Morrissey and Daoism: Easy Wandering, <i>Wuwei</i>, and the Aesthetics of Awkwardness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the author draws attention to “Daoist” themes in Morrissey’s art and personality. The link between Morrissey and Daoism can be established via Oscar Wilde, whose relationship with Zhuangzi’s philosophy has been much commented upon. Morrissey’s worldview and art have been shaped by Wilde, whose Complete Works Morrissey received from his librarian mother at the age of eight. The self-estranging irony, the incorrect behavior, as well as the conviction that aesthetics is more important than ethics, are emblematic of Zhuangzi, Wilde, and Morrissey. Linking themes of East Asian philosophies to Morrissey’s art is historically justified. There is an affinity between Daoism/ Buddhism and the subcultural context from which Morrissey emerges. Morrissey becomes the Oscar Wilde of post-punk. Morrissey rejects all taints of rock’n’roll machismo and plays up to social awkwardness of the misfits and the outsider. The article also deals with the following themes : strength arising from weakness, uselessness, aimless wandering, language skepticism, identity, authenticity, handicap, camp, and finally, the aesthetics of awkwardness. Awkwardness transcends mere clumsiness (which is no aesthetic quality at all) and becomes potentially attractive. Morrissey’s wuwei strategy of non-pretentious acting creates an aesthetics of awkwardness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".