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In 1968, both Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, and U.S. cities erupted in riots; anti-war demonstrators chanted “the whole world is watching” as police beat and tear-gassed them in Chicago outside the Democratic convention. George Wallace led a popular political movement of Klan sympathizers and White Citizens Councils in a vicious backlash against the gains of the Civil Rights movement; and the vengeful, paranoid Richard Nixon was elected president and began to intensify the war in Vietnam and pursue his program of harassment and imprisonment of black Americans and anti-war activists through Hoover’s FBI (and later the bogus “war on drugs”).
Good times, and given several pertinent similarities to our current moment, it seems like a year to revisit if we want to see recent examples of organized, determined resistance by a very beleaguered Left. We might look to the Black Panthers, the Yippies, or Students for a Democratic Society, to name a few prominent and occasionally affiliated groups. But we can also revisit a near-revolution across the ocean, when French students and workers took to the Paris streets and almost provoked a civil war against the government of authoritarian president Charles de Gaulle. The events often referred to simply as Mai 68 have haunted French conservatives ever since, such that president Nicolas Sarkozy forty years later claimed their memory “must be liquidated.”
May 1968, wrote Steven Erlanger on the 40th anniversary, was “a holy moment of liberation for many, when youth coalesced, the workers listened and the semi-royal French government of de Gaulle took fright.” As loose coalitions in the U.S. pushed back against their government on multiple fronts, the Paris uprising (“revolution” or “riot,” depending on who writes the history) brought together several groups in common purpose who would have otherwise never have broken bread: “a crazy array of leftist groups,” students, and ordinary working people, writes Peter Steinfels, including “revisionist socialists, Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists, surrealists and Marxists. They were anticommunist as much as anticapitalist. Some appeared anti-industrial, anti-institutional, even anti-rational.”
“Be realistic: Demand the impossible!” was one of the May movement’s slogans. A great many more slogans and icons appeared on “extremely fine examples of polemical poster art” like those you see here. These come to us via Dangerous Minds, who explain:
The Atelier Populaire, run by Marxist artists and art students, occupied the École des Beaux-Arts and dedicated its efforts to producing thousands of silk-screened posters using bold, iconic imagery and slogans as well as explicitly collective/anonymous authorship. Most of the posters were printed on newssheet using a single color with basic icons such as the factory to represent labor and a fist to stand for resistance.
The Paris uprisings began with university students, protesting same-sex dorms and demanding educational reform, “the release of arrested students and the reopening of the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris,” notes the Global Nonviolent Action Database. But in the following weeks the “protests escalated and gained more popular support, because of continuing police brutality.” Among the accumulating democratic demands and labor protests, writes Steinfels, was “one great fear… that contemporary capitalism was capable of absorbing any and all critical ideas or movements and bending them to its own advantage. Hence, the need for provocative shock tactics.”
This fear was dramatized by Situationists, who—like Yippies in the States—generally preferred absurdist street theater to earnest political action. And it provided the thesis of one of the most radical texts to come out of the tumultuous times, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. In a historical irony that would have Debord “spinning in his grave,” the Situationist theorist has himself been co-opted, recognized as a “national treasure” by the French government, writes Andrew Gallix, and yet, “no one—not even his sworn ideological enemies—can deny Debord’s importance.”
The same could be said for Michel Foucault, who found the events of May ’68 transformational. Foucault pronounced himself “tremendously impressed” with students willing to be beaten and jailed, and his “turn to political militancy within a post-1968 horizon was the chief catalyst for halting and then redirecting his theoretical work,” argues professor of philosophy Bernard Gendron, eventually “leading to the publication of Discipline and Punish,” his groundbreaking “genealogy” of imprisonment and surveillance.
Many more prominent theorists and intellectuals took part and found inspiration in the movement, including André Glucksmann, who recalled May 1968 as “a moment, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury.… a ‘cadaver,’ from which everyone wants to rob a piece.” His comments sum up the general cynicism and ambivalence of many on the French left when it comes to May ’68: “The hope was to change the world,” he says, “but it was inevitably incomplete, and the institutions of the state are untouched.” Both student and labor groups still managed to push through several significant reforms and win many government concessions before police and de Gaulle supporters rose up in the thousands and quelled the uprising (further evidence, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet argued this month, that “authoritarianism is the norm in France”).
The iconic posters here represent what Steinfels calls the movement’s “utopian impulse,” one however that “did not aim at human perfectibility but only at imagining that life could really be different and a whole lot better.” These images were collected in 2008 for a London exhibition titled “May 68: street Posters from the Paris Rebellion,” and they’ve been published in book form in Beauty is in the Street: A Visual Record of the May ’68 Paris Uprising. (You can also find and download many posters in the digital collection hosted by the Bibliotheque nationale de France.)
