talking cure. He may not have been the perfect scientist - real science for all its defences and pretensions is an all too human construct; what he did do was experiment, craft new methods for investigation, theorising the processes at work ( centrally, "transference") and he published as he went along, he laboured at forms of exposition, he addressed criticisms and anticipated them, he revisited his own theories and amended them through the process of trial. He was also quite funny. He reads better in the French than in the original English translations though those who can afford it can try out the newly released translations advertised at the Freud Museum which preserves his last port of call in Hampstead.
5. 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!) into 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 is 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 a 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 is divided between the academy and the party today.
Oh, and his pedagogic stance: "The emancipation of the working class must be the task of the working class itself."
(But in case you’re missing the mark, some home-werk: what is Marx - posthumously - really saying when he talks about “educating the educator” in his Third Thesis on Feuerbach?)
6. 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 - the span of decades in A la recherche vs that of a day in Ulysses; an anatomy of the duchess vs undressing of the chambermaid.
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 even 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 Ulysses was published in Paris, and Jacob's Room and T.S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in London, there's poor Walter Benjamin based at home with his parents in Berlin, venturing out to Heidelberg to pursue his Habilitation and a love affair. He announced but was unable to launch Angelus Novus, a journal of literary criticism. A year of the most worthwhile projections and failures.
Benjamin, too, undertook the labour of translating Proust, the first to appear in German, though the manuscript of 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."
All four - Proust, Woolf, Joyce and Benjamin - looked back to Homer. The first edition of Ulysses was bound in "Aegean Blue" in homage to the Greeks - to the character whom Joyce declared "a complete man" in contrast to the other heroes of literature. Joyce also adhered to a theory that Homer was of Semitic stock, hence casting Leopold Bloom as a Jew. Woolf (married to a Jew but somewhat anti-Semitic) 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"... For Benjamin, Homer represented a threshold, a paradise lost in the mode of storytelling when a story that could be told orally, in community. The novel, the book, was the product of the modern isolated individual for the consumption of the self-same reader…
In Benjamin's essay 'The Image of Proust': "the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust’s mémoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting…” In ‘Excavation and Memory’: He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter... which yields only to the most meticulous examination ... the real treasure hidden within." And back to the 'Image of Proust': "For here the day unravels what the night has woven"
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
1. Lucid Symptoms
Divine, Profane, Surgical, Published: The Performing & non-performing Wombs & Brains of our Doras & Noras
Women were somewhat missing, but where did they fit, how should they feature. Mother-daughter rivalries? As the oppressed - and the exploration of the roots of their oppression? As empowered - mythically, subliminally, materially - in what domain? As writers, activists, educators, healers? The starting point that felt most congruent was along the patient-healer axis, and from there, everything else crept and fought back in. From the Witches, Midwives Nurses, to the Bell Jar and the Yellow Wallpaper, a host of women writers have had a say, alongside a few male allies and some exemplars of provocation and domination. Luce Irigaray was one of the first voices to preponderate, emerging as a complex answer to the question that posed itself when comparing the lot of women in France with their philosophies and that of women in the Anglo-Saxon world with their political sociologies. The latter somewhat poorly represented in the collection of texts but there's Federici's Caliban and the Witch and her erstwhile fellow-traveller from the Wages for Housewives era, Selma James.
Whether the woman's role in question is as educators, wives, workers, carers, mothers, activists and healers; whether the input is literary, philosophical or political; whether the women in view are considered active, passive, rebelling or complicit: a central antagonism is present throughout: the female subject and subjectivity is formed by, lives with/under the law of the father. And in among the analysis of material conditions and the strategies to change material reality, there is adamant persistence, an undoubtedly feminist one to go there on the question of specifically female interiority. And to propose a form of writing, fitting to the expression of that: which Cixous encrypts as an écriture féminine.
The questions facing women, their doubts, their strivings are also to be found, centrally, in courses 2,3 & 5.
2. I can't get you out of my head / from under my skin. Perch to perch, prop to prop, The Double lives of the haunted ego (in search of the other).
Split off, appropriately enough, from course 3, the question of the Double posed itself. Dostoevsky's case study, Jekyll and Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray... Wuthering Heights. What is it that's going on? Does the Double represent a crisis of the self, or is it no more than a tale of the uncanny? In our own searches for the other, it's now a commonplace assertion that we merely find reflections of our self (or do we call it projections, shadows, alter egos?). R.D Laing raises his hand to say, it's a split, a confrontation between our true selves forced into hiding vs the false ones, compliant masks we opted for, insecure in our own existence. Alice Miller might interject: the split in the child is to please the parents. On the question of our peer-peer relations, Melanie Klein's might assert that rivalrous envy is the motive force, the imprint of the siblings, or indeed that guilt binds us to the other, as in Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity. The big brother that torments us may be a whole continent, as in Kafka's America. Otto Rank, developing the old idea that shadows and reflections were souls, and their loss represented death, describes a primary narcissism, an aspect of which is fear of death; the Double is created as an insurance, a protection from death - an act of love. But if as the person matures, they stay stuck in narcissism, the double comes to represent everything they can't control, becomes malign, an omen of death.
