The Utopia Workshop Ltd

Adult Community Education and Arts
directed by Robin Sivapalan, an adult education organiser based in London

Sous les feux d'artifice
the clair-obscur of Europe's lost library, gathering

"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

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. You'll work with three curated reading lists concurrenty, one from each section below, as part of self-faciliated group. The final 2 months are dedicated to collectively producing a play with public educational workshops.

It's affordable way for passionate local educators to belong to an advanced dialogic learning community in the humanities. It calls for a serious commitment to be able to engage with the programme adequately - a personal and collective, intrinsic, dedication: at least 2-3 hours reading each day, meeting with one of your 3 study groups each week. And according to skill, experience and capacity, members in each group should expect to plan or co-plan & facilitate sessions, with support from Robin.

It's yet to be decided how access to the book collection will be managed - whether to hire a space as a shared reading room, and even in that case, which books can be lent out, with many hard to replace. The discussion groups will be held in pubs or cafe; what we lose in calm/focus we gain in connection with the wider world.

The course will only run if 36 people are ready to enrol. This would create 3 groups of 12, from the Founders, Foundations and from the Articulations, Application courses; and 4 groups of 9 people following four of the Octogan of Agon courses. The recruitment thresholds are then 48, 60, an ideal maximum of 72 people. Some compromise will be needed to decide on which courses to select if there aren't the numbers for all of them to run.

"Nous lisons pour redevenir les auteurs de nos vies." (We read to become once again the authors of our own lives.) — Hélène Cixous, L’Heure de Clarice Lispector

"The fourth class of readers may be compared to the slave of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, preserves only the pure gem, and is himself profited by his labours and profiting others." — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare, 1811

"The unconscious is that chapter of my history which is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere." — Jacques Lacan, Écrits, 1966

"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer."— Simone Weil

"The revolutionary spirit is a social creative power... it is the soul of the collective, the intellect that gives the mass its direction and its eyes." — Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918

“A community of readers engaged with serious books becomes as individuals respond to the book and define its cultural and individual meaning, a community of inquiry” - In Defense of Reading, Daniel R. Schwarz

"The space of literature is not only that of an institution... it is also the space of a resistance, the place where a democratic 'right to say everything' is exercised." — Jacques Derrida, Passions, 1993

"We need a 'Community of Christians'—not a body of thinkers, but a body of people who are able to think."— T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939

"I call experience a journey to the end of the possible... This experience is not a matter of isolated individual study; it is essentially a communication." — Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, 1943

"I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards... the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.'" — Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?

"Men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do." — 1 Chronicles 12:32 Sons of Issachar

"Discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle; discourse is the power which is to be seized." Discourse on Language, 1970, Foucault