cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4028381
The only thing I can think of is Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and Marshall McLuhan’s work on media.
Oh, and this work by Christian Fuchs.
Problem being:
I think Fuchs is a Marxist-Humanist and I’m not sure what to think of Marxist humanism.
But I could be wrong.
Maybe I should ignore that aspect of their work.
Thoughts?
Got any book recommendations at all?
I’m looking for:
Media studies
Cultural theory
Communications
Internet
Social media
Management and organization
Community-building
Trends
Technology
etc.
^ These are the topics I’m looking into.
And, hopefully, from a Marxist-Leninist or Marxist standpoint (or at least leftist).
Got anything? Maybe advice?
Parenti’s Inventing Reality? Selections from Gramsci?
Good idea!
Anything else?
I feel like this is an under-studied topic.
Either that, or not many people study media and communications in conjunction with Marxism.
So I’m looking at my bookshelf now and I’m thinking you’d probably also find Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han interesting.
Yeah, problem is a lot of my reading on propaganda and communication was before I de-wormed myself of the ‘communism bad’
, so I don’t have too much else to offer other than lib stuff. I think anything modern you can find on Gramsci’s Cultural Hegemony would probably be the most useful for you.I’ve heard good things about Byung-Chul Han from a separate video so that should work!
Oh, okay, I wasn’t sure if you that would work for you or not. Then I would say Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent would be the two big ones. I haven’t found any specific Gramsci books to recommend, I’m afraid. I bought Volume 1 of the Prison Notebooks and found them to be more like notes to self that lacked a lot of context. A bit much for me. If you find something good please pass it along. If you’re willing to move away from strictly ML aspect you may find Dark Money by Jane Mayer interesting in which it explores how the Koch brothers and (other billionaires) shoved their dollars and views into every aspect of USian life, from media to education.
I’ve heard good things about the book Dark Money. I’ll check 'em out.
It’s a decent book, but Mayer kinda lets the Dems off the hook. I typically recommend it grouped with Thomas Franks’ Listen Liberal: Or Whatever Happened to the Party of the Left as he covers that pretty much right up until 2014 or so the dems were fully on board with much of what the Kochs were doing. The Kochs were actually on the board of the Democratic Leadership Council which helped get Bill Clinton elected back in the 90’s. I usually also recommend Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean as well, as it expands on the history behind neoliberalism’s father of Public Choice Economics James M. Buchanan ( a real ghoul, one of the assholes invited to advise Pinochet after Allende’s demise) and his involvement with the Kochs. But that may be a bit farther out of the wheelhouse of what you’re looking for. They’re just 3 books that go really well together as my holy trinity of covering US neoliberalism… Actually, you might wanna check them out, as one of the big things Democracy in Chains covers is the way Public Choice Economics is used to present privatization to people in ways that we see very heavy in the news media, while Frank covers how media uses virtue signaling to present a illusion of politics. Maybe, idk, your call.!
If you find this article relevant to your interest, I’d recommend checking out all three books.
Starring this comment. So that’s Thomas Franks’ book (which I already know of) and Democracy in Chains (which I’ve heard good things about). Interesting connections there as well.
lol, yep. awesome. You can find all these on libgen. Btw, for media analysis there’s also the Citations Needed Podcast. Their episodes they did on Bill Gates a while ago are quality and just the tip of the iceberg.
And yes, I’ll also check out the first two you mentioned.
Last two things, on the topic of Community Building, check out work by Mark Lakeman.
Badass democracy - reclaiming the public commons: Mark Lakeman at TEDxSantaCruz - YouTube
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
I happen to like TED talks (well, at times) even though most MLs hate 'em (with good reason).
I’ll check these out!
McLuhan was actually really conservative while envisioning a weird sorta low-key accelerationist post-literacy utopian tech future.
That’s not to say that his contributions should be disregarded for that fact but I wouldn’t go to him for my politics lol (and I’d be skeptical about his conclusions too.)
Poststructuralism and adjacent stuff like the Frankfurt School has a fair bit about the topics mentioned and they can be useful as tools in the toolkit but ultimately I’m pretty skeptical about it tbh. Often this stuff is really impenetrable. Debord is pretty grounded, especially given that he’s a French philosopher, but the same cannot be said of others who wrote directly about media like Baudrillard (“directly” in a relative sense lol) or ones whose analysis can be applied to media studies such as Deleuze and Guattari or Derrida and to try and wrap your head around them and then to apply this to your major in a coherent way is probably too much to ask.
That’s not me shitting on you by any means but rather it’s an indictment on those authors who wrote in such an obtuse way that it requires deep study and developing a good basis of pre-knowledge to understand the discussions they were a part of.