Jean Laplanche, a serious re-interpreter of Freud's work, would turn the spotlight on the process whereby the child creates the boundary of the ego, a stable 'I' as a means of psychic survival: translating, organising, ordering - incorporating - what it can from the barrage of enigmatic messages they receive from the adults (themselves, it should be said, not fully conscious of what they transmit). But it's always an inadequate process, there's always a residue of untranslated, unincorporated but none-the-less messages-experiences, symbolised by castration, a symbol of lack. We're left with this feeling, like a splinter under the skin, and we go forward in life attempting to complete a translation which can never be adequate. The Jungians waited too politely to speak, but they're here too, having 1-2 with as many texts as they can collar, offering to transmute to double into a source of creativity. Artaud lights a fuse.
3. The Voices Told me To /Moi, j'accuse - The Contest of the absolute authorities.
A trio of plays: Anouilh's 'Antigone', Osborne's Luther and then Shakespeare's Richard II. Antigone's obstinate fidelity to her moral system comes up against the necessary cruelty of Creon standing in for the state; Osborne's portrayal of Luther as a figure similarly hunted, the intensity of his self-inflicted trials sets the trajectory for his confrontation with the church hierarchy. Both characters eventually obey a higher reason, internalised, but not without inner turmoil that precedes the outward battle. Richard II, facing the fait-accompli of his usurper is more resigned in his defeat, as though once the mirror of his counterparts and the court fails to reflect his Divine sovereignty, he crumbles. "Ay, No; No, Ay". But not entirely. His commitment to the role, his theatricality in refusing to make a public confession, his smashing the mirror, logically, commits him to the prison cell at best, not the retreat to a hermitage he was offered earlier.
The protagonists of the other texts on this course navigate their selfhood set against the potency of the bureaucracy, the psychiatric institution, the courtroom. Whatever the setting, a trial is at stake, and the subject the choice is to perform madness or martyrdom; the trial was convoked from the very moment they would obey the voice in their head.
With analytic rescue from eminent French Freudian Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel on the Ego Ideal (who they feel they must be), Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Alice Miller, Foucault (naturally), Ranciere and others: there's no in camera courtroom. The trial is staged, the plea and the judgement, the audience-public, are together complicit in the agony of the individual.
5. Sublimations: Golden Notebooks in the Garden on Gethsemane
Agon - contest, competition, struggle - was a daemon or a minor deity in the Greek world, often linked to Zelos (rivalry) and Nike (victory) - symbolising the necessary human struggle to achieve success. Virtue & excellence - arrete - is achieved through agon, endurance, the active process. The contest is there in role protagonist and antagonist. It becomes a term in intellectual debate, also associated with the courtroom. We can think of the adversary (Satan) who incites God to let him really test Job's piety through a trial of tragedy; or the Devil's Advocate, the official in the Catholic Church who acted like a prosecutor in process of canonisation, trying to find reasons deny a candidate their sainthood; J.S. Mill , 'On Liberty' about our beliefs needing to be subjected to the strongest possible criticism; or Marx to encourage the French working class to wade in the water of Capital:There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."; and to bring us up to date, Robert Howell, imagining the crippling effect a Google Morals Map that guides right conduct would represent: "Virtue is not a piece of information that can be handed over; it is a way of being that must be achieved." All this to say that there's no material or spiritual bypass to sublimation.
A Freudian term where it's generally taken to represents the redirection of libido, recast by Laplanche, in his lectures on Sublimation as the struggle to retranslate the traumatic energy that hasn't been understood. For Freud, the sexual energy is desexualised and "bound" to a new, cultural object, or work; the sexual nature remains for Laplanche - and keeps its obsessive character - but not as a trauma repeated by a truth represented, in symbolic form. For Jung the battle between the ego and the shadow (the conscious and unconscious) through the mechanism of the "transcendent function" moves us along the process of integration, individuation. Lacan has his axe to grind to on the matter, and he gets to speak in his own book, but our contemporary Jamieson Webster walks us from Freud through Lacan should you wish to eave him on the shelf. And one more thing, we have Christ's Agony in the Garden, but the whole process from entering Jerusalem to the resurrection, and while agony remains as a word in Latin, it maps only onto the death throes, while passio- passive endurance - becomes the catch-all word encompassing the emotions. And in the line up of literary giants - Lessing, Kazantzakis, Woolf, Sackville-West, Murdoch, Duras, Stendhal, Goethe Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Hesse -you'll see their characters flex, making a direct bid for sublimation. Some fail, some get there or close, if you think that's possible. Adorno didn't. Glorious nonetheless.
