I'm in love with the modern world.

[reddragdiva]

If you, unlike me, have actually been educated in postmodernism and critical theory rather than, as I did, picking it up as one goes: please read this, in which I try to explain why it's actually useful (despite its glaring problems) to hardcore materialists, and correct me. In particular, flagging where I'm not even wrong — I come to this stuff as an autodidact because I found it useful, not as someone who trained up in it properly.

(I was seventeen or eighteen, had just started getting seriously into thinking about popular music [and unpopular popular music] and the horrifying quantities of bullshit surrounding it, and found Mythologies by Roland Barthes at the local second-hand bookshop, and went "HOLY CRAP THIS NAILS IT." Bits were opaque and bits were stupid, but enough made what I'd already been thinking make more sense that I got quite a lot out of it. Possibly the main failure mode was helping encourage me to think listening to records was much more important than it actually was.)

(Oh, and Paul Morley in NME. Yes, that Paul Morley.)

I doubt I'd call popular culture an important problem, except possibly as a threat. It is one that involves moderate quantities of money sloshing back and forth. But, more importantly, undue influence. Most recently, it got its hooks into things that actually affect the rest of the world. Understanding the precise mechanisms by which an industry that small can punch so ridiculously far above its economic weight may be useful. (Not that PM/crit is fully up to that task yet, and I'm greatly disappointed by that, but it's the right direction.)

I appear to be the sort of person who enjoys reading criticism. This is probably a terrible, terrible fate.

Comments

[siderea]

Oh. If your interest in postmodernism extends to guerrilla amateur semotician drive-by deconstructions of popular culture, check out the new collective blog Partial Objects.

[reddragdiva]

I appear to be the sort of person who enjoys reading criticism. This is probably a terrible, terrible fate.

Barthes

[skiamakhos]

One problem I had with Barthes is that he's often really badly translated. It really helps to speak French! His work on photography is absolutely seminal, but yes, as you say, opaque, but largely due to crap translation or near-untranslatability since he's making up new terms for things.

[sidhedmento]

I've still to read my Barthes books. I have them in shiny condition on my bookshelf looking classically intellectual and all that.

I've been told not to use them for my thesis. *pout*

[fluffymormegil]

I think the analysis would go something like:

• Politicians have power and want money and fame.
• Media company owners have money, are the fount of fame, and want power.