About a dissertation

I finished my MA course last year, and submitted my dissertation in September. It’s been prodded and poked and evaluated and checked for plagiarism and moral turpitude and probably verrucas, but I was waiting until I’d officially graduated to spread the picture on a wider screen. The current pandemic, of which you may have heard, has rather put paid to that, so sod it, here it is.



There are a couple of typos in there, and a few things I wish I’d expressed a little more cogently, but there we are. It’s about 15,000 words, so you should be able to get through it more quickly than you did The Irishman. Take care now.

About the dissertation

For the past couple of years I have been studying for an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies, which is essentially a slightly more coherent version of this blog. And now, having completed my dissertation, I am not. What have I learned? That Foucault is far funnier than I ever gave him credit for, that Adorno definitely isn’t, that nobody except me loves Baudrillard any more and that ultimately the human race as we know it is doomed and we’ll all be reduced to a small pile of ones and zeros by the year 2100.

About high and low

I always loved the idea that TS Eliot was a devotee of the music hall star Marie Lloyd and the anarchic comic genius Groucho Marx (although their eventual meeting was a disappointment); also that Wittgenstein eventually tired of philosophy and mostly read hard-boiled detective fiction. And now I discover that Theodor Adorno, grumpy, pop-loathing mainstay of the Frankfurt School, watched at least one Gracie Fields film. I wonder whether he joined the fan club.

About Adorno’s friends

And in the space of a few days, I change my mind. Way back in the mists of last week, I mused over some people’s lack of curiosity when confronted by something they don’t know or don’t understand. But then, as part of my coursework, I read a piece by Adorno that made passing references to Karl Kraus and Paul Valéry and I was all at sea. In fact, I’d heard of both of them, although only vaguely: Kraus, I seemed to recall, had some connection with Frank Wedekind, the creator of Lulu (not the singer); Valéry I knew because Pierre Bayard had described his hilarious tribute to Anatole France, his predecessor at the Academie Francaise, which he delivered despite clearly not having read a word of France’s work. And if I hadn’t been aware of these molecules of fact, I could have Googled them, right?

But it’s not that straightforward. Adorno refers to “The strictures of Karl Kraus against freedom of the press”. What strictures? When? Where? Then: “If cultural criticism, even at its best with Valéry, sides with conservatism...” Well, that’s all very well, but could you give some examples, Theo? Of course, Adorno simply assumed his readers would know what he was talking about and in his time and place that was probably a valid assumption. There would have been a comfortable fuzz of connotations about Kraus and Valéry so that simply mentioning their names would have triggered the relevant context. And that’s not something that can be replicated by a mere search engine; not a search engine I've ever used, at least.

One thought though; if I’m expected to follow accurate MHRA-style reference guidelines when I’m writing about Adorno, wouldn’t it be nice if Adorno reciprocated?

Pseuds' corner

The last word about blogging vs old media, for the moment at least, I promise. I was looking for something Adorno said about ukeleles, for some completely different purpose, when I came upon this:

"Pseudo-activity is misguided spontaneity. Misguided, but not accidentally so; because people do have a dim suspicion of how hard it would be to throw off the yoke that weighs upon them. They prefer to be distracted by spurious and illusory activities, by institutionalized vicarious satisfactions, than to face up to the awareness of how little access they have to the possibility of change today. Pseudo-activities are fictions and parodies of the same productivity which society on the one hand incessantly calls for, but on the other holds in check and, as far as the individual is concerned, does not really desire at all."

Now old Theo was talking about DIY, of all things. But I think there's an interesting point to be made about blogging as well. Of course, plumbers and carpenters and electricians and other skilled tradesmen felt threatened by the post-war DIY boom (although they probably recouped any potential losses with the exorbitant rates they could charge for emergency repairs whenever some klutz stuck a rivet through the gas pipe). But I think the reaction of many journalists to blogging is slightly different. They may sneer at it, as a pseudo-activity, as a parody of what they are paid to do. But if they did a bit of soul-searching, and looked at the recycled press releases and witless lifestyle guff with which so many of them lag the cavities of the media (and I must clarify that I'm not casting aspersions on all hacks here), they suddenly realise that what they do is just as much a pseudo-activity as what I'm doing here. Exactly what value do the 3am Girls offer that, say, Billy doesn't?

At least when you pay someone to come round to repair the gas pipe, you get your cooker working again.

Used

It's generally regarded as good practice for big websites to include some sort of disclaimer when publishing links to sites beyond their control. The BBC News site, for example, has a standard blurb: "The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites".

Sounds pretty fair to me. You can go here: but don't blame us if it's shite. And then I noticed this, on the homepage of the Internet Movie Database: "IMDb cannot vouch for the user experience provided by external sites".

What the hell does that mean? A site doesn't "provide" a user experience. A user experience is "provided" by the user, who responds to information and other stimuli provided via the medium that he or she is using.

At least, that's how it should be. And then I remembered that Adorno quote that Patroclus and I seized upon a few weeks back, within hours of each other, unaware and thousands of miles apart:

"The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object."

But that's no longer a subversive observation, it seems. It's now corporate policy, loud and proud.

Also... The mighty Swells of stuck-caps-lock fame laughs at cancer, but not in a brave way; if you haven't yet visited Teleport City, then you really ought to; and thanks to my dad for spotting this, by Agnes Catherine Poirier in The Observer: "The French think Edgar Allan Poe is a genius. Why, asks the uncomprehending Anglophone. Because Poe was translated by Baudelaire."

Three quotations...

...that might have gone into that bit where the Spinal Tap one sits, or maybe the Green Wing one, or possibly even the Murakami. Such is the postmodern condition. (A line I tried to shoehorn into the 3,000 words I wrote about Radiohead's 'Fitter Happier' at the weekend, before deciding that references to Baudrillard, Eliot, Joyce, Lou Reed, Nirvana, The Stepford Wives and Leonard Nimoy made it quite pretentious enough, thanks for asking. And on the subject of Radiohead, has anybody listened to Thom Yorke's Eraser album yet? Doesn't it sound a bit like how you'd imagine TY's demos to sound before the other guys have had a chance to work on them? Strange, that.)

Anyway:

"Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object."
(Theodor Adorno)

"...and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody..."
(Zadie Smith, from On Beauty)

"Do I get bonus points if I act like I care?"
(Dr Gregory House)