2025-2026 Grant Watson's seminar: SCRITTI POLITTI

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

Seminar participants second year: Agnese Fieno Spolverini, Aimeé Phillips, Patrick Freriksen, Muyang Teng, Magdalena Beliavska, Leo Hugendubel

Seminar participants first year: Shoshana Walfish, Emma Caspers, Gianfranco Colla, Bea Secchia, Ayris Taban, Tomaso de Luca

SCRITTI POLITTI

INTRODUCTION:

What makes a text political? Does politics reside in the content, the affect, the actions, or community convoked? Using examples from literature and critical theory this seminar will examine the politics of reading and writing with particular reference to where these sit in an art school context. The title ‘Scritti Politti’ is borrowed from the eighties pop band, who took it from Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Scritti Politici’ his political writings. Scritti Politti emerged from the art school at a time when Marxism, and ‘wild’ theory mixed with the visual arts and with postpunk experimentation. According to Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsió authors of ‘Politically Red,’ the historical layering and constellation of references in a text, mean that every scene of reading becomes a crowd. Their collection of essays on left thinkers such as Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and W.E.B. Du Bois, takes as its frontispiece a manuscript page from the ‘German Ideology’ by Marx and Engels, where the text is overlayed by the scribbled drawings of heads in the margin, that appear to summon a multitude and to mobilise the masses. In the spirit of Benjamin’s ‘Author as Producer,’ they argue for an engaged practice that deploys words in the world to material effect. Conversely, the position of the autonomous artist is examined by Leela Gandhi in her chapter ‘Art’ from ‘Affective Communities, Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship.’ Through a study of Oscar Wilde’s circle and his writing, Gandhi seeks to place the aesthetic movement on the side of the outcast, through its implication of homosexuality, and though Wilde’s association with ant-imperial, socialist, and anarchist thought. Through the archive, Gandhi develops an argument against doctrinaire Marxism and the retrieval of an eclectic transcultural solidarity under the banner of utopian socialism. The role of minoritarian writers is famously developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their study of Kafka. They see his texts as the space for experimentation and becoming and as the assemblage of voices from which new assemblages might emerge. In Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambrano’s recent book ‘Tone’ the process of emergence is given special attention in a study by ‘The Committee to Investigate Atmosphere.’ This reads as a heterodox research project of interest to creative practitioners and begins with a question (what is tone?), includes a review of literature, a methodology of collective practice, and has findings, which come (after Kafka) in a report to an academy. This seminar will explore the politics of reading and writing, through the study of a diverse but interlinked texts, as well as through practical workshops, and is designed to support the development of a thesis.

Readings:

Walter Benjamin Author as Producer, in K.M. Newton (ed.) Twentieth Century Literary Theory, Macmillan Education, New York: 1997

Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities, Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Duke University Press, Durham & London: 2006

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1997

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 2007

Karl Marx Theses on Feuerbach, in David McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx, Selected Writing, Oxford University press, New York: 2000

Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice, Sort of books, London: 2025

Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsió, Politically Red, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts: 2023

Shola von Reinhold, Lote, Jacaranda Books, London: 2020

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Goal and Other Poems, Penguin Classics, London: 2010

Oscar Wilde, The Complete Fairy Tales, Penguin Random House, London: 2025

Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno, Tone, Columbia University Press, New York: 2024