Perhaps the co-option Debord predicted was as inevitable as he feared. But like many radical U.S. movements in the sixties, the coordinated mobilization of huge numbers of people from every strata of French society during those exhilarating and dangerous few weeks opened a window on the possible. Despite its short-lived nature, May 1968 irrevocably altered French civil society and intellectual culture. As Jean-Paul Sartre said of the movement, “What’s important is that the action took place, when everybody believed it to be unthinkable. If it took place this time, it can happen again.”
“It’s nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. It was a joke. I wanted to make a parody of Jean Cocteau’s first film. That’s all. We shot it in two hours, for fun, one Sunday afternoon. It has no sort of meaning.”–Orson Welles
The Hearts of Age may have indeed been a lark when it was shot in 1934, but given that one of the two teenagers went on to direct Citizen Kane seven years later, no doubt it’s worth a second look.
Like all things Welles, his 19-year-old life was much more fantastic than most high school grads. Though he and school chum William Vance shot the film at their alma mater, the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, Welles had graduated three years earlier. According to Senses of Cinema, Welles
had spurned a scholarship to Harvard University, visited Ireland on a sketching tour only to talk his way into performing for the Dublin Gate Theatre, written detective stories for pulp magazines, and travelled through London, Paris, the Ivory Coast, Morocco and Seville, where he spent an afternoon as a professional bullfighter. After returning to America in 1933, introductions to Thornton Wilder and Alexander Wolcott led to a position in Katherine Cornell’s touring repertory company. Welles toured with the Cornell company from November 1933 to June 1934, appearing in three plays and making his New York debut as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet.
Back in Woodstock to sponsor a theater festival at the school, Welles and Vance borrowed a camera from their old principal and shot this eight minute short.
William Vance, Welles’ friend and co-director, kept the only copy until he donated it to the Greenwich Public Library, where film historian and writer Joseph McBride discovered it in 1969. McBride then wrote about it in Film Quarterly and the secret juvenilia of Welles was out of the closet. (“Why did Joe have to discover that film?” Welles was quoted as telling his cameraman).
Never entered into copyright, it’s a public domain film and so has been available on various platforms for years. (I saw it in the ‘90s as part of a “before they were famous” short film festival with student work by Lynch, Scorsese, and Spielberg).
The short indeed looks like a parody of surrealist film, a bit like Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet as Welles intended, but with a bit of René Clair’s Entr’Acte and some good ol’ Eisensteinian montage thrown in.
Welles appears in heavy stage makeup as a rich, older man in a top hat and cane, looking not too far from the elderly Charles Foster Kane. His then girlfriend and future first wife Virginia Nicholson plays an old hag who rides forlornly back and forth on a bell. There’s a clown in blackface played by Paul Edgerton, an Indian in a blanket (co-director William Vance in a cameo) and a Keystone cop, which some websites say is also Nicholson. But Charles “Blackie” O’Neal is also credited as a performer without a role and he indeed may be the actor playing the Keystone Cop. (O’Neal, by the way, would later be father to Ryan O’Neal.)
Although he dismissed the film, Welles’ preoccupations with death are here, right at the beginning of his career, with suicides, coffins, skulls, and gravestones featuring prominently. And though it’s no masterpiece and honestly a bit of a mess, it shows a director interested in experimenting with film, with humor, and the wonders of makeup.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
“Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. ‘It is possible,’ says the gatekeeper, ‘but not now.’ ” So begins Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law,” a short story first published in 1915 but still resonant just over a century later.
It takes no great intimacy with the work of the man who also wrote the likes of “The Metamorphosis” and The Castle, which ultimately drove his name into the lexicon as a byword for absurdly intransigent bureaucracy and the irony of struggling against it, to figure out whether the man ever does get to see the law. Most readers now first encounter the text of “Before the Law” when they read a priest telling it to Josef K, protagonist of Kafka’s posthumously published 1925 novel The Trial. Some see it before they read it in the form of thepinscreen animation (by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, the masters of that recherché art) that precedes Orson Welles’ polarizing cinematic adaptation of the book.
A few years ago, the Barcelona-based animator Alessandro Novelli created his own update of the parable, The Guardian. Using a mixture of two- and three-dimensional animation in a stark, line-drawn-looking black and white, it envisions the man (sporting a thoroughly modern beard and pair of severely tapered pants) and his journey through mountains, woods, and cities to the gate. Once he reaches it, his lifelong standoff with the gatekeeper opens up a number of unexpected visual realms, taking us atop a chessboard, inside an alarm clock, beside falling dominos, deep underwater, and up into the night sky.