Walter Benjamin gets overlooked and his stuff applies to modern media, especially The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which with a little bit of interpretation can definitely be bent towards a critique of AI and it’s role in communication and especially media.
There’s Marcuse, particularly One-Dimensional Man but… I’m a bit take it or leave it when it comes to that work.
Of course there’s also Horkheimer & Adorno, in particular Dialectic of Enlightenment and the chapter The Culture Industry - Enlightenment As Mass Deception.
Then you’ve got your semioticians that are associated with this bunch like Kristeva, whose concept of intertextuality may be of relevance to you, and Barthes for example.
I guess since Benjamin and Kristeva got mentioned I should also mention Bataille too.
I think Fuchs is a Marxist-Humanist
We talking Gyorgy Lukacs Marxist-Humanism here or we talking Raya Dunyayevskaya Marxist-Humanism tho?
(Btw you could probably add Lukacs to the list above.)May I ask a silly question of you? I have a copy of Dialectics of Enlightenment, but haven’t read it yet. Would you say it belongs more on the shelf with my philosophy books with stuff by Marcuse and Simone de Beauvoir or like mythology books by Joseph Campbell and Riane Eisler?
Personally I’d be putting it with the philosophy books, hands down. But you’re right to ask where it best fits between those two categories.
Word. It’s currently with mythology.😅 Now I’ll spend the rest of the evening arguing with myself over it.
Whatever makes sense to you, dude. It’s your bookshelf and it’s supposed to be for your own reading, not to impress others with how accurately it is organised per the Dewey Decimal System.
Anyway, if someone gives you the side-eye over it you can always invoke the death of the author in your defense.
(You know, I got into it with some lib on social media a while back, I can’t remember over what exactly, but I provided info or a definition that was on a concrete subject and, I kid you not, the other person erm, ackshually-ed me and played that very card. I was like bruh, are you kidding me?? You can’t just say that the speed of light is 100km an hour and when you get called out for being completely wrong to turn around and claim that authorial intent is unimportant and that your personal interpretation takes precedence because of the death of the author - that’s not how it works outside of fiction and it’s not some get-out-of-jail free card where you can just make up anything you want.
I swear to Marx, so many of these people online just seem to memorise a random assortment of the names of concepts and fallacies, then they haphazardly deploy them to dazzle others in order to “win” a discussion.)
Oh, lol, no worries. It’s more to satisfy my own anal organization. I’ve got limited space so any time I add a book I’ve gotta rethink how they should be grouped. DoE just happens to be one of the few I know very little about, but mythology and enlightenment was my wheelhouse for a while so I tend to place it within that context. Thanks for the insight!
This has been rattling around in my brain since I first commented so apologies for the double-tap.
I think that there’s an angle that you could take in particular with regards to AI and the production of culture/media. This might seem a bit like the ramblings of a sleep-deprived crackpot and it might be more suitable for the inspiration for a thesis so strap yourself in:
I think there’s a lot that could be plumbed from synthesizing Marx’s bit in Grundrisse that sometimes gets referred to as “The Fragment on Machines” with the overall thesis of Deleuze & Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia to conceptualise a framework for understanding the direction that AI is taking by applying it to the production of culture.
This doesn’t necessarily agree with my current position on AI because as yet I’m agnostic about whether an LLM could actually genuinely achieve true AI or near-AI status but whatever. I don’t know enough about it and I’m hedging my bets by adopting a cowardly stance on the matter. But to argue this point would require a fairly optimistic assessment of the trajectory that LLMs are on and how far you think they’ll develop.
Anyway, if we take Marx’s FoM and narrow the scope to being purely within the confines of the machines containing the sum total of cultural knowledge, where humans are relegated to being mere nodes in the network, or links in the chain, but where the network itself is dominated by the machines themselves and thus they become both the primary producer of culture and inherently also the primary consumer of the culture produced as the machines feed back on themselves (assuming that there are not limitations imposed as a measure to prevent AI poisoning or ultimately a terminal AI feedback loop of poisoned AI self-cannibalising).
With a culture industry that becomes divorced from humanity by increasing degrees, this imo bears an uncanny resemblance to what D&G put forward as the inherently liberatory capacity of schizophrenia under capitalism, except confined within the bounds of just cultural production; whether you want to transpose the site that D&G predicted this horizon to emerge upon or whether you want to limit it to narrower confines would be a debate you’d need to have with yourself after reading their stuff and maybe hashing it out with a PhD supervisor or D&G enthusiast.
The inversion in this example is that rather than the individual becoming increasingly fused with the ephemeral identification of a rotating cast of what is essentially branding or marketing desires in the ultimate latter stages of capitalism as it accelerates this process to its absolute limit, instead we have a potentially infinite degree of acceleration that the machines would be able to achieve within the domain of cultural production as machines do not have the inherent limitations that humans have. (Sidebar to note that the inherent limitations of human capacity is one of my major reservations about the conclusion that D&G never quite concretely make but only ever explain as having the possibility of existing.)
