The silent chorus: culture and superficiality

The Silent Chorus is a philosophical examination of superficiality in the modern capitalist West. Building on the work of thinkers such as Aristotle, Vico, Herder, Marx, Heidegger, Baudrillard and MacIntyre, this thesis analyses superficial appropriation in popular culture to highlight the shallowness of our everyday cultural life. Superficial appropriation reveals how the world is treated as a mass of depthless commodities to be bought, sold and consumed for self-satisfaction. Superficiality more generally estranges us from our and others' narrative traditions, corrupts our universities, robs us of our communal ethical will and hollows out our world so that we are symbolically 'homeless'. This hollowness, in turn, leads people to seek meaning though shallow and vicarious means, such as superficial appropriation. The Silent Chorus argues that this malaise is engendered by the Epicurean tradition, and its modern expressions in late capitalism, mechanistic materialism and egoistic individualism. As an alternative to this Epicurean 'homelessness', The Silent Chorus develops the vision of the 'Chorus'. Drawing on Classical Greek tragedy and democracy, narrative theory and thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition, the Chorus is a utopian vision of diverse, creative, open-ended cultural life. This vision is used to highlight the degeneration of superficial popular culture, past and present deficiencies of our universities and the ethical weakness of our superficiality. It does not solve our problems, but rather clarifies them, and gives us an alternative. Moving dialectically between deep utopia and shallow reality, 'what should be' and 'what is', The Silent Chorus further reveals the ontological, existential and ethical danger of our age, while providing a speculative vision for the future.