This March at Central Saint Martins, teachers and students from a seminal '60s/'70s experiment in art education gathered to reconsider the past in the light of today's crisis-ridden academy.

The first in an irregular series of Mute columns kicks off with some reflections on a very special week for the UK and its 'plabour' pool

The production of a normative human body is a vital means of social control. In an interview with Stefan Szczelkun, artist Alexa Wright explains how her work experiments with the defended boundaries of the human/self, and the affects unleashed by their transgression

Guy Hocquenghem's frank, candid and provocative text was one that took stock of the desiring-politics of the gay liberation movement. Queer cruising zine collective, B.T.F.A, discover that it still has a fresh take on sexual possibilities and the normalising power of phallocratic roles

With his insistent psychologisation of the elusive novelist B. Traven, '70s documentary film-maker and biographer William Wyatt demonstrates a singular inability to understand the political stakes of refusing identification. Neinsager opens and then firmly shuts the Traven file again

Is there more to the refusal of identity than the romantic escape fantasies of certain anarchist cells or the necessary survival tactics of the ‘illegal'? John Cunningham takes up the case of clandestinity and resistance in the age of biopolitics

Closedness and Openness

What happens when musicians smash the metronome of developmental time and the prison-house of language?, asks Howard Slater in this month's Mute Music Column

On the way to a full silence the mark of language

brands the body with a reminder of the time

 

- Delphine