4
Stories within stories, folies à deux, the head and the belly, the high-flown, the idiom: we begin tonight's entertainment with Gargantua & Pantagruel, Jacques le fataliste, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, The Pickwick Papers - in any order. Joyful writers of the picaresque and satirical, Rabelais, Diderot, Cervantes, Sterne and Dickens are wonderful comedians of the human condition. Wit - its recurrence as a word in the first days of my renewed reading journey, undertaken in a period of mourning - these have been the writers, Dickens first, that brought the laughter back out loud. The ingenuity of the repartee, the cleverness in the sudden, and even more in the expected. Doffing their caps to their predecessors, each proffer their distinctive shade of comedic master-servant duo. So, roll up, roll up, come here for that. And stay, if you will, for a foray into the texts that cast servitude in the darker tones we know, the power struggles that bite and claw, where a symbiotic tussle shape-shifts to one of supremacy and subjection. Hegel is here for it, the master-slave section of his Phenomenology of Spirit - and a host of exponents, all varieties of Marxist. Frederic Jameson, Raya Dunayevska. Let's take Hyppolite, whose translation and teaching shaped the '68 generation of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Althusser; he's in dialogue with the Hegel à la Sartre. Hyppolite, with Marx, notes the substantiality of the slave, however alienated they are through their subjection: they have a closeness to the world through their labour which directly transforms it (and them). The master, also alienated, is at home in their world, with power, but they are phantoms in a world built by others. Whereas for Marx, the class struggle issues in a higher state of universal rehumanisation, Hyppolite sees it a staging point (a play within a play, if you like) on the way to the realisation, the "Unhappy Consciousness", that humanity and the divine are separate. A sober version of the defiantly jubilant existentialism in the Marxist rally. Or we can kick work to the kerb altogether and bring in Bakhtin on Rabelais to take us back to carnival, the Beach Beneath the Streets of the Situationist International, or Jacques Ranciere's Proletarian Nights, the Workers' Dream in Nineteenth Century France which "locates the nineteenth-century origins of European socialism not in the noble desire of artisans to control their own labor but in the utopian visions of working-class poets who wanted to be free of labor altogether". Or turn to Jessica Benjamin, the psychoanalyst who shows we can all just get along in mutual recognition. Or Boétie, on Servitude, who say the choice to be a servant is all your, precursor to the anarchist (here represented) or the Tories (not), qui sais?
4. "Stop complaining" said the farmer, "who told you a calf to be"? The serious play between the Master and the slave, carousing on carousel
The Octagon of Agon
6. You're Uranus not my rival: The Gays look at the Boy-Man in the Mirror
Speaking of bypasses: the mantra of the gays, according to the gospel of our Lady Gaga, is that we're born this way. The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic Perspectives, while refuting both that there's any biological determination of homosexuality and that developmental factors predetermine it, frames sexual orientation, and its significance, as something that shifts across historical periods and in the course of personal life cycles. They advocate for understanding a person's life story, for psychoanalysis to help rebuild coherence for those who've faced intolerance and hostility. Well, in a long list of books ordered - to nail the question, any and every question - this was the last and it was expensive. The authors may be right, and regardless, it may simply be the pragmatic thing to recognise that the persistent search for an etiology and developmental causes has evidently been connected to pathologisation and stigmatisation, to attempts to reorient gay people according to speculative theories of developmental factors; and that there's every reason to hold their line as a buffer against the damage done to gay people. But I suspect it will leave questions unanswered, if you're question-minded. So, yes, there's a fairly exhaustive list of the heavy-hitters in the mainstream and the gay psychoanalytic field. There's a fair smattering of the ground level dirt and oil of (mainly white) gay men's lives to be found in a selection of novels and plays, with queer literary criticism to help you grope around. Freud, in a passing sardonic remark in one of his lectures dismisses a claim that must have been in the ether in his days that there was something of the special, even the elect connected with homosexuality. A century of experience of basic gays confirms his judgement. Freud, whatever anyone thinks of his suggestions about homosexuality, politically stood against criminalisation, and did more than anyone else to reflect the deviant back at the normative, for us to see family resemblances of any pathology in all of us. And yet there's something attractive in a figure like Marc-André Raffalovich, the wealthy Russian Jew who converted to Catholicism and tore away the beautiful John Gray from Oscar Wilde who Dorian is thought to be based on: Raffalovich's Uranisme et Unisexualité, posits a basic taxonomy of gays, the superior - born inverted but naturally refined, intellectual, capable of directing the sexuality into high art or deep and chaste friendships - and the inferior, basically naturally debauched. Ok, let's perhaps not take that as gospel but do we claim the Proust, Tchaikovsky, Forster, the Genet & the Baldwin to be just incidentally gay, or whose poetic genius was in some part forged by oppression, or do we see their homosexuality as causal, necessary, even without ever being able to isolate it as a factor then, no more than we really can now, from their fraught social existence as gay. Is this too long in the mirror, in the bathroom? Michael Jackson - was Peter Pan gay? Let's what von Franz in Puer Aeternus, A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood would say. No issue with daddy issues? Let a thousand fetishes bloom, sure but this arena is for those who want to enter the fray for the sweat of the wrestle.
