Perhaps Sian et al would like to pilot this programme. I for one would be quite up for a being a guinea pig, not liking those pesky words so much. I can just see us errecting (and then perhaps deconstructing) a big Maypole .
Oooh, i feel a bit of a barndance coming on...
Crossposted from Infinite Thought blog. (Links other than the first posted by me-Clare)
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I like Jarvis Cocker's plan to incorporate lectures into his gigs.
Oxbridge lecturers will doubtless be watching these gigs carefully, waiting to see if the lecture-disco format takes off.
Well, I may not be an Oxbridge lecturer, but I could probably do with more music in my classes. When teaching Adorno I once played some selections from Swing Tanzen Verboten!, a collection of Nazi swing music from WWII. Fearing the mystical transformative properties of the tunes, one of my students asked me if he could hold me personally responsible if he became a fascist. But of course, dear boy.
Of late I have been trying to think which areas of philosophy I really, definitely don't want to teach, so that when asked I can resolutely say 'no, not my area!'. So far I have determined two: logic/calculus and ethics. I really, really hate teaching ethics. Kant's categorical imperative, fine, but talking about ickle bitty foetuses with undergraduates - horrible. If ethics means anything it's only as a branch of politics. A very tiny branch, too fragile to hold even the smallest of birds. Perhaps, in retrospect, I wasn't the best person to be appointed to the Ethics committee...but who else was going to approve the participant observation burlesque project!
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In addition: Adorno about Popular Music (now with english annotation)
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3 comments:
I find myself agreeing with him. Had I not read Thomas Frank's book 'The Conquest of Cool:
Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism' I might have argued the case for popularising matters by any legal means necessary. As it is, however...Frank describes how big business has taken on the mantle of ‘cool’ and turned it to corporate advantage:
“The enthusiastic discovery of the counterculture … marked the
consolidation of a new species of hip consumerism, a cultural
perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness,
shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”
(The Conquest of Cool, 1997)
Given the enormous resources available to those who would stifle dissent, I believe the challenge is permanently ON to discover new and creative methods to express 'marginal' views - for such, in effect, they are. Otherwise, every 'protest concert' does little more than confirm to the wider masses that the wonderful, self-regulating and self-monitoring 'system' is, in reality, not at all as 'bad' as the protestors make out - after all, 'they' allowed the concert, didnt they?! As a consequence, attending the concert is all anyone need ever DO. (Bit like 'Comic Relief' and other projects of national conscience-appeasement that ensure the maintenance of the status quo - "Aint that some 70's pop-rock band anyway?" !!! geddit??).
Speaking of marginality: 'et al'???
Exactly!
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