This document outlines a course exploring the manifesto across different domains such as art, politics, culture and therapy. On Mondays it will examine the manifesto as a form of protest and novelty, looking at Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto. Tuesdays will focus on protest and rupture, discussing works like Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". Wednesdays will analyze rupture and hiatus, exploring concepts like "shattered vessels" from Kabbalah. Thursdays will consider change, reviewing pieces like Rilke's "You Must Change Your Life". Each afternoon will include workshops where participants write their own manifestos.

1. THE MANIFESTO IN
THE 21ST CENTURY
Vincenzo Di Nicola
MPhil, MD, PhD
Professor of Psychiatry
University of Montreal
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
The George Washington University
FROM ART TO POLITICS
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Image courtesy of Jaswant Guzder

5. Course Overview
Since the 19th century, the manifesto has been a vehicle for protest in
the form of an announcement - implicitly or explicitly - of a
rupture/hiatus and a call for change.
We will explore the manifesto in:
• Art (Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto),
• Politics (Marx & Engels’ Communist Manifesto vs. Mussolini’s
Fascist Manifesto),
• Culture (Di Nicola’s Slow Thought Manifesto), and
• Therapy (Di Nicola’s Slow Therapy).
In the workshop component of these explorations, participants will be
tasked with writing their own manifesto to be shared by the end of
the week.

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Image courtesy of Jaswant Guzder

7. Outline – Afternoons, 3-5 pm
Manifesto – “The
shock of the new”
(Robert Hughes)
Monday
Protest/Novelty –
“Thirteen ways of
looking at a blackbird”
(Wallace Stevens)
Tuesday
Rupture/Hiatus
• Rupture – “Shattered vessels” (Kabbalah)
• Hiatus – “Take your time” (Wittgenstein/Di
Nicola)
Wednesday
Change – “You must
change your life”
(Rainer Maria
Rilke/Peter Sloterdijk)
Thursday

8. Outline
SHOCK! – “The
shock of the new”
Monday
PROTEST/NOVELTY
– “Thirteen ways of
looking at a blackbird”
Tuesday
BREAK/PAUSE
• Rupture – “Shattered vessels”
• Hiatus – “Take your time”
Wednesday
CHANGE – “You
must change your life”
Thursday

9. • Monday – Manifesto –
• “The shock of the new”
(Robert Hughes)
Outline

10. 10 Image courtesy of Jaswant Guzder

11. • Monday – Manifesto – “The shock of the new”
(Robert Hughes)
• The manifesto as a form (Hanna) – shock, rupture/hiatus,
protest, call for change – its relation to modernity
• Introductions: Presenting participants’ practices
• Workshop: Choosing a manifesto, writing your own
• See: “How to Write: A Manifesto” in Hanna (2020, pp. 18-
19)

12. Workshop: Writing A Manifesto
• In the workshop component of these explorations,
participants will be tasked with writing their own
manifesto to be shared by the end of the week
• Choosing a manifesto or writing your own?
• Representation vs. creation
• See: “How to Write: A Manifesto” in Julian Hanna,
The Manifesto Handbook (2020, pp. 18-19)

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34. LENNON WALL
At the Alfred Summer Arts Festival
“Words in commotion – words set free”
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38. Alfred Community Chalk Wall
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39. Workshop: Writing A Manifesto
• In the workshop component of these explorations,
participants will be tasked with writing their own
manifesto to be shared by the end of the week
• Choosing a manifesto or writing your own?
• Representation vs. creation
• See: “How to Write: A Manifesto” in Julian Hanna,
The Manifesto Handbook (2020, pp. 18-19)

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41. • Listen!
• There has never been a more perfect time to write a
manifesto or to be a manifesto writer.
• NOW IS THE TIME.
• But … do it the hard way! The hard way is good.
• Why use a laptop when you can write longhand?
• T.S. Eliot wrote: “The purpose of literature is to turn blood
into ink.”
• Why use cold ink when you can use your own hot blood?
• If you don’t bleed writing it, the reader won’t bleed
reading it.
• YOU WANT THE READER DO BLEED DON’T YOU?

42. • Make it newer.
• Confuse art with life.
• Pick a fight with Papa.
• Stroke the belly of the underdog.
• Write the manifesto you’ve always been destined to
write, the one that uses every atom of your being, the
one you’ve been waoting your whole life to write.
Repeat.
• Invent a new language.
• Use no adverbs, or use only adverbs.
• Discover language in rude and unexpected places.
• Don’t hesitate to mess with the English.