7. Friends: J.M. Coetzee & Paul Auster
The Music of Chance, I read it over a few successive stops on a bench adjacent to a small church with a pretty bell tower in the scorching in the late morning sun. It was Mareuil, printemps 2024 - two years ago when the momentum of synchronicities announced it was back, in books as is my synchronicity's wont, but more clinically in recurrent words - in English and in French, a hall of mirrors in ambush on the page. I was also, more laboriously, trying to make my way through Monod - Le Le hasard et la nécessité - found on the public lending shelves in the village at the same time. And when the almost alien perfection of Couperin's Les barricades mystérieuses appeared in Auster's book, like a looming, commanding - true -puppeteer, it was like I had known- what exactly, I think I forgot as soon as I'd had the thought. The whole book felt like that in a way, the scripting of inevitability in the guise of chance. I lent it to the optician, I took it back before I left. I had a friend who rated 'The New York Trilogy' but had not read anything by him before. I knew he had some French connection. Coetzee was for dusk, the last half hour, sometimes not even that long, in a spot where the sun set across fields a little off from the village square, fields that backed onto South African veldts. Each section, numbered like chapters in a bible or points in a list of theses, was as worked as a painting, like being whacked with a rock-filled sack by a hilarious, cunning assailant who knew everything, like Freud but as thick as an oil spill. Two books out of a marathon of 26 I read in those 10 weeks in Mareuil, I was happy to have two new people with a long list of contemporary works I could get through like a teenage reader. So, I just collected them up from the charity shops on return, and one day, quite at the beginning of the slots being taken for these courses, with a novel each of theirs on the go (Coetzee having the same maestro effect in the Master of St Petersburg) I thought to look up the two together and see perchance if there was a link. I found Here and Now. They wrote to each other, we friends, maybe they had a gentle rivalry going on, they were men and writers after all. I ordered 6 copies online - at that stage, I was still mainly acquiring on the basis of finds on my rounds but figured I'd not seen this book before so - and I gathered together the stock of their texts that I had in already, not a few. And the next morning, at the edge of my bed, I had an image of myself in the St John's Wood's Oxfam; I almost missed it, for some reason stowed in among the play section, a different edition of Here and Now, the confirmation I was seeking. And so here we are. You can read wikipedia entries on them for yourself, and maybe you're way ahead of me with these writers already.. They both studied English Literature, both worked on translations. Coetzee's biography does not disappoint in the scheme of this course - I've seen a book on him where he's cast as a public intellectual of our times. They're both activists in their way. Auster's 4-3-2-1 a critic describes as "a mesmerizing dramatization of the multitude of clashing selves we each harbor within"; a critic says of Coetzee's work that he "seems to be taking less interest in the storytelling keel of his books and is inviting us instead to listen in to an intimate conversation he is having with himself, in the form of multiple alter egos", that his characters are somewhat harsh on him. Coetzee is clearly the more heavy-weight, intellectually, in accolades, in heft of the cultural themes he takes up, he's also still alive. But in the formative story Auster gives of himself - witnessing a boy being struck dead by lighting a few inches away from him at a summer camp at the age of 14, that sense of the quick malignance of life always in the wings energises his work, and I found out today he was Jewish. The opening letters of Here and Now are, felicitously, an exchange about friendship, they adopt a cordial formal tone with each other, a container for some geeky enthusiastic exchanges of their library pickings, their musings. You get the feeling that Coetzee lets Auster set the tone and he matches it out of bonhomie. Anyway, so this is the option for those who just want to read lots of novels by two particular authors and get to know their world, uncrowded by lit crit and high theory.* I am hoping for the sake of completeness that their work will tick the remaining boxes of this Octagon of Agon - murder, mystery, inheritance etc... I've just found out that the Olympics were called Olympiakoi Agōnes, via a google search to find out how-whether strife and agon are connected. They very much are. Eris. There's a new book on it: Conflict and Competition: Agon in Western Greece: "The agōn deemed characteristic of ancient Greek culture has roots in the eris (strife) illustrated in Homer and Hesiod and debated in the metaphysics of Heraclitus and Empedocles". Nietzsche wrote on it: Homer's Contest. Maybe J.M and Paul chat about it, I wouldn't be surprised.
