“Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of “fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.”
—Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.
Barring a few employment opportunities that can’t be listed truthfully on a tax form (mobster, pimp, sub-Saharan Warlord) I’d argue that the three most useless jobs in the world are as follows: Ballerina, Sportscaster, Graduate Student. I won’t speculate much on the former two, except to say that any job that allows you to list a tutu as a tax write-off or receive a paycheck to discuss Brett Favre isn’t actually a job.
Actually, I will extrapolate just a tad more: I don’t mean that in any new-wave, follow-your-bliss, pop-philosophy sense. I mean it really isn’t a job. The services you offer are scant at best and pointless at worst. You want to dance? Start a dance studio to teach little girls they should starve themselves for a dream. You want to talk about sports? Cool. What you’re saying on the radio isn’t any more insightful than what my father says when he screams at the 49ers. You aren’t discussing how to curtail water waste or improve the political situations in any countless number of countries. You’re arguing with another overweight man with high blood-pressure about a two second time- frame.
This is not to say I dislike sports, or the ballet. Well, I don’t dislike sports at any rate. But as a member of the third ignominious category of workers I listed, as a Graduate student in English, I feel I have the prerogative to wax philosophic on the topic of uselessness.
Before I go any further, I should probably explain the title of this blog. Anyone out there who has read Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1944 treatise on the “Culture Industry” (Don’t worry, I don’t expect anyone to, in fact, I probably advise against it, unless you want to spend a day with a headache reading the only thing that makes listening to Elliott Smith seem like rollicking in a sun-drenched daisy field) will recognize this as a derisive (and utterly silly) term for the culture industry itself, a play on Althusser’s concepts of Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses (See? Bona fide pretentious Graduate student). Adorno and Horkheimer, though particularly Adorno, are derisive of practically everything in sight, from movie theaters to Jazz music, viewing it all as mass produced art created by a capitalist system to both feed itself and keep its participants docile. Rays of sunshine, right?
But the beauty of language is that it can be subverted to whatever means we see fit. If I felt the desire, I could probably go out and create a whole grass-roots movement hellbent on using the term ‘Bloated Pleasure Apparatus’ to mean ‘Rosie O’Donnell’ (Alright, on that one, I probably give myself too much credit). The point, however, is that I appropriated the term to mean, all at once, Graduate School, Education, Literature, Theater, History, Politics and quite possibly and most appropriately, myself. For all things of these are topics for which I feel quite deep affection, even as my inner curmudgeon seeks mostly to denigrate and mock them as unabashedly silly.
This is perhaps especially true of my relationship with Graduate school, which seems grandly consumptive and self-congratulating to the point that it’s almost masturbatory. If I seem utterly harsh toward sportscasters and ballerinas, it pales in comparison to the degrees I find Graduate School contemptible, and thus worth mockery. Somehow, graduate students, though we are told school is now our ‘job,’ fail to produce anything substantive or worthwhile for the world at large. Our paychecks certainly reflect this truth. We exist on a plane somewhere between adult-hood and toddlerdom, where consequences and harsh realities are like pithy philosophical daydreams. While we opine radical political positions and read dense impractical treatises from the comfort of a coffee shop, elsewhere, someone of little consequence to us is starving or cold and could really use a meal. We know this person on in abstract, in theory. In class, we spend hours arguing the definition of the term “culture” or whether or not alternative lifestyles truly exist and be studied, or can never be anything but co-opted once identified. But these conversations are not substantive. They are not giving healthcare to those who need it, nor feeding the hungry. They are the smug musings of smart people sitting in a room, slapping each others’ backs.
All of this may beg the question of why I persist, if I find graduate school and its denizens so detestable. The truth of the matter is, I enjoy being angry. I enjoy disliking things, I enjoy being curmudgeonly and so beneath my rantings and my protestations, you’ll find what I hope most of us are, a lover of literature, history, politics and their peculiarities, an appreciator of education and its possibilities. I believe most of all that through active, unpretentious, inclusive education we will improve the world, even if it takes a long, winding and altogether strange path. For me, Graduate school is the first necessary step up that path.
Welcome to the Bloated Pleasure Apparatus.
I added you jackass!! I am looking forward to reading your goodies!!!
And by the way…… your words make my Blog feel real stupid!