The Big Charts…

Marx

Economic base, superstructure

A modern historical materialist

Social order proceeds without exhaustion

Grund 265 “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”

Sartre

Xxiii language steals our thoughts

113 man is inside language

A man is the product of his product

45 mediation as synthesis

89 make and grip history

154 progressive/regressive

Xxxiv,102,103 a combination of dialectic and praxis

A whole with limits and futures possible

45 " If one totalize is too quickly ... then the real is lost "

82 horizontal synthesis and totalization in debth

90 plurality of means

173 synthetic totality

48/49 great bit on Marxist failing and particulars and universals

126 existentialism confirms the specificity of the historical event

Merleau-Ponty

10 the opposing ways knowledge and practice confront the past: “knowledge by multiplying views, confronts [the past] through conclusions that are provisional, open, and justifiable (that is, conditional), while the practice confronts it through decisions which are absolute, partial, and not subject to justification ”

xvii History is to be seen not as a mere plurality of subjects, but rather as an intersubjectivity wherein men have common situations , and the meaning we give it

One could bridge the subject/object through empiricism, rationalism, or 'embodied consciousness

16 to M-P Weber showed how a dialectical philosophy of history can be applied: “ History had meaning ,” “ meaning arises in contingency ,” “ the historical understanding which reveals an interior to history still leaves us in the presence of empirical history ” That is a philosophy of history “ without dogmatism ”

24 Weber, according to M-P, does great in showing that history’s aim “ is to recover the fundamental choices of the past ” (p.24), but at the same time “ never sees the fundamental choice of the proletariat appear ” (p. 25). Weber does not apply his historical understanding to the benefit of political action.

17 - 18 history doesn't work according to a model, but the advent of meaning

57 “a [ Lukacs’] philosophy of history [that] does not so much give us the keys of history as it restores to us a permanent interrogation.”

31 Relativize relativity to gain totality

31 “recover an absolute in the relative ”

31 Lukács' “the totality of observed facts”

Mauss

13 reciprocation includes the duty to give, but also to receive

14 exchange happens in the presence of the gods and nature

16 it is the spirits that truly owners of the possessions and with whom the contract is made

vi/46 total services (gifts) and total counter-services (reciprocations) that include the economic, juridical, religious, and social spheres of life

Piaget

A wholeness of self-regulating transformations

A spiral half open at the top and bottom

See below

137 “The most important conclusion to be distilled from our series of investigations is that the study of structure can not be exclusive and that it does not to suppress , especially in the human sciences and in biology , other dimensions of investigation . Quite the contrary , it tends to integrate them , and does so in the way in which all of integration in scientific thought comes about , by making for reciprocity and interaction”

Bemjamin

210 loss of authenticity which is replaced by 'Information'

de-fetishization via mediation

The history of development is one of domination , only rupture can provide liberation

Frankfurt

198 mediation = de-fetishization

movement from community (Gemeinschaft) to society (Gesellschaft) as backbone of modern history

Marcuse

445 All facts are stages of one process – a subject/object totality

Adorno

461 Confusion between causation and levels of abstraction – only particulars are caused

461 No the event is caused by general forces, much less by laws; causality is not the 'cause' of the the events but rather the highest conceptual generality under which concrete causal factors can be subsumed.

Castoriadis

Offers a bridge to post structuralism , in Marxists considered structure a technocracy

117 a second ordered symbolism

132 The institution is a socially sanctioned, symbolic network in which a functional component and an imaginary component are combined in variable proportions and relations.

146 The social world is, in every instance, constituted and articulated as a function of such a system of significations, and these significations exist, once they have been constituted, in the mode of what we called the actual imaginary (or the imagined).

Imaginary time

13 There is no method in history unaffected by historical development

29 historical materialism is untenable

34 Paradox of History: any stage has its bias with which it views the past

45 history is the domain of creation

The collection of all the views of the world is reality

75 To demand that the revolutionary project be founded on a complete theory is therefore to assimilate politics to a technique, and to posit its sphere of action -- history -- as the possible object of a finished and exhaustive knowledge.

