2026-2027 Grant Watson's seminar: Scritti Politti II

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

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

Seminar participants first year: 

Scritti Politti II

INTRODUCTION:

Sitting down to read a book, alone or in a group. Reading out loud, taking notes, copying a sentence, writing a new sentence; all routine actions in a pedagogy. Other preoccupations might capsize the process (personal struggles, social urgencies, political crisis) and make them feel irrelevant. This seminar questions the role of reading and writing in an art school context and their continued importance. The title Scritti Politti comes from the eighties pop band, who took it from Antonio Gramsci’s Scritti Politici, his political writings. The band emerged from art school at a time when Marxism and ‘wild’ theory mixed with the visual arts and postpunk experimentation. The seminar looks at writing as a creative practice, and literature as a resource for doing political work, and as its own kind of politics, beyond polemic or propaganda, including through works of Queer Marxism. Fredrick Jameson points to ‘a cultural revolution within the reading process,’ a type of ‘pedagogic surgery’ that breaks or destabilises existing patterns of thought. Jameson was interested in aesthetic forms and how these emerge in relation to social formations. From a postmodern aesthetics entangled with the consumer culture of ‘late’ capitalism to a sentence that reconstructs the world that made it possible, reviewing literary and artistic forms lets us glimpse the forces shaping society, and better understand the signifying practices that mediate it. John Keene's Counternarratives adopts the literary modes that underscore the historical record and underwrite its authenticity, then sabotages them. This novel deploys conventions such as the travelogue, the epistle, and the footnote to unleash a cast of marginalised protagonists, and recentre queer and Black histories. His characters pursue multiple pathways within shifting historical paradigms, including the Atlantic Slave Trade, the American Civil War, the Haitian Revolution, and British, Portuguese, and Dutch colonialism, but are not reducible to them; instead, they act in curious and unexpected ways. Marxist scholar and poet Himani Bannerji describes how human experience is not simply a mechanical relationship to economic or identitarian determinants, but that it navigates an ensemble of social relations, with literature seeking to think and translate these lived experiences into writing. Another example of how form corresponds to social urgency appears in Sam R. Delany’s Return to Nevërÿon series, where the sword-and-sorcery genre collapses in the context of an emergent AIDS crisis. Shifting from the utopian to the autobiographical, Tales of Plagues and Circuses in Fight from Nevërÿon gives a diaristic account of New York at the start of the 1980s. A more recent iteration of this question comes in Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement, where he asks why literature has not yet found the language needed to address the climate breakdown. In Politically Red, Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsió explore the linked practices of reading and writing. Here, writing departs from a mimetic process of copying words and sentences in order to enter the world of existing texts. The authors see this as inhabiting the archive of thought forms, with writing as a collective endeavour and a collaboration with the past, and, in this book, an immersion in a rich history of cultural Marxism. The seminar will explore the politics of reading and writing through the study of these and other interlinked texts. Through close readings and practical workshops, it supports the development of a writing practice and the submission of a dissertation. 

Readings:

Bannerji, Himani. (2020). The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers.

Butler, Octavia E. (1995). Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows.

Cadava, Eduardo, & Nadal-Melsió, Sara. (2023). Politically Red. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Delany, Samuel R. (1979). Tales of Nevèrÿon. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Ghosh, Amitav. (2016). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Jameson, Frederic. (1971) Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 

Jameson, Fredric. (1991). "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." In Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Chapter 1, pp. 1–54). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Keene, John. (2015). Counternarratives. New York, NY: New Directions Publishing.

Mieli, Mario. (2018). Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique (D. Fernbach, Trans.). London, UK: Pluto Press. (Original work published 1977).

Salton-Cox, Glyn. (2018). Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (1993). "Queer and Now." In Tendencies (pp. 1–20). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.