An Animated Alan Watts Waxes Philosophical About Time in The Fine Art of Goofing Off, the 1970s “Sesame Street for Grown-Ups”

in Animation, Life, Philosophy, Television | May 19th, 2017

Time is a mea­sure of ener­gy, a mea­sure of motion. And we have agreed inter­na­tion­al­ly on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watch­es for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is a cir­cle, and that it is cal­i­brat­ed, and that each minute, or sec­ond, is marked by a hair­line which is made as nar­row as pos­si­ble, as yet to be con­sis­tent with being vis­i­ble. 

— Alan Watts

How­ev­er true, that’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly stress-induc­ing obser­va­tion from one who was known for his Zen teach­ings…

The pres­sure is ame­lio­rat­ed some­what by Bob McClay’s trip­py time-based ani­ma­tion, above, nar­rat­ed by Watts. Putting Mick­ey Mouse on the face of Big Ben must’ve gone over well with the coun­ter­cul­tur­al youth who eager­ly embraced Watts’ East­ern phi­los­o­phy. And the tan­gi­ble evi­dence of real live mag­ic mark­ers will prove a ton­ic to those who came of age before ani­ma­tion’s dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion.

The short orig­i­nal­ly aired as part of the ear­ly 70’s series, The Fine Art of Goof­ing Off, described by one of its cre­ators, the humorist and sound artist, Hen­ry Jacobs, as “Sesame Street for grown-ups.”

Time pre­oc­cu­pied both men.

One of Jacobs’ fake com­mer­cials on The Fine Art of Goof­ing Off involved a pitch­man exhort­ing view­ers to stop wast­ing time at idle pas­times: Log a few extra gold­en hours at the old grind­stone.

A koan-like skit fea­tured a gramo­phone through which a dis­em­bod­ied voice end­less­ly asks a stuffed dog, “Can you hear me?” (Jacobs named that as a per­son­al favorite.)

Watts was less punch­line-ori­ent­ed than his friend and even­tu­al in-law, who main­tained an archival col­lec­tion of Watts’ lec­tures until his own death:

And when we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word “now”; we think of the short­est pos­si­ble instant that is here and gone, because that cor­re­sponds with the hair­line on the watch. And as a result of this fab­u­lous idea, we are a peo­ple who feel that we don’t have any present, because the present is instant­ly van­ish­ing — it goes so quick­ly. It is always becom­ing past. And we have the sen­sa­tion, there­fore, of our lives as some­thing that is con­stant­ly flow­ing away from us. We are con­stant­ly los­ing time. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to be wast­ed. Time is mon­ey. And so, because of the tyran­ny of this thing, we feel that we have a past, and we know who we are in terms of our past. Nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were. 

Watch a com­plete episode of The Fine Art of Goof­ing Off here. Your time will be well spent.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

Take a Break from Your Fran­tic Day & Let Alan Watts Intro­duce You to the Calm­ing Ways of Zen

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Pre­dic­tion That Automa­tion Will Neces­si­tate a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Love Letters of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

in History, Philosophy | May 10th, 2017

The noto­ri­ous four-year affair between Han­nah Arendt and Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger has occa­sioned many a bit­ter aca­d­e­m­ic debate, for rea­sons with which you may already be famil­iar. If not, Alan Ryan sums it up suc­cinct­ly in a 1996 New York Review of Books essay:

She was a Jew who fled Ger­many in August 1933, a few months after Hitler’s assump­tion of pow­er. He was elect­ed Rec­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Freiburg in the spring of 1933, and in a noto­ri­ous inau­gur­al address hailed the pres­ence of the brown-shirt­ed storm-troop­ers in his audi­ence, claimed that Hitler would restore the Ger­man peo­ple to spir­i­tu­al health, and end­ed by giv­ing the famil­iar stiff-armed Nazi salute to cries of “Sieg Heil.” The thought that these two were ever soul­mates is hard to swal­low.

