On entertainment: The politics of vulgarity

This thesis looks at the cultural field of British "light entertainment", and aims to locate its specificity in relation to its history, its political stance, and its textual strategies. The thesis asks the questions "What does entertainment do?" and "What is entertainment for?". I argue that modern entertainment attempts to simulate a more anarchic and disruptive cultural form, taking access to Bakhtin's account of the European tradition of carnival to explain this point, while also contriving always to contain and limit its celebrational and chaotic nature. I refer to a general social trend toward ever-increasing domestication and privatisation of our leisure activities, so that the very public and unifying carnival of the middle ages can in fact in no way be allied with any modem cultural form, and I argue that this can be seen as a historical shift, from a society based on carnival to one based on entertainment, that can be related to Foucault's explanation of changing power structures within modem Europe. In seeking to be mainstream, and to be acceptable to a general, mass audience, entertainment - as disseminated by the "show business" industries - aims to appear daring while remaining unthreatening. A television programme of the 1980s is analysed in some depth to explore how this strategy works, and a particular aspect of note is that in attempting to appeal to all sections of a diverse audience, entertainment refuses to acknowledge this diversity, and aims to represent us as all the same underneath, with some tensions immanent in the text because of this. The thesis argues that modem light entertainment, as described here, is a historically and culturally specific category. I use the work of Raymond Williams to explore the development of a language around culture in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within an increasing differentiation of the cultural field allowing the consumption of particular cultural forms to confer and confirm cultivation on their consumers, entertainment aims to appeal universally to all of us. Thus, entertainment has an obvious classed nature, but refrains from marking its spectators off as working class (in contrast to high culture's capacity to mark its consumers as upwardly mobile or cultivated). Entertainment is traditionally understood in contrast to "art", a contrast carrying an implicitly recognised and accepted set of polarities. If culture is serious, worthwhile, lasting, demanding, creative and original, entertainment is trivial, valueless, ephemeral, easy, and formulaic. Within this construction, entertainment is essentially characterised by absence - it lacks the qualities that distinguish true culture. I argue that this polarity is not so much an external interpretation imposed on entertainment, as a strategy within entertainment itself. I refer to Bourdieu's account of the political functions of so-called "legitimate culture" in maintaining class distinction, and posit a parallel function within entertainment, which continually articulates this set of polarities, allowing entertainment texts to represent themselves as pleasurable in contrast to the hard work involved in engaging with high culture, and as universally appealing in contrast with the minority appeal and pretentiousness of "art". I explore a British film from the 1930s starring George Formby to demonstrate this point. I name this strategy within entertainment texts as vulgarity, defining this as a deliberate refusal to be respectable, and to place oneself outside of the field of culture. In setting up this vulgar space, entertainment provides us with a period of relief from social aspiration, within which we do not seek to demonstrate cultural knowledge or cultivation. This representation of itself as without artistic merit is essential to the working of entertainment, and the fluidity of the category is demonstrated by the many cultural texts which have shifted historically from the field of entertainment to that of art, and vice versa

Affective Experience, Desire, and Reasons for Action

What is the role of affective experience in explaining how our desires provide us with reasons for action? When we desire that p, we are thereby disposed to feel attracted to the prospect that p, or to feel averse to the prospect that not-p. In this paper, we argue that affective experiences – including feelings of attraction and aversion – provide us with reasons for action in virtue of their phenomenal character. Moreover, we argue that desires provide us with reasons for action only insofar as they are dispositions to have affective experiences. On this account, affective experience has a central role to play in explaining how desires provide reasons for action

Can A Quantum Field Theory Ontology Help Resolve the Problem of Consciousness?

The hard problem of consciousness arises in most incarnations of present day physicalism. Why should certain physical processes necessarily be accompanied by experience? One possible response is that physicalism itself should be modified in order to accommodate experience: But, modified how? In the present work, we investigate whether an ontology derived from quantum field theory can help resolve the hard problem. We begin with the assumption that experience cannot exist without being accompanied by a subject of experience (SoE). While people well versed in Indian philosophy will not find that statement problematic, it is still controversial in the analytic tradition. Luckily for us, Strawson has elaborately defended the notion of a thin subject—an SoE which exhibits a phenomenal unity with different types of content (sensations, thoughts etc.) occurring during its temporal existence. Next, following Stoljar, we invoke our ignorance of the true physical as the reason for the explanatory gap between present day physical processes (events, properties) and experience. We are therefore permitted to conceive of thin subjects as related to the physical via a new, yet to be elaborated relation. While this is difficult to conceive under most varieties of classical physics, we argue that this may not be the case under certain quantum field theory ontologies. We suggest that the relation binding an SoE to the physical is akin to the relation between a particle and (quantum) field. In quantum field theory, a particle is conceived as a coherent excitation of a field. Under the right set of circumstances, a particle coalesces out of a field and dissipates. We suggest that an SoE can be conceived as akin to a particle—a SelfOn—which coalesces out of physical fields, persists for a brief period of time and then dissipates in a manner similar to the phenomenology of a thin subject. Experiences are physical properties of selfons with the constraint (specified by a similarity metric) that selfons belonging to the same natural kind will have similar experiences. While it is odd at first glance to conceive of subjects of experience as akin to particles, the spatial and temporal unity exhibited by particles as opposed to fields and the expectation that selfons are new kinds of particles, paves the way for cementing this notion. Next, we detail the various no-go theorems in most versions of quantum field theory and discuss their impact on the existence of selfons. Finally, we argue that the time is ripe for a rejuvenated Indian philosophy to begin tackling the three-way relationship between SoEs (which may become equivalent to jivas in certain Indian frameworks), phenomenal content and the physical world. With analytic philosophy still struggling to come to terms with the complex worlds of quantum field theory and with the relative inexperience of the western world in arguing the jiva-world relation, there is a clear and present opportunity for Indian philosophy to make a worldcentric contribution to the hard problem of experience