Critical Media Studies

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!

Barry and Mike discuss Susan Sontag's essay on photography, exploring the distinction between images and reality. They delve into the influence of Plato's cave allegory, the power of photographs to evoke emotions, the impact of nostalgia, and the implications of our difficulty distinguishing real from represented images in our digital age.

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.

This discussion delves into Simone Weil's philosophy on attention and its crucial role in meaningful engagement. The speakers examine how distractions in our digital age challenge genuine creativity and deep thought. They critique TikTok's superficial engagement and highlight the importance of selective focus in learning. By connecting Weil's insights with contemporary issues, they advocate for a more deliberate approach to attention that fosters creativity and spiritual richness in our busy lives.

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.