43. • WE WANT COURAGE, AUDACITY, AND REVOLT.
(Without the Fascism.)
• Build your own manifesto writing machine.
• Rest the keyboard between your naked thighs.
• Make your reader come; they’ll always come back.
• Make the page run red with raw animal heat.
• CAUTION WILL GET US NOWHERE.
• Julian Hanna, “How to Write: A Manifesto”
In The Manifesto Handbook (2019, pp. 18-19)

44. How to: Slow Down
Words: Vincenzo Di Nicola
Alfred Summer Arts Festival
Miller Performing Arts Center
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Photo credit: Paul Hokanson, Continuum, choreography – Melanie Aceto, 2017

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Image courtesy of Jaswant Guzder

46. • Tuesday – Protest – “Thirteen ways of looking at a
blackbird” (Wallace Stevens)
Outline

47. • Tuesday – Protest – “Thirteen ways of looking
at a blackbird” (Wallace Stevens)
• Multiplicity in art and life – Portuguese poet Fernando
Pessoa – creating modernity
• The mission poem: the poet’s manifesto – the vertiginous
openness of translation (indeterminacy)
• Fernando Pessoa’s mission poem, “Autopsychography”
• Adélia Prado’s mission poem, “Com licença poetica”
(With poetic licence)
• Paul Celan’s mission poem, “Todesfuge” (Fugue of
Death/Deathfugue)
• Dylan Thomas’ mission poem, “In My Craft Or Sullen Art”
• My mission poem, “Minor Poetic Emergencies”
• Workshop: Choosing your mission, elaborating your
manifesto (Freud called it “working through”)

48. Autopsycografia
 O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.
 E os que lêem o que escreve,
Na dor lida sentem bem,
Não as duas que ele teve,
Mas só que éles não têm.
 E assim nas calhas de roda
Gira, a entreter a razão
Ésse comboio de corda
Que se chama o coração
 —Fernando Pessoa
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50. Com licença poetica
 Quando nasci um anjo esbelto,
desses que tocam trombeta, anunciou:
vai carregar bandeira.
Cargo muito pesado pra mulher,
esta espécie ainda envergonhada.
Aceito os subterfúgios que me cabem,
sem precisar mentir.
Não tão feia que não possa casar,
acho o Rio de Janeiro uma beleza e
ora sim, ora não, creio em parto sem dor.
Mas, o que sinto escrevo. Cumpro a sina.
Inauguro linhagens, fundo reinos
(dor não é amargura).
Minha tristeza não tem pedigree,
já a minha vontade de alegria,
sua raiz vai ao meu mil avô.
Vai ser coxo na vida, é maldição pra homem.
Mulher é desdobrável. Eu sou.
 Adélia Prado, Bagagem
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53. Death Fugue by Paul Celan
from: Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
Translated by John Felstiner (2005)
Black milk of daybreak
we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Marguerite
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling
he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he orders us strike up and play for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Marguerite
your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
He shouts jab this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

54. Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Marguerite
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers
He shouts play death more sweetly Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise then in smoke to the sky
you'll have a grave then in the clouds there you won't lie too cramped
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams
der Tod is ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Shulamith

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In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

56. In My Craft Or Sullen Art
by Dylan Thomas
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiw3uOT2eUc
 Recited by Dylan Thomas, December 1945
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57. From Stevens’ first poetry collection,
Harmonium (1917)
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58. Reading Wallace Stevens
 Haiku-like, austere
 Imagism, cubism are influences
 Robert Buttel (1967) proposes that the title “alludes
humorously to the Cubists’ practice of incorporating
into unity and stasis a number of possible views of the
subject observed over a span of time”
 “This group of poems is not meant to be a collection of
epigrams or of ideas,” Stevens (1966) remarks in one
of his letters, “but of sensations”
 Deconstruction – Jacques Derrida – text & meaning
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59. From Stevens’ first poetry collection,
Harmonium (1917)
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60. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
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61. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
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62. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
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63. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
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64. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
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65. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
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71. • Wednesday – Rupture/Hiatus
• Rupture –
• “Shattered vessels”
(Kabbalah)
Outline

72. • Wednesday – Rupture/Hiatus
• Rupture – “Shattered vessels”
(Kabbalah)
• Rupture and change
• Interdisciplinary forms – breaking boundaries
• Biographical narrative – “Intimate strangers”
• Philosophical fiction – “Strangers in a cemetery”
• Workshop: Naming the rupture in your practice, turning it
into a hiatus – “reflection before action,” further elaboration
of your manifesto – “working through”

73. KINTSUGI
• Philosophy of kintsugi
• “Shattered vessels” ‫הכלים‬ ‫שבירת‬
• Shevirat HaKelim
kabbalah
• “There is a crack, a crack in everything,
that’s how the light gets in …”
– Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
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“There is a
crack in everything
— that’s how the
light gets in”
— Leonard Cohen
“Anthem”

75. Website - Café Ferreira – Montreal, QC.jpg

76. Website - Café Ferreira – Montreal, QC.jpg

77. Who can tell from the sound of the word ‘parting’
What kind of bereavements await us
– Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam, “Tristia” in Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems,
translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin (London: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 23).
Image courtesy of Jaswant Guzder

