The London Word Festival team have put up loads of wonderful pictures from that seminal evening of entertainment, Keep Printing and Carry On at STK. Darren Hayman, Jo Neary, and Murray Macaulay all in collaboration with the Henningham Family Press. And if that wasn’t enough, Universettee with guest mini-lecturers Sophie Mackay and David Barnes…
The other week I gave a lecture (the subject of which is not the subject of this blog) at the Universettee. As its name suggests, the Universettee is interested in shifting the seat of learning from the academy to the home – university to universettee. It’s a university of the comfy chair, and takes place in various people’s houses and flats around London. Lecturers are not paid, and neither are those who host the lectures.
Later on in the same week, I attended a concert. We arrived at a house in Hackney, deposited our coats on top of the bed as we would at a party, and were serenaded with Dvorak, Brahms and Schuman in a downstairs room. Interval drinks and nibbles were informal. Again, the event was free. Both evenings had the feel of a party, and involved the free and easy exchange of thoughts and culture in a homely setting.
It seems to me that these groups, events and projects are forming a new kind of public space – or, perhaps, are drawing our attention to the potential of the public space. For the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas the ‘public sphere’ could be a space for the radical renewing of democracy. Free from the atmosphere of oppression and coercion or the pressures of the bourgeois market, the ‘public sphere’ might be an exciting clamour of voices and ideas.
Perhaps – and only perhaps, because I teach in a university and see their essential value – the removing of the pressured culture of the academy can renew a practical and impassioned curiosity. Perhaps the ability to see a concert outside of its normal context – a context that to some extent is historically conditioned and not absolute – allows listeners to truly grapple with the music.
In other words, there may sometimes be a weight of expectation and rarification that hangs in the air of university halls, concert auditoriums, art galleries and the like. This isn’t a call for dumbing down, nor for a kind of hideous mercantilising of all cultural activity, as Peter Mandelson seems intent on pursuing. His proposals to tie university funding to some sort of basic economic performance indicator will kill scholarship, which thrives on the obscure.
What I am saying is that grand spaces – big institutional public spaces – sometimes terrify or oppress. We don’t want to and shouldn’t get rid of these spaces. But sometimes, just sometimes, shifting the centre of gravity can re-energise our engagement with ‘culture’. Bringing the ‘public sphere’ into the private space once in a while may just enable us to re-evaluate the place and role of ‘culture’ in contemporary Britain.
Ping* will be giving a lecture very soon called:
“Hunchbacks, Lunatics and Biopolitics in the work of W.G. Sebald”
The lecture will give a history of what is behind the many physically and mentally malformed characters in W.G. Sebald’s books. The lecture will touch upon all his works, concentrating the most on chapter 5 of The Rings of Saturn. This chapter is worth reading before you come to the lecture, but hopefully it will make sense even if you have never read any Sebald before. He Is A Great Writer.
RSVP to book a space at www.shytstem.biz/universettee
Date: Monday 31 March 2008
Speaker: Ping Henningham
Venue: Hackney
Time: 7.30 for 8pm start
*there’s no link to the Bauhaus, Ping just looks cute in this picture.
Today we did an interview for Arte TV with a lovely guy called Phillip Bremner which may be screened in October. They wanted to get the beginning of the lecture. The lecture went really well, although my English was too complex. I’ve gone through this change where my syntax is all over the place and my vocab increasingly esoteric being. At the end folks came to the front and formed a kind of spontaneous seminar. Thanks for coming!
I’m doing a lecture as part of Janice Harding’s Universettee lecture series on 16th April 2007. It is an introduction to the ideas of Slavoj Zizek. Click on the picture of Zizek below for details on how to join us:
The thing that drew me to reading his books initially was wanting to understand his enthusiastic interest in Christianity, despite being a Marxist Psychoanalyst. He says things that should be deeply unpopular, but everyone seems to love it. They’ve made him a kind of Elvis figure. I could save you some tough reading, or perhaps cause you to do some more. Who knows?
BUSH AND BLAIR ARE BUDDHISTS!!!
