In this episode Barry and Mike discuss William Burroughs’ 1963 manifesto “The Cut-Up Method.”  We worry over some contradictions and tensions in his “new” method of writing.

#73 In this episode Barry and Mike discuss “Panglossian Neoliberalism,”

a term that Evgeny Morozov uses to describe the place of generative AI in the

hands of venture capitalists.

Can AI Break out of Panglossian Neoliberalism?

The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence

a sense oF rebellion podcast

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss chapter 2 of of Jonathan Crary’s “Scorched Earth.”   They focus on social media as a pharmacological problem within the Internet Complex. 

Barry and Mike discuss Jonathan Crary’s critique of the “internet complex” and what it means.

Barry and Mike discuss Siegfried Kracauer's 1926 essay "Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces." Written nearly 100 years ago, the essay is strangely relevant to our current political landscape. We pay special attention to Kracauer's unique notion of distraction, which contra Stiegler, Kracauer views as a stimulus to thought.

Barry and Mike discuss Yanis Varoufakis' book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, and the challenge it presents to Marxist theories about global capital.

In this episode Barry and Mike relate Evgeny Morozov’s 2013 New Yorker essay, “Only Disconnect” to their previous discussion of A. Romero’s meditation on boredom and distraction and the internet.   

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss “The Most Important Skill in the 21st Century,” Alberto Romero’s polemical defense of boredom in the media entertainment age. They discuss whether it’s possible to be bored today in the way that Romero seems to require.

In this episode Barry and Mike return to the earlier discussion of  Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together” and question her conclusion regarding the human/robotic distinction in light of PKD’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together” and her thesis, that though technology opens new possibilities for communication it simultaneously alienates us from each other, leaving us wanting for emotional connections.  We wonder whether Turkle is right and whether authentic relationships are possible. 

In this episode Barry and Mike resume their discussion of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun.”  They discuss how differences in class and education determine how the various characters relation to Kara as an embodiment of technology.

Change is good! Barry and Mike shift the focus of their discussions on technology to look more closely at what it means to be human in a technologically dominated world. This episode looks at Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, "Klara and the Sun" and investigates his questions about the spaces between humanity and technology.

This is a look back at our 3/3/23 episode on Simone Weil.

In this episode Barry and Mike wrap up their discussion of Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects,” focusing on the question of education and media.

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Marshal McLuhan’s seminal text, The Medium is the Massage:  An Inventory of Effects.  They discuss the form of the book and some of the key opening arguments. 

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss the three central issues raised by John Law in the introduction to his 1991 anthology, “Sociology of Monsters”: the problem of epistemology; the problem of the social; the problem of distribution.   Law argues that the coming together of Sociology and STS (science, technology, society) offers an opportunity to address these issues in meaningful and ethical ways.

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Denise Lu’s recent New York Times editorial, “Want to Enjoy Music More? Stop Streaming It.  Build a real music collection. Reintroduce intimacy to the songs you care about.” They attempt to re-frame the article in CMS friendly terms and end up with an extended investigation of the nature of intimacy and the archive.

On the occasions of their 50th episode, Barry and Mike get reflective.  The discuss the purpose or intent of the show, their favorite episodes, what they’d do over, and the biggest surprises that they’ve encountered so far. 

In this episode Barry and Mike discussion John Law’s 1992 essay, “Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity” and in particular Law’s concepts of network composition, punctualisation, and translation. 

Barry and Mike discuss Bruno Latour’s essay, “On Actor-Network Theory: A few clarifications.” They work through his key terms in an attempt to better understand the new meanings he ascribes to actors and networks and what this theory allows us to do with media theory. 

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss a chapter from Jacques Attali, book, Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Following on their discussion from the Glenn Gould episode, they interrogate at Attali's take on the impacts of recorded music as an archive and as background noise.

In this episode Barry and Mike talk about Glenn Gould’s essay “The Prospects of Recording.” They focus on two central arguments from the essay – how technology creates the new, empowered, listener and the significance of background music. 

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Andre Bazin’s collection of essays on new media and how the evolution of television and technological development impact how we see film.  Specifically, they discuss how “Industrial Art” challenges traditional ideas about aesthetics. 

In this episode Barry and Mike return to Bernard Steigler’s What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmakology.  They tease out Steigler’s terms proletarianism and disintoxification, as well as our possible roles in resisting the poison and fostering the growth of the cure in the pharmakon.

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Derrida's 1972 talk turned essay, "Signature, Event, Context." The episode engages his critique of Plato and Austin and turns to the relevance of his findings as they relate to AI. The discussion ends on a thought provoking read of human connection and the authenticity of language. They wonder, is AI a threat, or does it highlight our embarrassment over our inability to generate authentic language in the quest for human connection?

At Mike's insistence, the guys return for a second consecutive Adorno episode. "Opera and the Long-Playing Record" sees Adorno pivot, celebrating the advances and opportunities that the vinyl record affords music beyond archival purposes. Here, rather than denegrating vinyl as being a cheap proxy container for art, Adorno adopts a hopeful position, celebrating its ability to save art from staleness and its ability to create virtual spaces where art can be enjoyed free of distraction.