Arendt went on to write The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism and Eich­mann in Jerusalem, in which she used the phrase “banal­i­ty of evil” for the Nazi func­tionary on tri­al at Nurem­berg. Hei­deg­ger refused to dis­cuss his col­lab­o­ra­tion pub­licly and “remained silent about the exter­mi­na­tion of the Jews, about the ter­ror­ism of Hitler’s regime.” But as we’ve learned from his recent­ly pub­lished jour­nals, the so-called Black Note­books, he was pri­vate­ly a “con­vinced Nazi,” as Peter Gor­don observes, who “did not awak­en from his philo­soph­i­cal-polit­i­cal fan­tasies. They only grew more extreme.”

But indeed, Arendt and Hei­deg­ger were in love, dur­ing an affair that began when she was an 18-year-old stu­dent and he her mar­ried 36-year-old pro­fes­sor. Their let­ters show an illic­it rela­tion­ship devel­op­ing from cau­tion to infat­u­a­tion. Hei­deg­ger waxed roman­ti­cal­ly philo­soph­i­cal:

.…we become what we love and yet remain our­selves. Then we want to thank the beloved, but find noth­ing that suf­fices.

We can only thank with our selves. Love trans­forms grat­i­tude into loy­al­ty to our selves and uncon­di­tion­al faith in the oth­er. That is how love steadi­ly inten­si­fies its inner­most secret.

But both of them knew the rela­tion­ship could not last, and Hei­deg­ger sug­gest­ed that mov­ing on from him would be in her best inter­est as a young schol­ar. In 1929, Arendt met and became engaged to a Ger­man jour­nal­ist and class­mate in Heidegger’s sem­i­nar. She sent her pro­fes­sor a note on her wed­ding day which begins, “Do not for­get me, and do not for­get how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the bless­ing of my life.”

Before his Nazi appoint­ment, Arendt wrote to her for­mer lover and men­tor in 1932 or 33 upon hear­ing rumors “about Heidegger’s sym­pa­thy with Nation­al Social­ism.” (Her let­ter has been lost.) He replied with a num­ber of excus­es for spe­cif­ic acts—such as refus­ing to super­vise Jew­ish students—and assured her of his feel­ings, but “nowhere in the let­ter is there any denial of Nazi sym­pa­thies,” writes Adam Kirsch at The New York­er. The two met after the war in Freiburg, and Hei­deg­ger lat­er sent Arendt a pas­sion­ate, poet­ic let­ter in 1950, extolling the “excit­ing, still almost unspo­ken under­stand­ing” between them, “emerg­ing from an affin­i­ty that was cre­at­ed so quick­ly, that comes from so far away, that has not been shak­en by evil and con­fu­sion.”

Lat­er, in a 1969 birth­day trib­ute essay “Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger at Eighty,” Arendt penned what has gen­er­al­ly been tak­en as an exon­er­a­tion of Hei­deg­ger. In it, she “com­pared Hei­deg­ger to Thales,” writes Gor­don, “the ancient philoso­pher who grew so absorbed in con­tem­plat­ing the heav­ens that he stum­bled into the well at his feet.” The truth is quite a bit more com­pli­cat­ed than that, and quite a bit less lofty. But as Maria Popo­va elo­quent­ly writes, their rela­tion­ship “expos­es the com­plex­i­ty and con­tra­dic­tion of which the human spir­it is woven, its threads nowhere more ragged than in love.” Read many more excerpts from their let­ters at Brain Pick­ings. And find com­plete let­ters col­lect­ed in the vol­ume, Let­ters: 1925–1975 — Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger and Han­nah Arendt.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Look Inside Han­nah Arendt’s Per­son­al Library: Down­load Mar­gin­a­lia from 90 Books (Hei­deg­ger, Kant, Marx & More)

Heidegger’s “Black Note­books” Sug­gest He Was a Seri­ous Anti-Semi­te, Not Just a Naive Nazi

Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger Talks Phi­los­o­phy with a Bud­dhist Monk on Ger­man Tele­vi­sion (1963)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains Why If We Have True Meaning in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Darkest of Times

in Philosophy, Psychology | May 3rd, 2017

In one school of pop­u­lar rea­son­ing, peo­ple judge his­tor­i­cal out­comes that they think are favor­able as wor­thy trade­offs for his­tor­i­cal atroc­i­ties. The argu­ment appears in some of the most inap­pro­pri­ate con­texts, such as dis­cus­sions of slav­ery or the Holo­caust. Or in indi­vid­ual thought exper­i­ments, such as that of a famous inven­tor whose birth was the result of a bru­tal assault. There are a great many peo­ple who con­sid­er this think­ing repul­sive, moral­ly cor­ro­sive, and astound­ing­ly pre­sump­tu­ous. Not only does it assume that every ter­ri­ble thing that hap­pens is part of a benev­o­lent design, but it pre­tends to know which cir­cum­stances count as unqual­i­fied goods, and which can be blithe­ly ignored. It deter­mines future actions from a tidy and con­ve­nient sto­ry of the past.

We might con­trast this atti­tude with a more Zen stance, for exam­ple, a rad­i­cal­ly agnos­tic “wait and see” approach to every­thing that hap­pens. Not-know­ing seems to give med­i­tat­ing monks a great deal of seren­i­ty in prac­tice. But the the­o­ry ter­ri­fies most of us. Effects must have caus­es, we think, caus­es must have effects, and in order to pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen next (and there­by save our skins), we must know why we’re doing what we’re doing. The deep impulse is what psy­chol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist Vik­tor Fran­kl iden­ti­fies, in his pre-gen­der-neu­tral­ly titled book, as Man’s Search for Mean­ing. Despite the mis­use of this fac­ul­ty to cre­ate neu­rot­ic or dehu­man­iz­ing myths, “man’s search for mean­ing,” writes Fran­kl, “is the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion in his life and not a ‘sec­ondary ratio­nal­iza­tion’ of instinc­tu­al dri­ves.”

Fran­kl under­stood per­fect­ly well how the con­struc­tion of meaning—through nar­ra­tive, art, rela­tion­ships, social fic­tions, etc.—might be per­vert­ed for mur­der­ous ends. He was a sur­vivor of four con­cen­tra­tion camps, which took the lives of his par­ents, broth­er, and wife. The first part of his book, “Expe­ri­ences in a Con­cen­tra­tion Camp,” recounts the hor­ror in detail, spar­ing no one account­abil­i­ty for their actions. From these expe­ri­ences, Fran­kl draws a con­clu­sion, one he explains in the inter­view above in two parts from 1977. “The les­son one could learn from Auschwitz,” he says, “and in oth­er con­cen­tra­tion camps, in the final analy­sis was, those who were ori­ent­ed toward a meaning—toward a mean­ing to be ful­filled by them in the future—were most like­ly to sur­vive” beyond the expe­ri­ence. “The ques­tion,” Fran­kl says, “was sur­vival for what?” (See a short ani­mat­ed sum­ma­ry of Fran­kl’s book below.)

Fran­kl does not excuse the deaths of his fam­i­ly, friends, and mil­lions of oth­ers in his psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ry, which he calls logother­a­py. He cer­tain­ly does not triv­i­al­ize the most unimag­in­able of in-human expe­ri­ences. “We all said to each oth­er in camp,” he writes, “that there could be no earth­ly hap­pi­ness which could com­pen­sate for all we had suf­fered.” But it was not the hope of hap­pi­ness that “gave us courage,” he writes. It was the “will to mean­ing” that looked to the future, not to the past. In Frankl’s exis­ten­tial­ist view, we our­selves cre­ate that mean­ing, for our­selves, and not for oth­ers. Logother­a­py, Fran­kl writes, “defo­cus­es all the vicious-cir­cle for­ma­tions and feed­back mech­a­nisms which play such a great role in the devel­op­ment of neu­roses.” We must acknowl­edge the need to make sense of our lives and fill what Fran­kl called the “exis­ten­tial vac­u­um.” And we alone are respon­si­ble for writ­ing bet­ter sto­ries for our­selves.

