About cultural plausibility

An article about parents who hire tutors specifically to buy social advantage for their children is mildly depressing until one of those tutors rather lets the cat out of the Birkin with the admission that “an English accent implies that you're well-read, that you're well-educated, even if you're not.” Now it seems that we’ve got beyond Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and Hirsch’s cultural literacy into a state where cultural plausibility is all that matters. And even then, we know it’s bullshit, but still go along with it. I mean, would anybody who’s actually read The Great Gatsby attend a Gatsby-themed party, let alone throw one?

I’m guessing Zadie Smith has read Gatsby, and a few other books as well. But the number of people who can say the same is falling, as she suggests in an article excoriating the British Library for its treatment of its staff:

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

And as the man who hasn’t read Gatsby puts the frighteners on the BBC, maybe all that we can look forward to is increasingly implausible parties.

About Barbie

I enjoyed the Barbie movie, and was quietly impressed with how it sneaked references to Proust and Kubrick into a big-budget, candy-coloured Hollywood extravaganza. But I think Ian Leslie gets things right:

Rather than advancing intellectual ideas, it uses intellectual-sounding talk as a colour in its tonal palette, a striking and funny contrast to the vacuity of its characters. Barbie tickles the frontal cortex, site of Deep Thoughts, but its purpose is to raid the hypothalamus, source of endorphins.

Not about the Jubilee

No, I will not be indulging in bunting-related shenanigans over this inordinately extended weekend, and not just because even Radio 4 has taken to calling the whole thing “PLATTY JUBES”. Instead, here are two things that have amused me recently. First, Jacques Derrida playing cricket.

And then this, which may or may not be sincere: 

Niche film twitter question: is the French title of Emmanuelle 2, Emmanuelle: L'antivierge (1975), a pun on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972)?

— Matthew Sweet (@DrMatthewSweet) June 1, 2022

About The Modern Review

I bloody loved The Modern Review. Its glory days coincided with my first few years living in London and as such it defines the early 90s for me more than fax machines, shoegaze or Amanda de Cadenet. Having gone through three years of the English literary canon, the idea of applying chin-stroking critical techniques to the guttersnipes of pop culture felt deliciously transgressive. And, yes, I miss it (although maybe there’s a distinct element of still being the right side of 30 that I miss) and on more than one occasion, I’ve yearned for its return, despite the subsequent political missteps of its co-creators, Julie Burchill and Toby Young.

Be so, so careful what you wish for. Burchill crashed and burned in 1997 with a glossy reboot that lasted a mere five issues; and now Young, who has in the intervening decades recast himself as a champion of free schools and lockdown scepticism, is having a crack at it, promising something rather more serious. Ms Burchill, always skilled at repurposing sour grapes as a conscious career move, claims to be pretty happy with that state of affairs. 

Will I buy a copy? Oh, probably. Will I be disappointed? Certainly. But just as the original version reflected my own faith in words and art and subversion back at me, the new one will do the same with my middle-aged dyspepsia. It will be just the magazine we deserve.

About the football

It’s the big match tonight and yet again, it’s not the idiot being an idiot that intrigues; it’s the idiots filming the idiot. 

(And when I take to Google to determine whether Baudrillard or McLuhan or Berger might best explain the conundrum, I discover that the latter provided the voices for twin villains in an iteration of the Grand Theft Auto game. And call me an effete elitist, but I find that more intriguing than the fireworks or even the football.)

PS: When I posted the above picture on Facebook, the Zuckergods deemed it indecent. But in The Guardian, the brilliant David Squires makes it cleaner, and at the same time more brutal. 

About Derrida

About Foucault

I’m a little surprised that a member of this most performatively anti-intellectual government of my lifetime might namecheck Foucault in a speech; less so that the hapless Liz Truss got him so egregiously, so spectacularly wrong.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

About Ennio Morricone (RIP)

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 stickers

Gilbert Adair, along with Greil Marcus, Morley/Penman and, strangely enough, James Burke, was one of the people who really got me thinking about stuff that would lead me towards this whole cultural theory malarkey; I picked up Adair’s book Myths and Memories in a remainder shop some time in the late 80s, then followed the skein of influence back to Roland Barthes and I was hooked.

However, although he owes a methodological debt to Barthes, his style is rather different; for a start, in contrast to than Barthes’s own droll, sometimes quasi-Martian view of the physical manifestations of modern life, Adair often let his own prejudices burst through and they’re not always pretty. For one thing, he hated pop music and everything associated with it with a passion. In a later collection, The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice, he describes staring at a wall plastered with posters advertising record releases, almost revelling in the fact that he has no idea which bits of text are the bands, which are the titles. And while that flash of ignorance led him to some interesting ponderings on Eco and Malevich, I felt sure that I’d never find myself so baffled by the modern world.

Analogue posters still adorn the walls of London and other cities, even in this digital world and although these days I probably wouldn’t recognise most of the music they advertise, I’ve got at least a vague idea what’s going on. However one thing, on a smaller scale, does now put me in a state of Adairian bafflement - and that’s the invasion of stickers on walls and lamp-posts and bins and the few remaining phone boxes. Obviously there are still stickers advertising political opinions and commercial sex but these are something different, closer to adhesive street art, suggesting some sort of coded meaning that’s permanently closed off to me. But I don’t exult in not knowing, not getting the joke. I just gaze, feeling a bit disconnected, and old. Although, like Adair, I could let it all lead to Eco:

Today in Pompeii tourists are visiting murals depicting Romans with huge penises; originally meant as adverts for brothels, they are now considered great art. In the eighteenth century Telemann was thought a greater composer than Bach; in the nineteenth Eugene Sue a greater writer than Balzac. In 200 years we may consider Picasso inferior to the man currently responsible for the Coca-Cola commercials... So we should never be afraid to analyse marginal or inferior manifestations of our culture.

