Do you want to read Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote? Or the So’to creation story, The Watunna? Or Karl Marx’ Das Kapital? Or The Epic of Gilgamesh? Do you want to read books like these in an informal setting where an 18 year old and a 45 year old and an 70 year old can come together in a conversation facilitated by an experienced teacher?
The Tacoma Institute for Convivial Culture exists to provide a refuge for kind of deep, contemplative reading which is hard to find in formal educational institutions and which is difficult to practice amidst the distractions of our everyday life today. We offer various kinds of classes, seminars, and events, centering on great works of literature, art, philosophy, and religion from across the world and across time. We think that these works not only preserve perspectives from which we can learn, but also allow us to become more aware our own and our society’s unquestioned assumptions – things we tend to unthinkingly presume about human beings, or about human society, or about reality itself. At TICC, we discuss these texts in a non-specialized setting, without forbidding methodologies and technical vocabularies, and without grades and credits. TICC classes, or ‘conversations,’ are rooted in the creative collaboration between our teachers, who guide the conversation, and you, the student, who bring your own experiences and interests to the books we read.
TICC also provides a home for thinking about and encouraging convivial culture in various forms: the human capacity to assist each other in building equitable and sustainable communities, without the aid of experts and authorities, from the ground up.
Please join us for one of our classes, seminars, or events.
“At every moment, our concern for some matter is solicited. But our ability to think deeply and precisely about any of these particular matters is compromised by the “intrusive stimuli” which crowd in on us. Our attention is pulled first by one thing and then the next, at a continuously accelerating pace. The result is an inability to pause, and truly think – about anything. Our “hyperactive thinking” (Byung-Chul Han) and the resulting “scattered mode of awareness” also causes us to speed past the many rich sources (art works, philosophy or theory, our own or others’ experiences) which we might draw on to think about any particular thing. But we need to be able to think more deeply and more precisely about these matters of concern we encounter every day in the current media environment, and which then echo in our personal conversations. TICC Close Readings are an effort to address this problem – to create a space within which we can explore some forgotten context for or assumption behind a contemporary issue. The idea of supplying a ‘forgotten context’ or ‘overooked assumption’ is already a trope of many news articles, YouTube videos, and workshops. But in most cases these contexts or assumptions are offered first, so that – in a second step – one then understands the correct view of the matter in question. TICC Close Readings have a different aim: simply to open up space for “deep, contemplative attention” to a matter of current concern. Participants may apply what we learn together in quite different ways, individually or collectively.
Night or weekend seminars exploring particular issues