Unlike Alexeieff and Parker’s straight adaptation, The Guardian extends the story: Kafka’s stern sentinel and his utterly impassable portal turn into a challenge aimed more at the man’s fortitude. “Wherever it is you go to now,” says the gatekeeper after he has finally given the aged and weakened protagonist his chance, “remember this gate, and that this gate existed and was opened just for you. Yet you never found the strength to cross it.” In Kafka’s original, when the gate closes, it closes with an existential finality; in Novelli’s it re-opens “for the ones who will come. For the ones who will be brave.”
We so often hear pictures described as worth a thousand words apiece, but the Philographics project seems to have found a way to increase that value by at least 27,218. Or it has if you believe its blurb from Co.Design: “It takes the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 28,250 words to explain the woolly concept of relativism. It takes Genis Carreras 32 words and a single image.” When the Girona, Spain-based graphic designer harnessed his professional background in graphic design to his interest in philosophy, something hitherto unseen resulted: a visual dictionary of philosophy.
“I started the project two years ago with the intention to merge the world of philosophy and graphic design,” writes Carreras on the page of the Philographics Kickstarter drive, which raised £65,217 in 2013. “In the beginning it was a set of 24 posters, explaining philosophical theories like Dualism, Free Will, Existentialism or Idealism using only shapes and colour. But so many important ‘isms’ were left out that I decided to add more designs to the collection. Today the project consists of 95 designs, each of them depicting a different ‘ism’ using a unique combination of geometric shapes, colors and a short definition of the theory.”
The video above shows some examples, more of which you can browse one-by-one at Studio Carreras’ site, which also sells art prints, postcards, and the book Philographics: Big Ideas in Simple Shapes. Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova calls the results, which look a bit like the kind of high-design midcentury paperback covers that have lately come back into vogue, “a playful and thoughtful celebration of symbolic and metaphorical thinking — that distinctly human faculty that is the hallmark of our imagination,” and one meant to “tickle our curiosity and spark deeper interest in influential theories of human nature and human purpose that those of us not formally trained in philosophy may not have previously been inspired to explore.”
These images certainly make the famously wordy field of philosophy — and one so often lampooned for that wordiness — infinitely more inviting for the philosophically inclined visual thinkers among us. If Carreras is considering Kickstarting another edition of Philographics posters, might we suggest blacklight versions? Dorm-room philosophical discussions the world over may attain a new level of rigor as a result.
To get a brief introduction to Kessler’s unified theory of mental illness, watch the animated primer above. It comes courtesy of The Atlantic. Get more background on Kessler’s book by reading this review in The New York Times.
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By now, most people are familiar with the term “school-to-prison pipeline,” the description of a system that funnels troubled students through disciplinary program after program. Detentions, suspensions, and often expulsions further aggravate many students’ already difficult lives, and send them “back to the origin of their angst and unhappiness—their home environments or their neighborhoods,” writes Carla Amurao for PBS’ Tavis Smiley Reports. Harsh disciplinary policies don’t actually change behavior, and “statistics reflect that these policies disproportionately target students of color and those with a history of abuse, neglect, poverty or learning disabilities.”
In short, students come to school with significant stresses and setbacks, and are themselves treated as problems to be quarantined or forced out. But why not instead teach those students—why not teach all students—effective means of coping with stress and setbacks? I can think of almost no more useful a set of skills to carry into adulthood, or into a troubled home or neighborhood situation. As the CBS This Morning segment above reports, one school in Baltimore is attempting to so equip their students, with a yoga and meditation program during and after school that takes the place of detention and other punishments.
The Robert W. Coleman Elementary School adopted a twice-a-day yoga and mindfulness practice during school hours for all students, called “Mindful Moments”; and an after-school program called Holistic Me, which “hosts 120 male and female students,” writes Newsweek, “and involves yoga, breathing exercises and meditative activities. Disruptive students are brought to the Mindful Moment Room for breathing practices and discussion with a counselor and are instructed on how to manage their emotions.” As we’ve previously noted on this site, these kinds of activities have been shown in research studies to significantly reduce stress, anxiety, and depression and to improve concentration and memory.