To dig deep­er in Fran­kl’s phi­los­o­phy, you can read not only Man’s Search for Mean­ing but also The Will to Mean­ing: Foun­da­tions and Appli­ca­tions of Logother­a­py.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exis­ten­tial­ist Psy­chol­o­gist Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains How to Find Mean­ing in Life, No Mat­ter What Chal­lenges You Face

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Robert Pirsig Reveals the Personal Journey That Led Him to Write His Counterculture Classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

in Literature, Philosophy | April 26th, 2017

I well remem­ber pulling Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance from my par­ents’ shelves at age twelve or thir­teen, work­ing my way through a few pages, and stop­ping in true per­plex­i­ty to ask, “what is this?” The book fit no for­mal scheme or genre I had ever encoun­tered before. I under­stood its lan­guage, but I did not know how to read it. I still don’t, though I’ve had decades to study some of Pirsig’s ref­er­ences and influ­ences, from Pla­to to Kant to Dōgen. Is this mem­oir? Fic­tion? Phi­los­o­phy? A med­i­ta­tion on machin­ery, like Hen­ry Adams’ strange essay “The Dynamo and the Vir­gin”? Yes.

Pirsig’s coun­ter­cul­tur­al clas­sic, pub­lished in 1974 after five years of rejec­tions (121 in total) was “not… a mar­ket­ing man’s dream,” as the edi­tor at his even­tu­al pub­lish­er, William Mor­row, wrote to him at the time. Nev­er­the­less, it sold—“50,000 copies in three months,” writes the L.A. Times, “and more than 5 mil­lion in the decades since. The dense tome has been trans­lat­ed into at least 27 lan­guages…. Its pop­u­lar­i­ty made Pir­sig ‘prob­a­bly the most wide­ly read philoso­pher alive,’ one British jour­nal­ist wrote in 2006.’” Pir­sig, who died this past Mon­day, only wrote one oth­er work, the philo­soph­i­cal nov­el Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. But he will be remem­bered as an impor­tant, if quixot­ic, fig­ure in 20th cen­tu­ry thought.

Zen osten­si­bly recounts a motor­cy­cle jour­ney Pir­sig took with his son, Chris, and two friends. They are shad­owed by anoth­er char­ac­ter, Phae­drus, the author’s neu­rot­ic alter ego. Pir­sig poured all of him­self into the book: his unortho­dox philo­soph­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al jour­ney, his strug­gle with schiz­o­phre­nia, his close and fret­ful rela­tion­ship to his son (who lat­er suc­cumbed to drug addic­tion and was mur­dered at age 22, five years after Zen came out). It is a book “filled with unan­swered and, per­haps, unan­swer­able ques­tions.”

The kind of deep ambi­gu­i­ty and uncer­tain­ty Zen explores is not easy to write about, unsur­pris­ing­ly, and in the NPR inter­view above from 1974, Pir­sig describes his strug­gles as a writer—the dis­trac­tions and intru­sions, the self-doubt and con­fu­sion. Pir­sig seclud­ed him­self for much of the writ­ing of the book, and for much of it worked a day job writ­ing tech­ni­cal man­u­als, which explains quite a lot about its intri­cate lev­els of tech­ni­cal detail.

Pirsig’s descrip­tions of the hard-won self-dis­ci­pline (and exhaus­tion) that the writer’s life requires will ring true for any­one who has tried to write a book. He sums up his moti­va­tion suc­cinct­ly: “this was real­ly a com­pul­sive book. If I didn’t do it, I’d feel worse than if I did do it.” But Pir­sig found he couldn’t make any progress as a writer until he gave up try­ing to be “in quotes, a ‘writer,’” or play the role of one any­way. “It was always a sep­a­ra­tion of my real self from the act of writ­ing,” he says.

