We might also think of Pollock as leading us back to MacNiece and the more tense ambiguous harmony of Snow – ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think/ Incorrigibly plural’. But despite the tensions of the situation we faced in the Irish context, the work with Community National Schools was quite the success. There are now, in 2024, 29 such schools in the Republic of Ireland, staffed by capable and visionary teachers and principals, backed by newly confident communities, redeveloping the sense of what education and identity means in Twenty-First century Ireland. One of the stories we employed in the curriculum development was Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.  Michael Rosen has noted how this book was repressed (banned) in the UK for several years after its original publication in the United States:  ‘at a surface level, this was on account of it being deemed too frightening for very young children, but perhaps they also sensed that it was a book which showed a child’s destructive feelings without these feelings being punished’.

While agreeing with Rosen (whose vision of progressive education and childhood is to be lauded), we might also say there is more than destruction in Sendak’s children. We perhaps should take some courage from the central child figure Max, in this text:

And when he came to the place where the wild things are

they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth

and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws

till Max said “BE STILL!”

and tamed them with the magic trick

of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once

and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all

and made him king of all wild things.

If we are looking to examples of this vision deployed in more contemporary times, where we confront the monsters of our innermost and primal fears, as individuals and as communities , we can perhaps cite the example in literature of a certain psychogeography. This concept originates with the Situationist (and Lettrist) understanding of psychogeography, emerging with the French theorist Guy Debord (seminal for the May ’68 events), as ‘the study of the specific effects of the geo-graphical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (quoted Coverley 2006: 10). As Merlin Coverley notes, ‘psychogeography is, as the name suggests, the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of exploring the behavioural impact of urban place’ (Coverley 2006: 10). There is also a cultural and philosophical debt here to Surrealism and to Dadaism (earlier to the Symbolism of Rimbaud and Baudelaire), a debt which accrues also up to the Punk movement in music and in literature, which similarly deploys this ‘psycho-‘ or ‘damned’ dynamic (Hell 2008).  This methodology becomes a conducive technique for artists and writers to develop a new philosophical practice of everyday life, and literature (metafiction, poetics etc) becomes a particular pathway to explore.  Thus, we find ourselves within a pluralist literary context, enabling various perspectives and lenses on our perception of the world, seeking to work against what Eric Fromm used to call the ‘fear of freedom’.      

We have examples of how this radical aesthetic has translated very successfully and powerfully into everyday practice, from relatively recent history. Guy Debord’s vision was indeed seminal for the May ’68 events. His presence as an intellectual subversive at the University of Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris (under the reciprocal tutelage of luminaries such as Henri Lefebvre and Jean Francois Lyotard no less) was a crucial catalyst for the ’68 events.  The slogans and posters of ’68 may be simple, but this is also deceptive. We should rather look to the importance of the political ideas expressed aesthetically as having immediate impact in the late 1960s, but also at the insight of the underlying Situationist philosophy which influenced them. We need to remember the contemporary significance of Situationist theory, especially in the context of the renewal of Marxist thought in the 21^st century. This renewed Leftist critique of capitalism emerges as articulated through newer social and political movements of the current times, particularly through the political philosophy of Slavoj Žižek and his auto-critique of the Former Yugoslavia. It remains especially relevant in our present times of crisis and social apocalypse (I write this text on the cusp of the American Presidential Elections in early November 2024).    

But the avowal of a critique of ideology also comes with a significant philosophical health warning from the Situationists and this is a self-satire that is also prominent in ’68 and again visible in the posters. ‘Participation – All the Better to Eat You With My Children!’ (Vermès & Kugelberg, 2011, p. 6).