So, analyse away.

Not about Morrissey

Just as it happened 35 or so years ago, while I watched Johnny Marr’s Glastonbury set I gawped at his dexterity, musical imagination, effortless cool and implausible absence of body fat. Of course, in 1983 his serviceable singing didn’t come into the equation, because someone else was handling those duties.

Ah, yes, Mr Morrissey. What started out (apparently) as arch, subversive flirtation with the trappings and iconography of the far right has tipped right over the edge into full-on Faragerie and worse. He is, officially, no longer charming, and people are lining up either to agonise over the delight they once took in him and his mots (bon and mauvais alike), or to crow that they never liked the preening bigot in the first place. I’m in the first camp, but I guess you’d worked that out already.

So, when Marr trawls through his old band’s songbook, what reaction should we expect from the woke crowd? Awkward shoe-gazing? A mass turning of backs? A petition on change.org? Or ecstatic bellowing along from thousands of sunburned people who know all the words and the B-sides and probably the messages etched on the inner grooves as well, which contrasts with the polite response accorded to the guitar hero’s own solo work. (Note to self: remember that in the real world, Smiths fans always resembled the rowdy lads on the inside of the Rank gatefold more than they did Alain Delon or even Yootha Joyce.) Hate the singer – or at least express disappointment in how he turned out – while still loving the songs; that would appear to be the best option. Of course, the spirit of Morrissey still lingers over everything Marr does; at once there and not there, Schrödinger’s lyricist, Banquo at the vegan feast. This was meant to be a blog post about Johnny, but it’s not, is it?

The singer/song divide does appear to be an increasingly popular tactic, whether it’s Quincy Jones playing lots of Michael Jackson songs without ever mentioning Michael Jackson, or Nick Cave’s calm response to the misdeeds of Morrissey himself:

I think perhaps it would be helpful to you if you saw the proprietorship of a song in a different way. Personally, when I write a song and release it to the public, I feel it stops being my song. It has been offered up to my audience and they, if they care to, take possession of that song and become its custodian. The integrity of the song now rests not with the artist, but with the listener.

Which, the two or three loyal readers of this blog will know, is pretty much what Roland Barthes (a French theorist who never heard the Smiths but died a beautifully Morrisseyesque death) argued in The Death of the Author. As soon as the author publishes, or releases, or presses “SEND”, he or she leaves the party. I’ve often deployed this as a critical get-out clause; for example in my book about Radiohead’s OK Computer (all good bookshops, etc), I pointed out that the fact Thom Yorke hasn’t read Philip K Dick’s Valis, or can’t remember that the poem that inspired ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ was by Craig Raine, doesn’t invalidate those works’ relevance to consideration of his own music. I never thought it would also allow us to skip gaily over the sexual or political misdemeanours of our fallen idols, and I doubt old Roland did either – which rather proves his point, doesn’t it?

About Walter Benjamin (yet again)

Obviously, it’s easy to trawl through the work of writers from decades past and find that they’ve (presumably accidentally) had the core idea for some phenomenon that only came into being in our own time. Going back over The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, though, I realise Benjamin leaves the competition standing. Writing in 1936, he comes up with social media...

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers — at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. 

And then reality TV...

In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves — and primarily in their own work process. 

...in the space of a couple of paragraphs. Nice work, Walt.

PS: Edward Ward asks, Where’s Walter?

About Christmas, etc

About Foucault

Found, on the cover of a Foucault collection in the Birkbeck library, the Steven Campbell painting A Life in Letters: Idealized Portrait of the Wig’d Foucault. So idealized, in fact, (not to mention wig’d) that it looks totally unlike the polo-necked author of Discipline and Punish; if anything, more like the Daddy of Deconstruction Jacques Derrida.

What can it all mean? 

[Strokes chin.]

About Deleuze

From the delightful Dungeons and Dasein Facebook group.

About Guattari

I once asked Felix Guattari if he had any advice for younger writers. He said, "Never co-write a book with someone whose last name comes before yours."

— Dominic Pettman (@DominicPettman) 7 May 2018

About words and things

From Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992):

In the commonsense world of science and especially mathematics, ‘words’ really do not matter, because they represent no reality, they float above the surface of it. In the world of ‘theory’, however, the very opposite is true. Reality exists in language, in history, in culture, in all the contingencies of human action and creativity, in the very substance of Hamlet’s being, in ‘words, words, words’. A universal, objective reality, and the science that seeks to reveal it, was the great sustaining myth of the modern age. The question is, then, what happens to it when the myth is punctured, when the paradigm has shifted?

About social theory

Thanks to Hannah Marcus for this:

About intersectionality and things

From Susan Hekman, ‘Identity Crises: Identity, Identity Politics and Beyond’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 1999:

Political necessity has thrown together ethnic groups who, at best, have little in common and, at worst, have a history of ethnic hatred. Groups categorised as, for example, ‘Asian’ or ‘Hispanic’ are made up of diverse peoples; their designation is a result of the dominant group’s inability or unwillingness to recognise their differences.

...but lumping diverse peoples together as “the dominant group” is OK, I guess.

About myth

Am proceeding crisply through Laurent Binet’s excellent  The 7th Function of Language, which starts off with the death of Roland Barthes and then turns into The Da Vinci Code for people who can read without moving their lips: he describes Barthes’s most famous book as being about “the contemporary myths erected by the middle classes to their own glory.”

I think what often gets lost in discussion of RB is that he wasn’t celebrating the elevation of such phenomena as steak-frites or wrestling to mythological status; he’s (at least trying to be) an iconoclast. But his tactics have been recuperated into a sort of wistful pop culture nostalgia; and Binet’s book, in a way, makes a dangerously entertaining myth of Barthes himself.