39 the dialectical unity of history is a myth

44 Determinism in history is impossible because while some elements are causal, others not not!

45 Autonomous agents yield the coherence of capitalism (emergence), it's not an ideal type

53 The enigma of the Marxist project to grasp causality and meaning

Foucault

“In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favour of stable structures.”

“My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances), a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis.”

He asserts that ruptures, breaks, thresholds, limits, discontinuity are more important than continuity or stable structures. Foucault questions teleologies and totalizations. The mode of doing philosophy and history that seeks grand explanatory systems is suspect. Emphasis should be placed on historicity, specificity, locality, multiplicities

“My aim is most decidedly not to use the categories of cultural totalities (whether world-views, ideal types, the particular spirit of an age) in order to impose on history, despite itself, the forms of structural analysis. “ genealogy i s a new history of the present

Deleuze

70 “What is Power? Foucault's definition seems a very simple one: Power is a relation between forces, or rather every relation between forces is a 'power relation.'”

71 What is Power? Foucault's definition seems a very simple one: Power is a relation between forces, or rather every relation between forces is a 'power relation.'

Anderson

88 Once, in jubilation or alarm, modernism was seized by images of machinery; now, postmodernism was swayed to a machinery of images.

55 Where modernism drew its purpose and energies from the persistence of what was not yet modern, the legacy of a still pre-industrial past, postmodernism signifies the closure of that distance, the saturation of every pore of the world in the serum of capital.

62 what postmodernity seemed to spell was this something the great theorists of modernization had ruled out: an unthinkable de-differentiation of cultural spheres.

Jameson

20 Transformations of reality into images; perpetual present

43 When everything is systematic, we lose the notion of a system

Postmodernism is the third / late stage of capitalism

62 Postmodern time is spatial

25 Adorno and Habermas want to rescue the negative/critical power of high modern, but Habermas also wants to associate this with the Enlightenment

46 This identification of the class content of postmodern culture does not at all imply that 'yuppies' have become something like a new ruling class or 'a subject of history' -- merely that their cultural practices and values, their local ideologies, have articulated a useful dominant ideological and cultural pradigm for this stage of capital. It is often the case that cultural forms prevalent in a particular period are not furnished by the principal agents of the social formation in question . . .

22 - 28 for combinations of anti / pro post / modern classifications

40 As for 'totalizing' processes, that often means little more than the making of connections between various phenomena...

Flusser

power shift from ownership to programmers/operators; from material to symbolic

Kittler

Discourse network: maps the systems of rules and codes of a given epoch, to show what was said and done, and what could not be said and done, in that epoch.

History is a situation to situation

Habermas

G10 media of money and power

378 the eight functions media should serve

Public sphere

378 public sphere is at rest/vibrating

Refeudalization

402 In the Paris of 1848 every halfway prominent politician ...

402 In the 1830's there was a shift from the journalism of writers to the consumers of mass media.

Serra153 “Habermas' circulation of power has a center periphery axis with two main explanatory elements: a system of "Sluices" and a two-tiered motive problem-solving-1 for routine operations in the other for extraordinary situations”

Citizens are actors not spectators

Garnham

Media and modernity are linked

166 our vision and definition of the political underlies how we frame are questions about the media

64 there's three types of mediation: human agents, symbolic systems, and tools

38 all themes of media rest upon historical theories

see below

Modernity: social specialization, expansion of social scale, and the rise of or rational secular world view

Garnham isn't taking issue with postmodernism, but bad modernism;

8 history: reposing questions in different contexts through time

10 modernity: increased specialization, generalized structure of social coordination, and secularization

21 we need to distinguish between the nature of historical change and its evaluation

17 history is important because it is the only evidence we have, and it is always used to justify and explain our social world

120 history is an oscillation among a number of dimensions

13 he argues against particularism

26 he relies upon Runciman's variables of production, coercion, persuasion

39 two forms of power: what Habermas' calls the non-linguistic steering medium of money and the exercise of economic agents within those overall structural constraints

42 “The economy is structurally determining because it produces systematic results which no single economic actor planned or desired”

Historical time is drawn from the tension between structure and agency

Hall

Circulation of symbolic forms

131 Moreover "it [TV] is an iconic sign, in Peirce's terminology because "it posses some of the properties of the thing represented."