His process sounds like the freewrit­ing of Ker­ouac’s road nov­el or the auto­mat­ic writ­ing of the Sur­re­al­ists: “I could almost watch my hand mov­ing on the page; there was almost no voli­tion one way or the oth­er, it was just hap­pen­ing.” What he iden­ti­fies as the “sin­cer­i­ty” of the book’s voice helps steady read­ers who must trust a very unre­li­able nar­ra­tor to guide them through a phi­los­o­phy of what Pir­sig calls “quality”—a meta­phys­i­cal con­di­tion that under­lies reli­gions and philoso­phies East and West. “One can med­i­tate,” he wrote, “on the fact that the old Eng­lish roots for the Bud­dha and Qual­i­ty, God and good, appear to be iden­ti­cal.” Pir­sig sub­ject­ed all human endeav­or to the scruti­ny of “qual­i­ty,” includ­ing so-called “val­ue free” sci­ence, a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion he found dubi­ous.

In the BBC radio inter­view above, you can hear Pir­sig describe his per­son­al and intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney, which took him through a trou­bled child­hood in Min­neso­ta, a tour in the Kore­an War, an aca­d­e­m­ic career, and even­tu­al­ly a cen­tral role in the “whole attempt to reform Amer­i­ca” begun by “beat­niks” and “hip­pies” in San Fran­cis­co. (Both words, he wrote, were “clich­es and stereo­types… invent­ed for the antitech­nol­o­gists, the anti­sys­tem peo­ple.”) Urged by a uni­ver­si­ty col­league to pur­sue the ques­tion “what is qual­i­ty?,” Pir­sig under­took an obses­sive inves­ti­ga­tion. His will­ing­ness and courage to fol­low wher­ev­er it led defined the rest of his life as a writer and thinker.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What Are Lit­er­a­ture, Phi­los­o­phy & His­to­ry For? Alain de Bot­ton Explains with Mon­ty Python-Style Videos

12 Clas­sic Lit­er­ary Road Trips in One Handy Inter­ac­tive Map

Phi­los­o­phy of Reli­gion: A Free Online Course

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Discover the Creative, New Philosophy Podcast Hi-Phi Nation: The First Story-Driven Show About Philosophy

in Philosophy, Podcasts | April 24th, 2017

Let me call your atten­tion to a new and quite dif­fer­ent phi­los­o­phy pod­cast. Cre­at­ed by Bar­ry Lam (Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy at Vas­sar Col­lege), Hi-Phi Nation is a phi­los­o­phy pod­cast “that turns sto­ries into ideas.” Con­sid­er it “the first sound and sto­ry-dri­ven show about phi­los­o­phy, bring­ing togeth­er nar­ra­tive sto­ry­telling, inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism, and sound­track­ing.”

Above you can watch a trail­er that intro­duces Hi-Phi Nation, which is now avail­able on iTunes, Google Play, Sound­cloud and this web­site. Below, hear Episode 9 of Sea­son 1, called “The Ash­es of Truth.” Among oth­er things, it fea­tures film­mak­er Errol Mor­ris.

The first sea­son of Hi-Phi Nation has been made pos­si­ble by the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, The Cen­ter for Doc­u­men­tary Stud­ies at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, the Human­i­ties-Writ Large Fel­low­ship, and oth­er insti­tu­tions. Learn more about the show by read­ing these write-ups by Vas­sar and Prince­ton.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times 

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

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Philosophical, Sci-Fi Claymation Film Answers the Timeless Question: Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

in Animation, Comedy, Film, Philosophy, Science | April 21st, 2017

It’s a ques­tion that’s occu­pied our great­est thinkers, from Aris­to­tle and Pla­to to Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye:

Which came first—the chick­en or the egg?

