Week 9: Collective Ambivalence

April 2

Ethan Philbrick, Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence (2023) 

Companion sources:

• Julius Eastman, “Gay Guerilla” (1979)
  
• Regrouping (US: Lizzie Borden, 1976) [75 minutes]
• Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion (1974)
  

Lily Scherlis, “Experiences in Groups,” N+1 (2025)

Endnotes, “We the Unhappy Few”

Fred Moten, “The Mystic Group” (2019)

Please annotate a page from Ethan’s Group Works or one of the companion texts and write a question or prompt for class. Share these with me by 5pm on Wednesday.

Ethan Philbrick will visit class 




There will be a lunchtime workshop with Ethan after class. If you’d like to attend, let me know!




Additional:


Samuel Delany, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1979)

Wilfrid Bion, Experiences in Groups (1961)

Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (1970)

Lauren Berlant, “On Being in Life without Wanting the World: No World Poetics, or, Elliptical Life,” in On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022)

Sarah Schulman, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity (Penquin Random House: 2005)

Thinking Collective / Collective Thinking, eds. Eva Bentcheva, Annie Jael Kwan, and Ming Tiampo (ICI Press: 2025)