134 But we say "dominant" because there exists a pattern of "preferred readings"; and these both have institutional/political/idealogical order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized.

Rajagopal

5/277-278 TV is like a gift without reciprocity

4 TV yokes together different temporality is

12 TV fore- grounded latent opportunities which were acted upon by the press

31 in media does not cause or reflect events, it participates in them

124 how does media view us?

148 new circuits of exchange between the split public

It provides distance/refuge

Television is the medium of electronic capitalism

178 media was used by a strategic tool by the BJP

278 Television enforces a new form of political participation, more private, fragmented. It determines an imaginative participation without enfolding viewers in networks of dependence.

Split-public and counter public

33 a break from the past by returning to the past

91 History as a means of contingency 'The possibility of the reflexive appropriation of a historical sensibility'

271 “The growth of Hindu nationalism took place at a specific historical moment: the hiatus between a long period of Indian National Congress hegemony and an emerging dispensation characterized by the importance of the non-committed vote, and a newly salient split public.”

25 analysis and Habermas tend to homogenize

10 without inquiring into the specific meanings of any event for the different actors in a circuit of communication , any account of the message in circulation would be incomplete

24 Negt: critical theory of media can't have TV at its center ; there are no law - like patterns

Bourdieu

101 Schudson shows objectivity in journalism

66 Great rant on polling

see below

89 the notion of field transcends conservation and transformation

99 one can play to increase capital or change the rules of the game

102 (Luhmann) systems are apparatus without struggle

90 history = sociology

102 there is history only as long as people revolt

194 Science is the best tool we have for critiquing domination, and reflexive science permits a more responsible politics

16 society is not a seamless totality

75 the universal and unique and are false antinomies

109 'There are no trans-historical laws of the relations between fields, and that we must investigate each historical case separately”

47 science is not merely a politic: do not conflate the politics of knowledge (science) and power

148 symbolic violence: mobilization of evaluative power

80 'The dominated, in any social universe, can always exert a certain force, in as much as belonging to a field means by definition that one is capable of producing defects in it'

111 the state can be seen as an ensemble of fields that are the site for struggle of Weber's "monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence"

9 Major flaw of purely social physics point of view: does not recognize consciousness and interpretations of social agents

98 agents have a stake in the game

But the only agents are producers

126 habitus is socialized subjectivity

129 Habitus [accounts for] that, without being rational, social agents are reasonable

Couldry

Media can affect the exchange rate between for in different field

Geertz

Thick Description

20 Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings,assessing the guesses, and drawling explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent Of Meaning and mapping out its bodyless landscape.

14 culture is not a power, but context

Geertz

Common Sense

78 common-sense includes notions of natural causation

Benson

8 3 effects showing cause

11 hypotheses of media effects

Baker

Media products have significant public good aspects, externalities (too many bad, too few good); there are two purchasers: audiences and advertisers, and people seek media products to confirm or determine preferences

Digital technologies reduce the cost of copying and delivering content, finding material, assembling and synthesizing input, and reducing bottlenecks

TV is not just another appliance and

the nature of monopolistic competition can lead to less-valued products prevailing in a competitive environment

22 random variation; institutions

22 an evolutionary approach

120 “Media policy should favor structural rules that allocate or encourage the allocation of decision-making control over content creation to people with commitments to quality rather than merely to the bottom line”

5 the logic of seeing who favors something more simply by seeing how much each is willing to pay favors the rich