Without trying to dazzle you with words or trying to teach you all of D&G in a single comment, to put it into a metaphorical sense:
If AI cultural production gains enough momentum as it cycles and accelerates endlessly, as humans are caught in this every increasing churn, at some point one or more people will be ejected from that cycle at such a terrific speed that they will achieve escape velocity from capitalism and/or this AI culture production cycle, at which point they will be able to begin anew at creating works of cultural production that are meaningful to themselves and others while being entirely divorced from the prior mode of cultural production (and/or capitalism), which is essentially what D&G argue as being the liberatory capacity that will emerge.
I think I’m gonna have to go talk to my own D&G guy about this…
Anyway hope you liked the little guided tour of my brain just now, and if you were wondering what soundtrack best describes what it’s like up there this is it. I hope that what I have written in this comment makes some sense or at least that it will later on.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I don’t know how to think of Deleuze and Guatarri. I’ve avoided them because they seem to have coming from the psycho-analysis tradtion and isn’t that academic tradition basically bunk?
Or maybe… not? I know Freud is generally derided a lot.
I don’t know how to think of Deleuze and Guatarri.
Relatable lol.
D&G has gotta be some of the toughest of the Frankfurt School theorists and their magnum opus, Anti-Oedipus (which Capitalism and Schizophrenia is one part of) is a direct response to Lacan so if you want to truly get yourself right across D&G then you really have to start from Lacan.
I’ve avoided them because they seem to have coming from the psycho-analysis tradtion and isn’t that academic tradition basically bunk?
Yeah, it is and yeah, it is. But I think it’s important to be cautious about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Freud gets derided a lot, especially from psychology (it turns out the call was coming from inside the house the whole time 😱😱) but a whole lot of that is due to them wanting to position psychology as a much harder science than arguably it is, or ever could be, and so they use Freud as a whipping boy; “Look at how scientific we are, we even denounce the forefather of psychology for being insufficiently scientific!!”
Psychology as a discipline is always frantically trying to adorn itself with anything that confers it with the aura of being scientific when tbh it’s just desperate to be something more like biology than it manages to be but also less like sociology which it loathes and which it cannot acknowledge how proximal it is to it.
If you contrast how contemporary psychology relates to Freud vs how it relates to BF Skinner, it says a lot. Skinner made some major contributions to psychology at the time but a lot of his contributions are have been superceded, if not completely disproven by none other than the man, the myth, the self-mummyfying Noam Chomsky just about as soon as Skinner dropped his theory on linguistic development. Sure, Skinner was much more scientific than Freud was but that was as much a product of his time as anything else, and what really gets overlooked is that Freud too made major contributions to psychology in his own time. (There’s also a massive discussion about the sociology of scientific knowledge which I’m just going to completely sidestep or otherwise I’m going to write forever and nobody wants that. Also it’s bizarre because I wrote a comment somewhere completely different on Hexbear on a subject entirely unrelated and I was channeling the spirit of Harry Collins, a big figure in SSK, just before. How odd.)
Anyway, what I’m driving at is that while Freud was wrong about plenty that doesn’t mean that he was wrong about everything or that his conclusions were not valuable. For example, he revolutionised psychology by asserting that the pathology a patient was experiencing could be resolved internally by the patient. Prior to Freud, mental illness was basically considered to be a product of things like “poor moral character” and shit like that, with the solution being that you just beat or torture the patient until they straighten up and fly right, or you just consign them to the asylum forever.
(I’m going to try and rein myself in a bit but there’s another tangent I’m about to spiral off on about the earliest reform attempts of the asylum and the role of Richard Paternoster, who was a colourful character by all reports, and how his incarceration in a mental asylum is a perfect example of the stuff Foucault discussed.)
But perhaps surprisingly, you’d think that psychology would have surpassed psychoanalysis and yet comparative analysis between CBT, the gold standard for psychosocial treatment, and psychoanalysis shows roughly equivalent outcomes. So basically you have a pseudoscientific approach to, like, dream analysis and psychosexual development and whatever but there’s indications that it’s about as effective as the most highly regarded and widely celebrated treatment method in psychology today.
All of this is to say that very faulty reasoning can still arrive at something useful.
And I think that’s what the Frankfurt School does - it isn’t just an effort to extend or defend psychoanalysis, it’s something that gets drawn upon conceptually as an influence. Think like the way that Hegel is to Marx - there are things in Hegel that no materialist would agree with but Marx drew a lot of inspiration from Hegel despite that fact. And although Marx was a Young Hegelian, Marx didn’t just go on to try and extend Hegel’s philosophy in his writings but instead he took what was useful, applied what he thought was most relevant, and discarded the rest.