*I am throwing in a couple of homeless books on Poland, that are among the last handful to be assigned but I couldn't bring myself to ditch; for Coetzee and his valid preoccupation with the Pole. Thank god, it's better to break the cordon on this section than to go with the temptation to take a few books on Poland as the basis to build a whole collection.... oh, there's the book on Polish Jewish philosophy
This, the sublimation garden, mapped onto the political sphere, unto infinity and beyond is where the men, broadly speaking, broadly speak. It started with me looking up 'The Discovery of Heaven' by Harry Muslich. I got something like this: a complex "novel of ideas" that blends philosophy, history, and theology. I recognised it immediately as emblematic of a whole squadron of such books I've accumulated with every intention of reading to get to the bottom of life, the universe and everything. But I've mainly dipped my toes in. We know the people who read such books. Let me take that back or qualify it. I want to read those books without being one of those people. And I had a lot of them. Apart from a couple of texts that felt, in the process, as being missing piece - welcome prompts from AI - Paul Ricoeur, namely who I'd never heard of before but seems a worthy giant - the reading list here consists of books that have survived many a cull for their appearance of importance. I did purchase Iris Murdoch's 'The Sovereignty of Good' for gender balance, but it's a very slim volume. The stakes in the fight pit the Freuds against the Jungs, the Dawkinites against the Sheldrakes. I'm obviously biased and the list reflects that, but it's also fair to say that the representatives I've gathered are on the back foot, you can't help but be aware of their opponent, they don't have the prerogative of speaking in their own terms, solely. Koestler, as a figure, a biography, seems the King David, shepherd boy with a slingshot with a mission. It's effectively the mainly 20th century resumption of hostilities from the eighteenth century, where science was enthroned for a full century but the religious, the mystics, the poets that popped up to tail end the 1700s with their Romantic reaction, come back with a more serious strategy. It's the fallout of the disillusion of both the American and Russian projects - the first and second worlds in seeming opposition but united in their materialism. It's the reclamation of the soul, with less fence-sitting but more conscious and high-minded ambiguity. Looking back to course 7, this snippet from a review of Here and Now captures the gloves on version of the dispute: "In his ongoing obsession with the loops and whorls of coincidence, Auster wonders at one point about the fact that in the course of a few days, at Cannes, where he is a judge on the Prize jury, and then in Chicago at a book event, and in a New York hotel where he is waiting to take Juliette Binoche out to lunch, he has happened to bump into Charlton Heston. "What am I to make of this, John? Do things like this happen to you, or am I the only one?"
Coetzee puts the Heston encounters down to the fact that Auster works in the film business before moving on to other concerns, including a review he is writing of the collected letters of Samuel Beckett, a shared hero."
There's the pessimism of Ernest Becker in The Birth and Death of Meaning that sees our efforts to find meaning to be no more than a psychological defence mechanism against the reality of death; he finds more than an echo in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. On the other side there's the host of writers that see the very purpose of life to be the creative search for meaning. Or the Camus-type variation that sits somewhere between which rejects that there is any intrinsic purpose or meaning but still advocates we put our shoulders to the wheel and relish the glimmers. Lenin polemicising against my Russian Revolutionary hero Lunacharsky, the commissar of Narkompros (Enlightenment), the department of education and arts. There's the bizarre example of Jacques Monod amassing all his knowledge of evolution at a cellular level in the service of a thoroughgoing materialism but where the evidence seems to speak against him, and he separately concludes that man has a meaning-making need that might always have to be catered for by a form of religion, so better that it be a socialistic one. There's the various blueprints for social organisation, where the battle over human nature naturally collides in the visions and measures. Is the ideal society trying to placate, to control, to reign in, or is to liberate, to realise. I think it's a fair characterisation of these texts to say that they pick up the threads we've seen in the foundation courses, and throughout the Octagon; they want the synthesis, the final frontier to be settled, to round off the long night with the final word on the way of the world, the right to the parting shot.
8. The Battle Royale: No More F***ing Waiting for Godot: The Senior Common Room pile-on concerning the Discovery of Heaven
1. The Theatre, Body, Semiotics & Language
Where will our bodies last be required? In the theatre, surely, with voices that must live anew everyday, with gesture: constantly resourcing language. The clumping together of these four aspects of the library has made a virtue of (an admittedly self-imposed restrictive) necessity. On the shelves together we have Kristeva, student of Lacan finding herself more aligned with Laplanche. Her chora, where the semiotic drives reside: the pulsions as primal as bodily urges; repetitions, rhythm, babble, assonance, silence; pre-linguistic, still-symbiotic with the maternal body; they organise in readiness for the symbolic order: language, grammar, the means of communication within the social law - the name of the father. The semiotic persists, it is there below the surface of the text, Kristeva calls it the genotext: the Tyger Tyger, burning bright ready to erupt the logical surface. To this the poets most closely adhere. Plato's cave seems more like the womb than the outside, but the figures crouched within, fixed on the moving shadows on the wall, intangible figments of reality, prefigures the screen. See what Sontag, Berger, Barthes say about that staging post from theatre to film, the camera and the image. The theatre is both the darkness and the light, the dream and the waking, the real body as fantasy, as fetish. Our bodies themselves speak; gesture yes, but as Boal, Lecoq will show, they communicate our habits and customs, our daily exertions, the shape of our character. In front of the audience, does the language of the body get its due attention. The body in its ritual not its frozen form. Bodies. It's the heart of a living polis throbbing, where language is its most persuasive, deliberate, communal. Approach with the ardour of Artaud; the applicant anthropologist will not be accepted.