The debate will like­ly rage as long as there’s a faith-based camp to square off against the evi­dence-based camp.

With that in mind, and the week­end loom­ing, we’re inclined to go with the Clay­ma­tion camp, in the form of Time Chick­en, Nick Black’s 6‑minute stop-motion med­i­ta­tion, above.

Described by its cre­ator as a “philo­soph­i­cal-action-fan­ta­sy into the world of sci­ence, reli­gion, knowl­edge and cre­ation,” Time Chick­en ben­e­fits from an appro­pri­ate­ly bom­bas­tic orig­i­nal score per­formed by the Prague Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra and the seem­ing-eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny of its admit­ted­ly clay-based, all-poul­try cast.

Black’s copi­ous cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ences and sci­ence fic­tion tropes are every bit as delec­table as a Mughal style egg-stuffed whole chick­en slow cooked in a rich almond-pop­py seeds-yogurt-&-saffron gravy.

Kudos to the film­mak­er, too, for eschew­ing the uncred­it­ed dub­bing that made fel­low clay­ma­tor Nick (Park)’s Chick­en Run a crossover hit, trust­ing instead in the (unsub­ti­tled) orig­i­nal lan­guage of his sub­jects.

Read­ers, watch this hilar­i­ous lit­tle film and weigh in. Which came first? The chick­en? Or the egg?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did Every­thing Begin?: Ani­ma­tions on the Ori­gins of the Uni­verse Nar­rat­ed by X‑Files Star Gillian Ander­son

Watch The Touch­ing Moment When Physi­cist Andrei Linde Learns That His The­o­ries on the Big Bang Were Final­ly Val­i­dat­ed

Hear Carl Sagan Art­ful­ly Refute a Cre­ation­ist on a Talk Radio Show: “The Dar­win­ian Con­cept of Evo­lu­tion is Pro­found­ly Ver­i­fied”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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An Interactive Visualization of Hegel’s Science of Logic (Available on Github)

in Philosophy | April 21st, 2017

In 1812, GWF Hegel pub­lished his Sci­ence of Log­ic. Two cen­turies lat­er, one of his dis­ci­ples put on Github an inter­ac­tive visu­al­i­sa­tion of Hegel’s work, which essen­tial­ly takes the struc­ture of the text and puts it into a visu­al map. Whether the visu­al­iza­tion has any util­i­ty, I’m not sure. But it’s fun to give it a quick spin.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Phi­los­o­phy Mat­ters

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Hegel’s Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry: The Road to Progress Runs First Through Dark Times

An Ani­mat­ed Intro to G.W.F. Hegel, and Every­thing Else You Want­ed to Know About the Daunt­ing Ger­man Philoso­pher

Watch The Half Hour Hegel: A Long, Guid­ed Tour Through Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, Pas­sage by Pas­sage

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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5 Animations Introduce the Media Theory of Noam Chomsky, Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stuart Hall

in Animation, Media, Philosophy, Television | April 20th, 2017

We watch it hap­pen in real time, aghast as the media can­ni­bal­izes itself, turn­ing real­i­ty into a par­o­dy of the kind we laughed at in goofy dystopi­an sce­nar­ios from Back to the Future, The Simp­sons, Idioc­ra­cy. A brave new world of hyper­creduli­ty and mon­strous disin­gen­u­ous­ness arrived on our smart phones and TVs. It was gaudy and per­ni­cious and lied to us like we couldn’t trust our lying eyes. We saw real­i­ty TV main­lined into real­i­ty. The response was to shout, “Fake News,” a phrase almost imme­di­ate­ly redi­gest­ed and spun into flim­sy con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. It now serves lit­tle pur­pose but to get the snake gnaw­ing its tail again.