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trauma
Image courtesy of V Di Nicola

79. Childhood is a knife
planted in your throat.
You don’t remove it
easily.
– Wajdi Mouawad
Play & film, Scorched
Image courtesy of publisher

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healing

81. HEALING
• What do we want to heal?
• Where would the healing take place?
• Clinical and cultural trauma communities
have divergent missions and different
answers
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82. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/33/44/c7/3344c7593cfc400728a198fd2557bdc3.jpg

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Image courtesy of
Jaswant Guzder

84. • Wednesday – Rupture/Hiatus
• Hiatus – “Take your time” (Wittgenstein/Di Nicola)
Outline

85. • Wednesday – Rupture/Hiatus
• Hiatus – “Take your time” (Wittgenstein/Di
Nicola)
• Defining slowness across disciplines
• Slow thought, slow art, slow politics, slow therapy
• Workshop: Naming the rupture in your practice, turning it
into a hiatus – “reflection before action,” further elaboration
of your manifesto – “working through”

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89. Take your time – avoid psilly mistakes!
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90. Slow thought …
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94. • Thursday – Change – “You must change your life”
(Rainer Maria Rilke/Peter Sloterdijk)
Outline

95. • Thursday – Change – “You must change your
life” (Rainer Maria Rilke/Peter Sloterdijk)
• The Event in art, politics, and therapy
• The tripartite Event:
• Presence (being there),
• Declaration (a new identity: naming it in the first person
– “I am an artist”),
• Fidelity (to the truth of the Event: “My new life is shaped
by my vocation as an artist”)
• Workshop: Declaring an Event, giving it a name: preparing
your manifesto as your own mission

96. • Thursday – Change – “You must change your
life” (Rainer Maria Rilke/Peter Sloterdijk)
• Religion/poliltics
• “The Ten Commandments” (Moses)
• “95 Theses” (Martin Luther, 1517)
• “I have a dream” (Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963)
• ”Hope” poster for Obama (Shepard Fairey, 2008)

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98. • Thursday – Change – “You must change your life”
(Rainer Maria Rilke/Peter Sloterdijk)
• “A Cyborg Manifesto” (Donna Haraway, 1985)
• The cyborg does not recognize boundaries
• No separation between animal and human, human from machine
•
• 3 boundary 20th C breakdowns:
• human & animal
• animal-human & machine
• physical & non-physical
• Called for a new feminism
• Rejects essentialism, naturalism, identity politics, totalizing
assumptions – “all men are one way, women are another”
• Including anything that is essential about the female experience

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100. • Thursday – Change – “You must change your
life” (Rainer Maria Rilke/Peter Sloterdijk)
• “SCUM Manifesto” (Valerie Solanas, 1967)
• Men have ruined the world and it’s up to women to fix it
• Attempted to kill Andy Warhol
• Satire, parody of Freud, masculinist society
• Betty Friedan rejected it, Germaine Greer interpreted it
• Radical, utopian/dystopian

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102. Source: The New Yorker

103. • Thursday – Change – “You must change your
life” (Rainer Maria Rilke/Peter Sloterdijk)
• “A person is a person through other persons”:
A social psychiatry manifesto for the 21st century
(Di Nicola, 2019)

104. V Di Nicola
Review article –
“A person is a person
through other persons”:
A social psychiatry
manifesto for the 21st
century.
World Social Psychiatry
2019; 1(1): 8-21.

105. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744)
Father of constructivist epistemology
which sees knowledge as
a social construction rather than
a discovery of the natural world
Verum esse ipsum factum
“What is true is precisely what is made”

106. What are we missing?

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Image courtesy of
Jaswant Guzder

109. • Thursday – Change – “You must change your
life” (Rainer Maria Rilke/Peter Sloterdijk)
• Social psychiatry reasons from society to the
individual rather than from individual to society
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual.
The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
– William James

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111. • Thursday – Change – “You must change your
life” (Rainer Maria Rilke/Peter Sloterdijk)
• Workshop:
• Declaring an Event
• Giving it a name
• Your manifesto is your own mission
• A manifesto is a proclamation
• Brief, action-oriented, imperative!
• Purpose and intention
• “Manifesto Everything” (Ganzeer, 2018):
“It’s time everything was a manifesto”

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Image courtesy of Jaswant Guzder

115. • Friday – Manifesto!
Outline
Image courtesy of
Jaswant Guzder

116. • Friday – Manifesto! –
• Workshop: Declaring an Event, giving it a name:
presenting your manifesto as your own mission
• Presentation of Manifestos

117. Acknowledegements
• Stanzi Vaubel, PhD
• Jaswant Guzder, MD
Child Psychiatrist & Artist
• Alfred University Summer
Arts Festival