2. On The Future of Our Educational Establishments and Restoring Our Reasons to Meet.
(Or The unrequited love of adult education and grinding your axes with kindness)
Friends, Romanesque educators: gis a job. Joking not joking: half othe books here assembled have been laid off, in the cull in adult education, unless they retrained to teach hairdressing and ESOL Entry 1. Let their drum keep banging against the doors of the Learning and Work Institutes of the world from which they were banished for claiming and reclaiming the right to lifelong adult community education in the humanities. Celebrate what they managed to implement, the horizons they envisioned. See their demise as intrinsically connected to the "next they came for me" Ivory Towers. The promise of higher education for the masses lasted, what, 10 years? From the Workers Educational Association to the initial educational dreams from the Soviets, re-read, react!
But now, more than ever, with learning having been so stringently associated with individual merit for individual beggar your neighbour gain - students at my college would steal the duplicate copies of the required reading texts from the library to hobble their friends, would sit silent in seminars and tutorials cravenly guarding their ideas - how do we make learning a social good (again) and how do we make social learning good?
The other half of these books take advice from the group therapist (quel surprise!) and the social worker, from the Quaker, the Corporate, the Queer. Not in a book (quelle tragedie!), here's an article I wrote on the issue (in an activist ESOL setting but with general concern). In a world where debate spells polarisation, ridicule, knee-jerk contention, turfwar or indeed TERF war - and critical thinking is dubbed Marxist, and Marx alone knows what that means.... I'll get off the soapbox, in the spirit of not making an audience of the group. Hard not to rant! Let me finish by saying that group belonging has evidence-based health benefits, it's a precious thing. One might imagine that's less the case for keyboard warriorism, YouTube commentary and shouting at your phone. Take a look at the article, it's thoughtful and temperate :)
3. Race, Nation, Religion, Empire
The hills we die on, prisons of belonging
Jewish People, Black History, The Balkans, The Middle East & Islam
It's easier to start by explaining how I came by the books on the list for this course. I started a library on the Isle of Wight, and next in at the Brent Trades & Labour Hall, both largely through making an intervention with a local Oxfam shop to stop unconscionable bag-loads of good books going to be pulped every week. In Highgate in 2013 it was some 2,000 which I'd sort through on a Tuesday and Thursday for a couple of years, carrying a traveller’s backpack plus two full bags-for-life on two buses back to Dollis Hill. Highgate being a rich area, with lots of Jewish people, without even anticipating much of a readership for the books I saved a whole load, many on psychoanalysis (mostly now lost).
A few doors down from the Trades Hall was a Black barber shop; he too kept a shelf of Black History books, part of a strong and longstanding local emphasis on self-education in the Black community, which used to be reflected on the shelves of the public libraries and in schools—in decline as part of the general decline. So the books for that section I largely accumulated cheaply, though I'd also go from time to time to a second-hand black bookshop in Hackney on Clarence Road, there no longer; and the easy pickings are no longer the same. It used to be the case that there was a wide social readership for Black History well beyond the community and the Left, thanks to a politics that took hold for a generation or two. For all non-white people in Europe, the Black American story was in some sense the benchmark story. Out to Hendon, Golders Green and Edgware of course there are a lot of charity shops, lots of books by Jewish writers, still. It goes without saying that it's broadly a community that reads, and in this part of London, with space for books.
The books on the Balkans are because I went to Sarajevo in 2016 for six weeks; they used to call it the Jerusalem of Europe. It was among the "ethnic conflicts" that were useful comparative case studies for me, of Tamil descent, alongside Ireland, Palestine. It's also just more interesting to me, the history and political geography of the region, the achievements of Yugoslavia, the shame of weaponised nationalism—in that case among people who speak the same language.
The Middle East, well it's the political football match par excellence in the West, it's the continuation of Empire and Anti-Semitism by other means. Look at the carnivals of performed empathy for the Palestinians, the pleasure of the pretence that there's a conspiracy at work to silence all criticism of Israel as anti-semitic; I don't deny there's a level of unscrupulous weaponisation of anti-semitism against opponents, but it's also patently possible to speak concretely, without dog-whistle and hushed whispers of what it is you oppose, and perchance to be opposed to those human rights abuses when they happen outside of Gaza. Anyway, much as Israel-Palestine is fascinating from any of the perspectives from the foundations of this programme, it's not the only story for the Jewish people, for the Middle East and for Islam. Half the books in that section were mine, the larger half rescued from the flat of a deceased comrade in Barnet, George Shaw, much more unequivocally Palestinian partisan, also a gentle, cultured guy, a Marxist humanist (the Raya Dunayevskaya books dotted around the Octagon are his).