Once upon a time, when I was younger, I picked up Leviathan by Hobbes. I’m sure you know the only bit that people ever quote from him - that life, in the state of nature, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short. I was naïve about reading Hobbes at the time and I disregarded what he had to say because the foundation that he developed his political philosophy from was so false that I found it to be objectionable. The thing is though, he wasn’t writing as a historian or an anthropologist, he was writing to elaborate on a (then) modern political philosophy. Another more common reason why Hobbes gets dismissed out of hand is because what he argues for, what his Leviathan represents, is essentially totalitarian in nature.
But although I strongly disagree with his conclusions and his muthologising or speculation about humans prior to the advent of “civilisation”, there are still important ideas in Leviathan - there are valuable observations and arguments and, equally so, there are observations and arguments he makes that are important to understand in order to refute the foundations of liberalism.
Learn from my mistake. You don’t have to agree with an author to read them, and you don’t have to agree with the basis of their argument nor even its conclusion to find useful things within it. That was what I was gently encouraging you to take away from my criticisms of McLuhan - his conclusions are crackpot-tier and I’d argue a product of his political and religious convictions but he still made important observations and arguments despite starting from a bad place (imo) and ending up with bizarre fanciful conclusions (imo).
I… actually do consider psychology to be better than psycho-analysis, but that’s probably because I’ve read too much from psychologists to begin with! I love psychology. I love the study of the mind. And I like that psychology is basically neuroscience with sociology. Gimme that. Gimme me stuff like that in general. I love sociology as well, as a matter of fact. The social sciences fascinate me to know end, but I want it to be mixed with material reality.
I mean, as discipline psychoanalysis is essentially dead in the water and has been since before Anna Freud even died her well-deserved death, may she rot in piss.
Whereas psychology as a discipline has greatly expanded and is extremely dynamic and it has analytical and descriptive power that outclasses psychoanalysis in all respects.
I don’t think that anyone but the most avid psychoanalist would argue that psychology is on par with or somehow inferior to psychoanalysis. My point was more about how in terms of outcomes for patients, you’d assume that psychology would have completely surpassed psychoanalysis given that it isn’t based on crackpot nonsense but rather it draws on, what, like a solid century of genuinely scientific endeavour and application. But that’s not the case - for all the advancements that psychology has made, and they are massive, in some ways it still seems to be stuck achieving outcomes on a rough par with the Austrian School of Sex Wizards and Oneiromancy.
Basically: Wrong ideas -> Wrong conclusions -> Respectable outcomes
vs
Good ideas -> Good conclusions -> Respectable outcomes
Which is just to say that something can be extremely flawed and yet still be useful. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to approach Freud without very healthy skepticism but that also applies for plenty of other things too and even if its foundations are false, its analysis is false, and its conclusions are false doesn’t mean that it is devoid of anything useful. All it means is that you’re going to have to separate out the wheat from the chaff and the ratio of wheat:chaff is going to be much less than desirable.
Right. Yes, there are a lot of problems in psychology and even psychologists threat about it. Plus, lots of chuds and conservatives in the discipline. And the “achievements” of psychology don’t compare well to, say, biology (as we previously brought up) or even sociology, I feel.
Which is just to say that something can be extremely flawed and yet still be useful.
Agreed! Frankly, I’ve… had a feeling that was the case for a long time, but also (again, for a long time), I was reluctant to take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion because I didn’t want to be led astray.
All to the good that I’m coming to terms with this logical reasoning.
Althusser’s on the reproduction of capitalism!
What else should I read by him?
On the reproduction of capitalism: ideology and ideological state apparatuses is a really great read. You can look up the chapters as essays individually but I think collectively they shine a bright light on how to navigate ideological reproduction, class struggle and the superstructure in relation to each other. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses the essay in particular you would really like I think
On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. eh?
I’ll check it out.
Let me know if there’s anything else I should check out from Althusser.
There’s technically his writings on the young Marx old Marx split but I haven’t really gone through them in depth or found a really great reason to yet. I like althusser as a Marxist leninist theorist more than his philosophical musings.
His essay on over determination is essential imo to understand dialectical materialism in its entirety.
His “young Marx / old Marx” dichotomy sucks, from what I hear.
Yea it’s just weird that he walks it back and forth multiple times and the demand for an epistemological break is unnecessary. He’s essentially trying to explain the confusions people have about Marx, but it’s overcomplicated and impractical to actually pinpoint the exact epistemological point of inflection.
It’s pretty much all explained in the essay on over determination anyways, the young Marx old Marx stuff is just like extra fluff essentially.
Eyyup.
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
thanks!
