gillian whiteley
Loughborough University, School of the Arts, English and Drama, Department Member
This RaRa project, developed with Radar Loughborough University Atrtscentre, involved a weekend festival (May 2017) explored and celebrated the radical history and format of the pamphlet through a one-day research symposium, exhibition,... more
This RaRa project, developed with Radar Loughborough University Atrtscentre, involved a weekend festival (May 2017) explored and celebrated the radical history and format of the pamphlet through a one-day research symposium, exhibition, public events, community workshops and lots more
Research Interests:
Research seminar talk October 2017
Research Interests: Politics and Performance
Is there no alternative? Re-imagining the university The cultural possibilities of this movement are immense…we should have no difficulty in recognising the spontaneous university as the possible detonator of the invisible... more
Is there no alternative? Re-imagining the university
The cultural possibilities of this movement are immense…we should have no difficulty in recognising the spontaneous university as the possible detonator of the invisible insurrection…
In 1962, in the Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds, Alexander Trocchi outlined the prototype for a network of autonomous free universities: their ‘infinitely elastic’ structures would lead to the gradual crystallisation of a ‘regenerative cultural force’ and ‘creative intelligence everywhere’. A collective insurgent, insurrectionary imagination and a new revolutionary politics would emerge. Since the ‘free schools’ of the 1960s, the discourse of ‘de-schooling’ has returned: educational institutions are ‘exploding’, universities across Europe and the US have (at least temporarily) been occupied and the managerialism of the academy is being challenged by a wave of ‘free’, DIY, often transient, sometimes virtual, universities. The recent curatorial project in Milan - Learning Machines: Art Education and Alternative Production of Knowledge – testified to some of the genealogy of thirty years of alternative sites and pedagogies for art production both inside and outside the institution.
Supported by dispatches from a recent visit to Milan, my paper offers a short introduction to the recent history of the ‘free university’ and a brief exploration of some of the theoretical problems and political questions it raises. This will be followed by an interactive ‘playshop’ in which participants will be invited to work in small groups on an exercise based around the idea of actively re-imagining the university. What is a university? What should it be? What could it be? Participants will be asked to use utopian, spontaneous and preposterous thinking to produce diagrammatic and textual models, no matter how gestural, impractical or ‘uneconomic’.
Gillian Whiteley
School of the Arts
Loughborough University
g.whiteley@lboro.ac.uk
www.bricolagekitchen.com
The cultural possibilities of this movement are immense…we should have no difficulty in recognising the spontaneous university as the possible detonator of the invisible insurrection…
In 1962, in the Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds, Alexander Trocchi outlined the prototype for a network of autonomous free universities: their ‘infinitely elastic’ structures would lead to the gradual crystallisation of a ‘regenerative cultural force’ and ‘creative intelligence everywhere’. A collective insurgent, insurrectionary imagination and a new revolutionary politics would emerge. Since the ‘free schools’ of the 1960s, the discourse of ‘de-schooling’ has returned: educational institutions are ‘exploding’, universities across Europe and the US have (at least temporarily) been occupied and the managerialism of the academy is being challenged by a wave of ‘free’, DIY, often transient, sometimes virtual, universities. The recent curatorial project in Milan - Learning Machines: Art Education and Alternative Production of Knowledge – testified to some of the genealogy of thirty years of alternative sites and pedagogies for art production both inside and outside the institution.
Supported by dispatches from a recent visit to Milan, my paper offers a short introduction to the recent history of the ‘free university’ and a brief exploration of some of the theoretical problems and political questions it raises. This will be followed by an interactive ‘playshop’ in which participants will be invited to work in small groups on an exercise based around the idea of actively re-imagining the university. What is a university? What should it be? What could it be? Participants will be asked to use utopian, spontaneous and preposterous thinking to produce diagrammatic and textual models, no matter how gestural, impractical or ‘uneconomic’.
Gillian Whiteley
School of the Arts
Loughborough University
g.whiteley@lboro.ac.uk
www.bricolagekitchen.com
bricolagekitchen aka Gillian Whiteley: Sounding Transitory Utopias: Improvisation, Potenza and Praxis Improvisation is frequently seen as an inherently radical cultural form for its spontaneity and its capacity to disrupt traditional... more
bricolagekitchen aka Gillian Whiteley:
Sounding Transitory Utopias: Improvisation, Potenza and Praxis
Improvisation is frequently seen as an inherently radical cultural form for its spontaneity and its capacity to disrupt traditional notation and operate outside hierarchical musical structures and institutions. In a recent essay, Edwin Prévost argues that individual virtuoso improvisers persist, but the emphasis on collective play counters a capitalist ethos, remarking that during the activity of sound-making and performance, ‘the materials used are investigated constantly for their potential’. It is the radical nature of this potentiality – or more specifically potenza - which I wish to investigate and develop here. Potenza, with its simultaneous implications of potentiality and power, is extensively employed and discussed in the recent body of writings related to Italian autonomous Marxism, politics and philosophy. Furthermore, every spontaneous ‘coming together’ in live improvisation establishes a transitory utopian space of possibility, a short-lived site of cultural resistance or perhaps what, in 1985, Hakim Bey termed a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). Free improvisation promises a new community in a permanent state of re-formation and, even if on a small-scale, revolution – a state of continually ‘becoming’. I will argue that the praxis of improvisation might be usefully conceptualised with reference to Agamben’s writings on potentiality and ‘the coming community’ and will explore its subversive
Sounding Transitory Utopias: Improvisation, Potenza and Praxis
Improvisation is frequently seen as an inherently radical cultural form for its spontaneity and its capacity to disrupt traditional notation and operate outside hierarchical musical structures and institutions. In a recent essay, Edwin Prévost argues that individual virtuoso improvisers persist, but the emphasis on collective play counters a capitalist ethos, remarking that during the activity of sound-making and performance, ‘the materials used are investigated constantly for their potential’. It is the radical nature of this potentiality – or more specifically potenza - which I wish to investigate and develop here. Potenza, with its simultaneous implications of potentiality and power, is extensively employed and discussed in the recent body of writings related to Italian autonomous Marxism, politics and philosophy. Furthermore, every spontaneous ‘coming together’ in live improvisation establishes a transitory utopian space of possibility, a short-lived site of cultural resistance or perhaps what, in 1985, Hakim Bey termed a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). Free improvisation promises a new community in a permanent state of re-formation and, even if on a small-scale, revolution – a state of continually ‘becoming’. I will argue that the praxis of improvisation might be usefully conceptualised with reference to Agamben’s writings on potentiality and ‘the coming community’ and will explore its subversive