
The Art of the Impossible
Date and time
Description
Politics is meant to be ‘the art of the possible’ – yet the defining political developments of recent years have been events widely declared ‘impossible’ until they happened. I’m interested in how we find our bearings in a time when the boundaries of political possibility are repeatedly breached.
Over five days at Newspeak House, I’m hosting conversations with artists, technologists, thinkers and doers about this. Mostly, this will mean a few of us sitting around a table together, but on the last night I want to open it up to anyone else who wants to join us, to hear a bit about where the conversations have led us – and maybe try out some of what we’ve been talking about.
I’ll be joined by guests including Billy Bottle and Liz Slade and probably some of the others who have been involved over the weekend.
I can’t say where we’ll have got to by Monday night, but here are some of the starting points for our conversations:
• This suggestion from Will Davies in the LRB: ‘The coincidence of the Corbyn surge with the horror of Grenfell Tower has created the conditions – and the demand – for a kind of truth and reconciliation commission on forty years of neoliberalism.’
• These lines from theatre-maker Chris Goode: ‘my sense is that only seldom is the problem that we ‘don’t know’ – or, at any rate, that we don’t know enough. The real problem is that we don’t have a living-space in which to fully know what we know, in which to confront that knowledge and respond to it emotionally without immediately becoming entrenched in a position of fear, denial and hopelessness.’
• This Compass report from Indra Adnan on the future of political parties.
And somewhere in the background are a series of occasional posts I’ve written, starting the morning after the UK general election of 2015, which people seem to have found helpful in making sense of unexpected political events.
If you want to get in touch, it's dougaldhine at gmail.
The event is free – but we’ll take donations to cover Billy’s travel costs for getting here from Devon.
This has all come together at the last minute because I was coming to London for a friend’s wedding and Newspeak House kindly offered to host me for a short residency. Big thanks to Ed Saperia – and to others who have helped, especially Maddy Costa. Also thanks to Kaospilots for covering my Interrail pass which made it possible to get here from Sweden without flying.