Thursday 24 November 2005

Fewtril #43

If you wish to fathom the ills of modern society, a good place to start is sociology; and once you have learnt from this mistake, you can begin to look at the matter seriously; and once you have looked at the matter seriously, you can then begin to take account of what is due to sociology.

5 comments:

dearieme said...

Look, something is going to have to change around here. You post a fewtril, such as this or the one below, then I scratch my head and wonder how to rephrase "how very true" in some mildly interesting variant. This dialogue lacks creative tension. I have a reputation for irony - or at least sarcasm - to protect. Either you must begin to say silly things or I'll have to shut up. Which is it gonna be, buster?

Deogolwulf said...

I'm sorry - it's not that I don't have plenty of native silliness to express, but I am doing my best to suppress it. I can see that the spark is lacking, however.

How about we have a Radical Lesbian Feminist Week? I could assume the persona of some tenured Prof-Ms, and talk about how shopping at Tesco is a sublimated form of rape. I might even suggest a causal link between testosterone and the curdling of milk.

How does that sound?

berenike said...

Queer Musicology? (discovering this on the syllabus was when I decided not to bother taking up my MSt place . . . but feminist musicology would have had the same effect. Raping the key of C?)

Anonymous said...

Sociology per se or just the Gramscian idiots that teach it?

Deogolwulf said...

I don't suppose the formal study of society has ever helped society itself - a peaceable one is much too delicate a thing to survive inspection and rationalisation.
Sociology itself has rarely if ever been solely about studying society; rather it has been the tool of those who would wish to transform it. Enter the Marxians, the Gramscians, and sundry other blighters - all bent on "capturing the culture".