In this episode Barry and Mike work through Adorno's "The Form of the Phonographic Record", extrapolating his arguments against technology and the phonograph and marveling at the surprising about-face at the end of the essay.

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss an essay by Dina Litovsky, "The Problem of AI Photography is not the Medium, It's the Message." They channel previous discussions on Susan Sontag, Andre Bizan and Jean Baudrillard to talk about the hyper-real, the role of AI in art and photography, and where the boundary between what we consider legitimate and illigitimate may be in contemporary art.

In this episode Mike and Barry take the Baudrillardian grand tour: we visit Disneyland, Los Angeles, Viet Nam, and pause to consider the philosophical significance of the 1972 Watergate break-in.

In other words, we discuss “The Precession of Simulacra” by Jean Baudrillard (from “Simulacra and Simulation,” 1981) , the text that introduced readers to the “hyperreal,” the idea that what we call reality is a media construct, a product of the symbol systems that saturate our lives.   We consider how Baudrillard’s ideas are echoed in the texts by Plato, Susan Sontag, and Andre Bazin recently discussed on the CMS podcast, and flash forward to discuss the current furor over ChatGPT and college writing instruction. Along the way, Barry proves beyond any reasonable doubt that he hasn’t read William Blake for a long, long time…

In the “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Andre Bazin makes the provocative claim that the invention of photography is "clearly the most important event in the history of the plastic arts." At the same time, Bazin questions our naïve faith that the photographic image is just as real as the object that it depicts. He goes on to provide an alternative history of painting and photography, highlighting the ways we value mechanical agency over human creativity. In this episode, Barry and Mike discuss Bazin's essay and also consider how the digitization of images has further altered "the history of the plastic arts." We hope you enjoy it!

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Susan Sontag’s essay In Plato’s Cave from her book: On Photography.  In this essay Sontag argues that photographs are much like the images that the prisoners in Plato’s cave see reflected on the walls: representations of reality, but not reality itself.  Sontag argues that, like Plato’s prisoners, we too have difficulty distinguishing the image from the event that they represent.  Additionally, she claims that these images, though different than what they represent, still have the power to produce an emotional response from viewers. 

Barry and Mike bring Sontag’s arguments from 1977 to our current digital existences and investigate current experiences with images, noting that in many ways the differences between the real and the image, as well as the implications of our difficulties in distinguishing between the two haven’t changed all that much in the last 45 years.  They focus on Sontag’s claims about nostalgia and negative empathy as being products of our interactions with photography and try to figure out what that means in our current situation.

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Jonathan Crary’s book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.  Though there are a few detours, the discussion focuses on two of Crary’s central arguments: the devaluation of sleep, and the human cost of living as a part of the technological spectacle (to borrow a little bit from DeBord).  The discussion goes a little bit long, but we had a really good time talking about this.  We hope you enjoy!

In This episode of the Critical Media Studies podcast we discuss Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. As the book is aphoristic, rather than trying to address the work as a whole, Barry and Mike look at what Debord means by Spectacle and hone in on a few particular sections (24-28). The focus of this episode settles around the question of whether or not there is a continuity between Debord's mediated society and our own digital mediasphere.

We hope you enjoy and welcome any feedback or suggestions.

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss the French Christian mystic Simone Weil and her focus on attention and its role in the “right way” of doing things. This discussion picks up on the previous episode with Byung Chul Han regarding distraction and multi-tasking.  Though this chat functions as a stand-alone discussion, In some ways this is a continuation of that previous discussion.  If you’ve not done so, you may want to listen to the previous episode first.  Either way, we hope you enjoy! 

As always, please feel free to leave us comments or questions.  We love to hear from you!

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Bernard Steigler’s 2010 book, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology.  They reconsider their understanding of the pharmakon from Steigler’s other work and discuss the significance of care in pharmakology. 

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Byung Chul Han’s “The Burnout Society” with an eye to his discussion of multitasking and the loss of what Han calls “profound boredom.”  The discussion invokes Bernard Steigler’s concept of noesis and Jauques Eleul’s concept of technique as a means of better understanding the spaces of focus and attention in the modern world. 

Barry and Mike pick up their discussion on Raymond Williams’ monograph, Television: Technology and Cultural From. In their previous episode they covered the idea that media technologies are answers to specific problems, rather than inventions looking for applications. 

In this episode they discuss how Williams’ ideas fit and clash with Marshal McLuhan’s ideas of media as being self-determining.  In short, they look at whether the tensions between Williams and McLuhan is a case of a terminological incompatibility, or whether the two philosophies of media technologies really do argue for different models and outcomes. 

Barry and Mike begin their discussion of Raymond Williams’ 1974 book, Television.  Their discussion revolves around the question of the place and purpose of media as a social process. The crux of the debate revolves around the question: Is television a solution looking for a problem, or is it, rather, the form that contains both? As a part of this, naturally, they go back to “their dear friend” Marshall McLuhan, who functions as a useful foil in teasing out the threads of possible insights. 

