Publish at October 28 2019 Updated January 26 2023
There are countless journals and publications that take a pop culture detour to address topics usually considered serious. Popular history magazines have devoted special issues to the comics Alix and Murena. Travel magazines have taken Corto Maltese as their guide. Political, philosophical, or sociological publications have used successful satires to present themes that are often considered undigestible.
Political, philosophical, or sociological publications have used satires that are often considered undigestible.
The référence à popular culture allows us to descend from a classic teacher/teacher relationship. To dare to approach a song, an episode of a series or a comic strip is often to venture onto the territory of the students, whereas it is more comfortable to bring them onto one's own territory and keep them there. It is also to help them feel comfortable with the content they are offered.
Popular culture invites à a certain modesty. While the loss of concentration of learners, and more broadly of our contemporaries, is lamented everywhere, œuvres « pop » manage à to capture à attention and keep it.
Because it creates images and stories that are frequently shared, pop culture fosters a moral anchor.
For teachers, pop culture is not just a simple pretext to grab the attention of students who might still be red-eyed from having seen several seasons of a show stolen. The dusty hierarchies between the arts, which made the academics of the past centuries beat the classification between sculpture and painting or drama and novels, no longer make sense.
The movies of Cameron, Kubrick or Spielberg, the comic strips of Mafalda or Peanuts, the songs of the Beatles or Bob Dylan are widely shared references. Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Daniel Pennac wrote scripts for Lucky Luke and writers that nobody disputes confess their passion for certain stories... The borders are not so hard anymore!
And the repertoire is so vast, it can illustrate anything. And even more than illustrating, pop culture makes certain complex notions tangible, such as Kantian ethics, Machiavellian thought, Hobbes' representation of power, with Game of Thrones for example. The jubilation is all the stronger that one provokes a great cart. The more complex the notion, and the more the rérence seems to be removed from any intellectual notion, the more the rapprochement stimulates the minds.
As an example, the work of Marianne CHAILLAN addresses a wide variety of fields. This philosophy teacher has written about topics as seemingly far removed from philosophy as popular songs, the Harry Potter saga and the Game of Thrones series, or Disney cartoons, each time making the concepts of classical philosophy more limpid.
This ease of constructing links to the world of ideas is also a danger. One thinks of Christian SALMON's analysis that Antonin Scalia, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, justified torture by relying...on the 24-hour clock. The tour through a story that many adhere to allows complex, but sometimes also dangerous ideas to be conveyed as obvious.
Among the authors most frequently summoned to explain the sins, we find, for example, Immanuel Kant. And yet, this philosopher does not distinguish himself by his words, his stories or his pictorial language. Nevertheless, he often arrives strong to analyze dilemmas, or different ethical positions of novelistic characters.
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Because it's often about power relationships and how we can live together, Machiavelli is never far away either. The sequences based on numerous characters make it possible to build typologies and to link them to different ways of thinking. Thus, the different houses in Game of Thrones embody different ways of exercising power.
Finally, Plato also occupies a special place. His allegories find a natural déclination in many popular works. The cave makes écho in Matrix, and Gyges’ring reminds another, object of all the covetousness in Tolkien.
While the three previous authors are regularly summoned, dozens of others help to understand the stories, which in turn help to learn their thoughts.
The interesting thing about pop culture is that it is broad enough that most concepts in the humanities can be represented in it. The result, of course, depends largely on the creativity of the person making the connection.
.So, the choice of flag that orients new Hogwarts recruits into the various groups unknowingly gives a leçon of existentialism à Harry Potter. Marianne CHAILLAN shows us that Dumbledore, by suppressing access to the mirror of the Rised, introduces principles of stoicism to the Harry Potter world. Simple readers captivated by the suspense of a story, we hadn’t seen it that way.
In fact, it is not necessary to like a story to use it as a learning situation. Let's take the series Doctor House, which features an unconventional doctor in a structured, structured and procedural environment. It is possible to use the story to work on the aesthetic in many ways.
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Stories, songs, serials shared by many are mediums and springboards for understanding and addressing abstract ideas. Pop culture stories help us to see in these productions a depth that we had not perceived, and that perhaps the authors themselves had not imagined!
The new modes of production and streaming, the explosion of works that are often consumed very quickly pose a challenge to pop culture: How do you find common references like Terminator, Matrix, Titanic, Snoopy, Corto Maltese or the Beatles that everyone shared a few years ago?
Illustrations : Frédéric Duriez
Resources
Yannis CONSTANTINIDES, « an éthics without morality », intervention à the week of pop philosophy » — 2016
https://youtu.be/MKW5jl9-gQg
Rick NAUERT- Ethical failures found on Grey's Anatomy and House - Live Science - March 2010
Adam KOTSKO - The ethics of Doctor Gregory House - Pop Matters - April 2009
https://www.popmatters.com/the-ethics-of-dr-gregory-house-2496049825.html
https://www.livescience.com/6240-ethical-failures-grey-anatomy-house.html
The Pop Philosophy Week website - November 2019
https://www.semainedelapopphilosophie.fr/
Marianne CHAILLAN : Personal website of the author of a dozen philosophical books, based on pop culture.
https://mariannechaillan.com
Marianne CHAILLAN - Blockbuster philosophy - intervention à the pop philosophy week — 2016
https://youtu.be/mUgUUmCDpi4
Jacques SERRANO — The Philosophy Break - October 2017, accessed October 26, 2019
http://lapausephilo.fr/2017/10/20/pop-philosophie-jacques-serrano/
Monica MICHLIN, « 24 hours chrono : space-time confinement, nœud of plots, piège id&elogical ? », TV/Series [Online], 9 | 2016, uploaded 01 June 2016, accessed 28 October 2019.
http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/1252
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