Events
31 May 2023 Start
31 May 2023 End
4pm (UK) / 6pm (Greece) Time
Greece / online British School at Athens, Souedias 52, Athens, Greece / online

e-mail.: [email protected]

Acid History

Wednesday, 31 May, 2023

Upper House Seminar by Joshua Whitaker (University of the Arts London, BSA Artist in Residence), entitled ‘Acid History’.

Abstract

‘Acid History’ is neither a record of psychedelic culture nor a catalogue of LSD experience. ‘Acid’ is deployed within the seminar, as Jeremy Gilbert has theorised it, as an adjective— a term that is both mystical in its practice and adamant in its materialism¹. It suggests a methodology of history which employs ‘weirdness’ (in its oldest sense, of controlling fate, becoming, and bending) to radically rethink the conditions of the past, and produce a future which escapes neoliberal politics. The seminar will link; St Paul, the Delphic oracle, fate, the Weird Sisters, puppets, collective joy, dance, and a ‘spirit of place’ using film, music, performance, and the conventions of a traditional lecture, as Avery Gordon puts it, ‘to consider a different way of seeing, one that is less mechanical, more willing to be surprised, to link imagination and critique, one that is more attuned to the task of “conjur[ing] up the appearances of something that [is] absent”’².

You can participate in the event either in-person in Athens or live online via Zoom.

Please register to attend IN PERSON at the BSA in Athens via Eventbrite here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/joshua-whitaker-acid-history-tickets-643556884967

Please register to attend ONLINE via Zoom here:

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jrtClyFrR6-ueVS-sIc_wA

Notes

  1. Gilbert, Jeremy. ‘Psychedelic Socialism’. openDemocracy. Accessed 6 April 2023. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/psychedelic-socialism/.
  2. Gordon, Avery F., and Janice Radway. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
    Imagination. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Pg. 24.