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?

  • ReadFanon [any, any]
    ·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • Makan@lemmygrad.ml
      hexagon
      ·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]
        ·
        9 months ago

        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).

        • Makan@lemmygrad.ml
          hexagon
          ·
          9 months ago

          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.

          • ReadFanon [any, any]
            ·
            9 months ago

            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.

            • Makan@lemmygrad.ml
              hexagon
              ·
              9 months ago

              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.