As always, we hope you enjoy!

Barry and Mike wrap up their discussion on The Dialectic of Enlightenment by taking on the final section on antisemitism and then offering their takeaways from the book.  It’s a long discussion that covers a good bit of ground.  Among other topics, they spend time talking about the dangers of partially understood ideologies, the role of access to public services (and how belonging to the to public creates impressions of authenticity), and the problems of conflating access with progress.

What do Taylor Swift, Beethoven, and Raidohead have in common?

In the fourth part of their series on Horkheimer and Adorno’s

“Dialectic of Enlightenment” Barry and Mike talk about the “Culture Industry.”  Among other topics, they discuss how money influences how art gets made and how capitalism impacts media. 

We hope you enjoy!

Horkheimer and Adorno – Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality

In this episode, Barry and Mike discuss "Excursis two: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality," from Horkheimer and Adorno's "The Dialectic of Enlightenment." Here Adprno and Horkheimer argue that, despite their many differences, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the French libertine writer the Marquis de Sade shared one idea in common: they both believed that Enlightenment reason could be wholly separated from moral concerns. In doing so, they both made it intellectually respectable to subordinate morality to power and thus indirectly led to the rise of fascism.

We had to leave a lot of ideas from this chapter on the table to keep the episode at a manageable length. There' s a lot more here to discuss: as always, we welcome your comments!

Barry and Mike take on Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment, the second chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” focusing on three key moments in the story of Odysseus' journey: the encounters with Circe, the Cyclops, and his return home. They explore the ways that Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of Enlightenment thinking is manifest in Odysseus’ actions, perhaps most evident in his uncanny ability to leverage myth in order to succeed in his endeavors. In Barry’s words, “He’s a problem solver, that Odysseus.”

The people have spoken! One of our listeners, Jessica, asked if we would do an episode on the Frankfurt school, preferably Horkheimer and Adorno. And when you folks ask, we oblige!

In prepping for an episode on chapter two of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Barry and Mike asked the age old question: Why just do one chapter of incredibly dense German philosophy when you can take on the book in its entirety? So that's what we're beginning here.

Over the next five episodes we will be discussing the individual chapters of The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The goal for each is twofold: First, we want to explicate the central arguments of each chapter and then, secondly, we will be applying those arguments to the digital media as they exist now, at the end of 2022.

This first episode attempts to lay out Horkheimer and Adorno's general argument about the Enlightenment and to sketch the direction for the books remaining episodes. We hope you enjoy and, as always, welcome your feedback, comments, and suggestions!

In this episode Barry and Mike wrestle with the idea of updating Benjamin's article "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Of the many questions that they attempt to address, perhaps the central one is: Can we update Bejmanin's theory and still maintain its philosophical integrity? Or has the digitization of virtually all media created an environment where his terms remain useful as a starting point, but ultimately anachronistic?

Spoiler alert - They do not reach a definitive conclusion. However, as with most of the episodes, they do wander into new questions and attempt to draw useful conclusions. This one was fun, but a bit messy.

In this episode Barry and Mike take up Stuart Hall's 1980 essay, Encoding and Decoding. They discuss how his arguments hold up after 40+ years and what our participation in the current media landscape mean for not only consumption, but the production of meaning as well.

In this episode, Barry and Mike finish their discussion of Chayka on Han and Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller.”  In teasing out Han and Benjamin’s ideas about the distinction between narration and information, they land on the problem posed by the contemporary digital campfire. 

Barry and Mike discuss Wendy Chun's book, "Updating to Remain the Same"

and discuss the political and social implications of her arguments.

They begin by deconstructing the terms of her argument that Crisis +

Habit = Update and pay particular attention to the role that Chun

assigns neoliberalism in defining the perpetually shifting nature of our

networked selves.

This one gets a little messy.

Barry and Mike discuss the main ideas in Michael Miller's article. They

specifically hone in on three of his main arguments:

1. That as it is often utilized on social media, (T)heory functions

more as a means of accruing social capital than as a foundation for

debate

2. That what he calls "weak theory" becomes anti-intellectual" in its

attempt to create moral superiority

3. About the public value of "progressive punitivism" as a means of

achieving a moral high ground.

In addition to playing with the way that these ideas work on social

media, Barry and Mike look at how these ideas work in our analog

existences as well.

As a follow up to their previous discussion on Deleuze, Barry and Mike look at William Burroughs' 1975 essay, "the Limits of Control" and discuss how his arguments hold up, nearly 50 years later in a (much more) digital world.

Barry and Mike discuss Deleuze's "Postscript on the Society of Control"

to investigate all of the ways that he argues societies have been kept

in line. As Deleuze argues that we currently inhabit two separate but

related control rubrics simultaneously, there is a bit to tease out.

The guys trace the history of social control according to Foucalt and

Deleuze with the aim of understanding what our technologically enabled

freedoms actually cost and why the freedom to do what we'd like might

not be much of a freedom at all.