How?, many won­dered in despair. Haven’t peo­ple read the the­o­ry? Noam Chom­sky, Mar­shall McLuhan, Stu­art Hall, Edward Said, Roland Barthes.… Didn’t we see them proven right time and again? But chances are if you know all these names, you’ve spent time in uni­ver­si­ty Eng­lish, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, or Media Stud­ies depart­ments.

You’ve hung around hip book­stores and cof­feeshops in cities and puz­zled over crit­i­cal the­o­ry, pre­tend­ing, per­haps, to have read at least one of these writ­ers you had­n’t. You gave up your TV years ago and kept your kids away from screens (or told peo­ple you did). You fit, in oth­er words, a cer­tain pro­file, and while there’s noth­ing wrong with that, it was, in the scheme of things, a pret­ty nar­row niche, and an often pret­ty smug one at that.

Maybe aca­d­e­mics, crit­ics, and jour­nal­ists need to be bet­ter at talk­ing and lis­ten­ing to ordi­nary peo­ple? Maybe fash­ion­able waves of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism need to be resist­ed with almost reli­gious vig­or…? What­ev­er the solution(s) for mass media illit­er­a­cy, we can treat the video series here from Al Jazeera as a step in the right direc­tion. Called “Media The­o­rized: Read­ing Against the Grain,” the project takes as its sub­ti­tle a quote from Roland Barthes, the French philoso­pher and lit­er­ary crit­ic who dis­tilled cul­tur­al stud­ies into high­ly read­able essays, dis­sect­ing every­thing from wrestling to tourism to adver­tis­ing. Barthes showed how these gen­res con­sti­tute sym­bol­ic texts, just like roman­tic nov­els and moral­i­ty plays, but pur­port to show us unmedi­at­ed truth.

“Media The­o­rized” sur­veys five cul­tur­al crit­ics who have, in five dif­fer­ent ways, made sim­i­lar analy­ses of mass media. Mar­shall McLuhan famous­ly declared the medi­um as the mes­sage: its sig­nal insep­a­ra­ble from its noise; Noam Chom­sky demon­strat­ed how pop­u­lar con­sent is engi­neered by a nar­row set of shady spe­cial inter­ests with influ­ence over the media; Stu­art Hall showed how mass media manip­u­lates dis­cours­es of race, class, gen­der, and reli­gion to mis­rep­re­sent out­siders and mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple and keep them in their place in the social imag­i­nary; and Edward Said doc­u­ment­ed the long tra­di­tion of “Orientalism”—a total­iz­ing Euro-Amer­i­can dis­course that estranges, belit­tles, and dehu­man­izes whole coun­tries, cul­tures, and reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties.

While it’s impos­si­ble to do jus­tice to the rich­ness and depth of their argu­ments with quick sum­maries and pithy ani­ma­tion, what “Media The­o­rized” does well is to present this hand­ful of aca­d­e­mics as acces­si­ble and unique­ly rel­e­vant to our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. This works espe­cial­ly well because the pre­sen­ters are peo­ple used to putting the­o­ry into prac­tice, com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the pub­lic, and cri­tiquing mass media. Activists and jour­nal­ists from all over the world, who have not only con­tributed short videos on YouTube, but thought­ful sup­ple­men­tary essays and inter­views at the “Media The­o­rized” site (which also includes high res­o­lu­tion posters from each video.) The project is an invi­ta­tion for each of us to take sev­er­al steps back and ask some high­ly per­ti­nent ques­tions about how and why the sto­ries we’re told get told, and for whose ben­e­fit.

Mil­lions of peo­ple have had enough and are demand­ing account­abil­i­ty from indi­vid­ual fig­ures in the media—a pos­i­tive devel­op­ment, to be sure, though it seems like too lit­tle too late. We need to under­stand the dam­age that’s been done, and con­tin­ues to be done, by the sys­tems mass media enable and sell. This series intro­duces “crit­i­cal tools” we can use in our “every­day encoun­ters” with such sales­man­ship.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent and How the Media Cre­ates the Illu­sion of Democ­ra­cy

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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