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/
Please register to attend ONLINE via Zoom here:
https://us06web.zoom.us/
Notes
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Gilbert, Jeremy. ‘Psychedelic Socialism’. openDemocracy. Accessed 6 April 2023. https://www.opendemocracy.net/
en/psychedelic-socialism/. - Gordon, Avery F., and Janice Radway. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Pg. 24.