Whichever of the four lists your group focuses on—that's something to be decided on together—you'll have your own approaches to the books on the list, including ones you'll want to add, maybe ones you might prefer were not there. It's precisely the reason for study groups: to take a step back, to step out of your shoes, to read with no particular skin in the game, for a while in any case. My favourite Fanon quote, which famously closes Black Skins, White Masks: “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”
4. The Library in all its forgotten, unknown, and possible glory
It's the twin peak of this project with the Theatre. Where would you or I be without the library? In this government declared Year of Reading, one of its aims is that there be a library in every primary school by 2029. Astonishing to find out there isn't. For me, it was a room along the front facade of the school, with the nurses room adjoining. Alongside stories, it contained the biographies of Marie Curie, Father Damian, MLK etc. It was a time of SATS boycott where teachers had autonomy and granted it to us, so the library was a resource for the open-ended half-term long classroom projects we were set. Now, with activity timed by the minute, with set extension activities, it's hard to imagine that earnt free time when you could slope off there. And the local libraries were nice. They still often are for the children to be fair. But the opening hours have been cut, shelf space reduced, half my borough's libraries handed over to be run and funded by volunteers - and let's be frank: the reason they're not all shut yet is for four reasons: the kids space, as mentioned; n defence of a warm non-monetised space for those in need with computers, and for pretence and nostalgia, for independent study space. The books are almost incidental. They arrive and they leave according to contracts with booksellers/publishers according to formulas. There probably isn't one qualified librarian in the council service. At the universities, the humanities departments and languages departments topple, several a year at the moment, with relentless marketisation, tuition fees and debt, and the absence of social mission. Libraries, in any case, are calculating the cost per unit of keeping a physical book in situ, and are in hock to the e-book drive, even though it's now widely understood that reading on the screen is an inferior experience to reading on the page; that the digital books don't actually belong to them, and their access has to be renewed. With the get-their-money and churn-them-out degree system, with minimum staffing resource, with the decline in independent learning skills which runs back through the whole system, with the text book cartel - what is the need for an extensive library. Go buy some stuff on anybook.com and you'll have for yourself some of the bounty of the cull. There are a few hundred books in this collection, often brand new, discarded from our universities.
So, there you have the doom-mongering. Let's go to the booklist. It's a modest orientation of different facets of libraries, the book industry and reading, with the usual spread of genre. Yes, even the psychoanalytic, and I'd hope the Marxist. Imagine reading the holy book on a kindle. There's the phenomenon of the literary salons, the curious role public libraries seemed to have taken at one point in America of supporting literature reading programmes. There's the important angle of the private library: The Utopia Workshop Library, much like the libraries I've been tasked to save of dead comrades - or the Helene Cixous archive bequest that Jacques Derrida talks about in his book: is there another form of public library that is more personal, taking the logic of the individual reader request (do those budgets even still exist) and dialling it up to community readership curation? Down with the Dewey Decimal System I say - up with the logic of the maze of the ramshackle bookshop.
The Ryde Bookshop on the Isle of Wight, a huge three storey house was an adventure in a deeply rooted archive of the reading interests of the people. There was one A. Henderson, whose books I had an eye for, a kindred intellectual spirit: I could put my finger on his former books among the tens of thousands with magnetic ease. It's to him, and that bookshop that I (we) can thank for me finding Utopian Thought in the Western World, to read it fourteen years later!
I didn't take advantage of the libraries when I was at university: my time was divided between the activist street, the rehearsal room and stage; the bar and common room. Is that not how youth should be spent? I only went into the Bodleian Library twice - once for matriculation, once to occupy it overnight to protest fees. In that city, those few miles in circumference, there were the faculty libraries and the 30+ college libraries; at Somerville, all students had a key to access it 24 hours - that I did actually do - and I will never forget its importance, in practice, as principle. All Power to the libraries, comrades!
5. Here's Where the Magic Happens: Lean in to the woo
The Royal Roads of Tarot, Astrology, Kabbalah, Dreams
Were you expecting this ? You must have seen it was on the cards. For the scientific materialist, it's only scientific to try, for the credulous fill your boots.
I think I'll approach this with anecdote once more, because how can you prove objectively what is understood intuitively, non-rationally, something which isn't subject to on demand repeatable experiment. I've tried this conversation in many forms, and I think the best ways in to the logic of illogic is often two questions: Do you believe in luck? Have you ever felt that certain coincidences were meaningful, and demanded explanation? There is also he question of personal destiny, which I think many harbour a belief in, and thus warrants some investigation.
This is the course where Jung comes into its own, but also arguably, the most useful of resources for literary understanding not just criticism.
It was in Marseille that I found a book on the Tarot named after that port city on the mediterranean. I'd stayed on at an airbnb weeks longer than anticipated. I stumbled on a house with a library, and sweeping one morning the book caught me eye. I only picked it up because I found it funny: the Marseillais are a very chauvinistic tribe, the best football, rap, sun etc, it amused me that they even had their own tarot. But as I read through it - the feeling was so familiar, page after page of symbols that felt like a dictionary of life, the key words of story. The Empress, the Hermit, the Hanged Man, the Moon, my favourites then and now. The Devil, Death (or in the Marseille, the card with no name), The Tower. The Star. The Wheel of Fortune. Go down that road and you'll see it everywhere in culture catching the imagination, from Andre Breton to Stephen King. Some even try to pin it on Freud - who did in any case spend his Saturday nights religiously playing the secular card game version with friends, still popular in certain parts of Europe. The story of its transmission appealed to me, the gypsy in this case rather than the wandering Jew. It's too detailed a story to tell her about the very precise coincidence that blew my mind in that book ,but suffice it to say that it issued in me getting tattoos of the Hermit and the Moon on my arms (I'm not a tattoo fan, and certainly don't have the arms for it). I loved the fact of the 1-1 conversations that the cards opened up, like the confessional or the couch, people speak back to the prompts from the cards and there's the added feeling, inseparable from it, of the right time.
