Abstract

In work that is explicitly critical or transgressive, one’s immediate public or community is likely to be other people who are either engaged in creative projects of self and social transformation, or whose existence necessitates ways of thinking, learning and acting that are radically opposed to the dominant forms. Such practices can create liberating and risky spaces for playful experimentation, free dialogue, human connection and critical activity. However, they can also insulate participants not just from the challenges of those who are excluded from or silenced by the practices themselves, but also from deeper questions about what makes such practices possible. It is easy to overestimate the transformative power of discrete practices as it is to underestimate the conditions that make them possible. It is also easy to confuse privileged or forced experiences of transformative learning with evidence of the viability of radical democratic politics on a larger scale. My concern is less with how to improve physical or cognitive access to cultural work that is self-defined as radical creative, and more with finding ways of opening up space for radical ways of thinking, being, relating and acting in everyday life.