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?
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.
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.)
Herbert Marcuse was generally pretty ant-Soviet and started the trend of scholars deriding the proletariat in America, which I always found to be pretty bad.
And yes, it seems to be in relation to Goerg Lukacs' humanism, not Raya Dunyayevskaya's.
Very much so but this goes right to the sorta second wave of then-leaders of Frankfurt School, specifically Horkheimer and Adorno, in the era post Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm et al. Horkheimer worked very hard to suppress mentions of things like class conflict in what other Frankfurt School theorists would publish in order to efface the materialist underpinning of Marx-inspired analysis and it's no coincidence that the Frankfurt School retreated into really pretty sordid cultural critique imo and there's an argument that Horkheimer could have actually intervened to rescue Walter Benjamin from the fascists but decided to leave him to his fate, although the primary source is an academic work in German so I haven't been able to verify this directly myself.
Tbh that second wave of the Frankfurt School in exile was extremely disdainful of the proletariat and of Marx while they actively courted the bourgeoisie by adopting a pseudo-Marxist revisionist angle.
—Lenin, The State and Revolution
Ah, not so bad then.
Yeah, I happen to really like Georg Lukacs' work.
Well, one of 'em, which is The Destruction of Reason.
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 is all that matters, dude. It's your bookshelf and it's there 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!