As for astrology - for me it's worth considering any form of cultural practice that could spring up in recognisably similar forms in such far-flung zones of civilisation independently: China, India, Egypt: the division of the skies, the characterisation of the planets, the total scope of the themes at play in the signs and in the houses. Like organising a library, the appetite for meaningful taxonomy. I know nothing about the Kabbalah, but Madonna and the vapid "deep" and mystical types notwithstanding - whom I also find a bit repellent, the idea that the letter of an alphabet could be more than mere ciphers appeals, if not enough to believe but to have a brief foray. And dream, an 11th hour addition, I don't know how I hadn't thought of it, other than a book or two in the Freud section, and dotted around. I have the most astonishing dreams - it's hard to believe that such creativity resides in me, such narrative power, and the ability to summon the precise cast member, from my life, from TV, totally novel, to step onto the stage. I've never been able to write fiction in my waking hours, so how do "I" manage that. So, with the Surrealists inevitably brought to mind, and Jung and von Franz having waited wryly for this moment, I went on a (sort of) last spree shopping. It' all in all one of the best collections of the library, and through my own peregrinations along the Mediterranean coast, I picked up a good range of decks you're welcome to try out.
It was that summer that Aylan Kurdi washed ashore, the image that turned a set of mounting numbers in the graveyard into human tragedy. I remember drawing a set of cards that were unambiguously about social disorder; having arrived back in Marseille aiming to stay again for a while, I instead moved straight on up to Calais: that piece of water that divides two nations, two languages, the fact of which means no one is responsible. If I hadn't gone to Calais then, I wouldn't have met the Sudanese friend who a year later happened to find himself living a mile away from me in London, which got me into teaching the third conditional for five years to migrant workers and refugees. The world is a strange place, and that's fine if you want to leave it at that, but as with any other set of tools that humanity has developed to navigate life, I think the ones here are worth exploring. We live amidst their languages in any case, it seems to me a question of whether we choose to hear and learn to speak.
6. The Mousetrap
The tragedy within comedy and vice versa
The thing about spending your time reading plays is that you can take the interior conjuring you do with characters, voices etc with fiction too, but decide to make it happen, to stage it. So here, at your leisure are a collection of plays, including the ones I'm projecting that we put on: Henry IV or Measure for Measure; any of the Phaedres or the Antigones; The Marriage of Figaro. Why? Just because. And you're free to push back on that. You could, if you want, take a look at some of the theory, of comedy, of tragedy and their adjacent modes, the surreal, the absurd, and map them all out.
It's the bête noire of the Cambridge English Literature course, the compulsory paper on Tragedy. Three hours, three questions. When my time came, I was already finding life somewhat unbearably absurd, so I wrote one answer for three hours on Hamlet. My parents didn't find it funny. My senior tutor offered to claim some dispensation; the word he used was "unravelled". It was certainly the moment where my life radically changed course, the jury's still out on whether I lost the plot or claimed authorship. It's such case studies, in every possible packaging of scenario, that we find, ready, in these texts to put on stage; for the audience to bring to bear their full range of responses; their judgement, their empathy, the complicité.
As to comedy, Chaplin: "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." This was the reminder Dickens gave me, and Cervantes, that you can choose laughter, and still shed the most poignant and sincere of tears at the end. Even Hamlet is a barrel of laughs if you adopt a way of seeing, and the text absolutely permits it. Job in his lamentation, in retort to the sanctimony of his supposed friends: "No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." Human wit is the ultimate defiance when being dragged down by the fates. There’s the darkly humorous irony in knowing that Horatio’s report of events will deny the events their due meaning.
But what's left to say after lines like these in Macbeth that devastate us all, irrespective of the particular smallness of our lives or ambitions:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Because for the most part we do live to see another day, and the requirement to act does not let up, nor does the struggle to signify something abate. The janus-faced stage, for that reason - with the immediacy of agitation that it can elicit on a good day with a good play - has often been subject to bans. Yes the morality card is played, and dry philosophical complaints. I think it’s more like they say about elections, that if it changed anything they'd abolish them; and thus the theatre remains perfectly untouched in our day. We go to be bored, as cultural currency, we don't even stay after in the bar.
“Human kind cannot bear very much reality”, said Eliot. To twist its meaning a bit, for the sake of silence and a Brechtian "bed for the night"; to give it a Marxist twist: Humankind cannot bear very much diagnosis. Unless it's going to change anything, may as well let be.
articulations, applications
24 copies of Montserrat by Roblès to handle before producing our play(s)
adult education for another world
Contact us
E-mail: robin@theutopiaworkshop.co.uk