In the Holistic Me program at Coleman, “which focuses on prekindergarden through fifth-grade students,” administrators already noticed a difference in the first year. “Instead of the students fighting or lashing out,” says principal Carlillian Thompson in the video above, they started to use words to solve their problems.” None of the students in the program have received suspensions or detentions, and many have become leaders and high achievers. The program was founded in 2001 by brothers Atman and Ali Smith and their friend Andres Gonzalez, all Baltimore locals. In the past 15 years, their Holistic Life Foundation and its partners have offered a variety of enrichment activities but focused primarily on yoga and mindfulness practices.
Using these techniques, students learn to resolve conflicts peacefully and to reduce the amount of emotional turmoil in their lives. Rather than further alienating or traumatizing already stressed-out kids, this kind of intervention prepares them for academic and social resilience. The foundation has rapidly expanded since 2015, receiving federal funding and delivering programs to Charlottesville, Minneapolis, Madison, and abroad. It may not have changed the course of “school-to-prison pipeline” policies just yet, but it has shown a constructive way forward for other schools like Baltimore’s Patterson High, which has adopted a 15-minute yoga and mindfulness practice at the beginning and end of each day for every one of its students.
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We post copious resources for the study of philosophy on this site, such that you can obtain a full college-level survey understanding of the subject on your own by taking the many free classes, listening to the many free lectures and podcasts, and reading the many free texts, ebooks and commentaries you’ll find here. But several of our posts have met with a similar reader objection: where is the Eastern philosophy?
The question could also be put to almost any academic department of philosophy. One answer I’ve often heard dismisses it altogether. Philosophy, some say, developed in the West, first in ancient Greece, then in Rome, the succeeding Christian empire, and the secular age that followed. It is a European pursuit and tradition. Other culturally partial critics, who wish to appear enlightened, are willing to concede that “the world’s Muslims,” as Richard Dawkins tweeted a few years back, “did great things in the Middle Ages,” at least providing a critical bridge between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Scholasticism.
Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes kept in dialogue with the Greeks after Europe had forgotten them, and preserved the only work of Aristotle we have. But that was then. What have they done for us lately? Attitudes like this, argues philosophy professor Peter Adamson, are prejudices with little basis in fact, and part of the reason for a dearth of high-quality, accessible Eastern philosophy resources in English. Adamson, who has made significant contributions to the study of philosophy online with his podcast, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, fills in the gap with his series on Islamic and Indian philosophy in several parts.
Beginning with philosophy in the Islamic world in Episode 171, “Eastern Traditions,” at the top, Adamson covers “influential thinkers of the twelfth century like Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and Suhrawardī, focusing on their legacy in the Eastern realms of central Asia and Persia, moving on to the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, and ending with developments in twentieth century philosophy.” Against dismissive claims like Dawkins’ that these centuries were “a time of intellectual and scientific decline in Islamic civilization,” Adamson argues they were “in fact a time of remarkable achievement in fields like logic and astronomy as well as the various disciplines of philosophy.” See all three parts of the Islamic Philosophy series above.
Adamson shares the introduction to Indian philosophy, just above, with NYU’s Jonardon Ganeri, and the two lay out a case for the tradition as “primarily a way of life and search for the highest good.” As usual, Adamson brings on guest scholars and provides a list for further reading on the podcast’s site. And as usual, his historical frameworks are rigorous and very well-researched. This series breaks into two main categories (below). The second part of the series focuses on the development of a formal tradition, the “sūtra (literally ‘thread’)… a genre of writing in which ideas were set forth in brief, aphoristic form. Various sūtras were taken as authoritative and foundational for numerous schools of Indian thought, which devoted further commentaries to the sūtras.”
As he has done with many of his other series, Adamson has adapted the Islamic Philosophy podcasts in book form, Philosophy in the Islamic World: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 3. His even-handedness and erudition make this series a joy to listen to, though he’d also encourage us to read the philosophers he discusses, if possible. If you’re new to reading philosophy, or to Adamson’s podcast, you’d do well to read his recently posted All 20 ‘Rules for History of Philosophy,’ which he has brought together in one place as “guidelines encapsulating what I see as good practice in studying the history of philosophy.” (Rule 8: “Read the whole text.”)
Many of these guidelines rub up against the current orthodoxies, assumptions and, frankly, snobberies of some contemporary academic philosophy. Among these, “Rule 14: Take religion seriously” and “Rule 15: Be broadminded about what counts as ‘philosophy.’” And for those who not only dismiss but also embrace entire cultures’ philosophical traditions for one defining reason—Indian thought is “spiritual” or “non-violent”; Islamic thought is “tolerant” or “intolerant”—Adamson offers Rule 18: “don’t essentialize.” As becomes clear on even a cursory listen to the podcasts in these series, what we tend to believe about “non-western” philosophy operates far in excess of what most of us actually know about it.
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