25 defn of power

22 agent choices can be limited

Lembo

241 sees little evidence of political contestation or identity

29 “Assertions about the power cannot be read out of what fear wrists see as the structure of the object, no matter how complicated and nuanced their conception of that object, TV, might be”

Carey

Test communication constitutes and produces reality, giving a shared symbolic order to an intricate world

McLuhan

The medium is the message

151 This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, if any extension of ourselves -- results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

Levinson

163 But if we agree with Jefferson that the best remedy to misinformation is more information -- because people have the rational capacity to separate truth from falsity, given the presence of sufficient true as well as false information -- and we can expect a massive dissemination of information by and large to create myths that are closer not further from reality.

188 McLuhan's four laws or effects of media -- amplification, obsolescence, retrieval, reversal -- indeed became McLuhan's swan song

184 As Karl Popper demonstrated in detail in this critiques of Marxism (e.g., pauper, 1945, 1957), there is a significant difference between the study of history, which attempts to describe and explain the past, and "historicism," which attempts to derive from such explanations and overarching theory of human societies and their evolution

183 Human beings selected for survival the media most appropriate to our needs.

Luhmann

2 Thus, the technology of dissemination plays the same kind of role as that played by the medium of money in the differentiation of the economy: it merely constitutes a medium which makes formations of forms possible

68 media is not consensual

103 reproduction of non-transparency through transparency

A function system with increased the effectiveness through differentiation, operational closure, and although poetic autonomy

Helps create the second order reality

Media contributes to the development of a social memory

Systems

Concentric circles

103 reproduction through autopoesis, which includes resolvable differences; recursive constitutive process capturing oscillation between memory and openness

Time becomes the continuum of meaning

21 maternity is the compulsive self-assessment; temporal structures striving for the new

No agency in systems

Williams

Includes 9 versions of calls and between technology and sociology

137 'Most technical development is in hands of corporations which express the contemporary interlock of military, political and commercial intentions'

124 Effects, after all, can only be studied in relation to real intentions, in these will often have to be as sharply distinguished from declared intentions as from assumed and in different general social processes.

Media Claims

Social Structure

Stasis/Change

History/Period

Totalizing

Power

Causality/Agency

Marx

Based / superstructure

Private property ; primitive accumulation ; M-C -M ; misery ; revolt

Generative

Sartre

Merleau-Ponty

56 Gestalten, the whole is greater than its parts

Out there must be discovered

Mauss

Piaget

5 “ We may say that a structure is a system of transformations. Inasmuch as it is a system and not a mere collection of elements and their properties, these transformations involve laws.”

11 “Indeed, all known structures – from mathematical groups to kinship systems – are, without exception, systems of transformation.”

16 Rhythm, regulation, operation, these are the three basic mechanisms of self-regulation and self-maintenance.

4 their theoretical employment has shown that structures, despite their diversity, have certain common properties;

5 “In short the notion of structure is comprised of three key ideas: the ideas of wholeness, the idea of transformation, the idea of self-regulation”

7 “All structuralists recognize as fundamental the contrast between structures and aggregates, the former being wholes , the latter composites formed of elements that are independent of the complexes into which they enter”

7 Structures do have elements, but the “elements of a structure are subordinated to laws , and it is in terms of these laws that the structure qua whole or system is defined.… These laws confer on the whole as such overall properties distinct from the properties of its elements”

104 boundaries are defined by struggle and the scope of their effected ; p layers take a stake in the game and contest the boundaries

1484 Bourdieu fights arbitrary boundaries but , of course , he is protective of autonomy

Rather than looking at the structure as a given order that exists in reality, Piaget advises that it is more useful to consider it a sort of approach, a method of examination of reality, which has certain rules and implications.

Frankfurt

Castoriadis

Foucault

Anderson

Jameson

Flusser

Kittler

Habermas

398 By "Public sphere" we mean first a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public. They are then acting neither as business or professional people conducting their private affairs, nor as legal consociates subject to the legal regulations of a state bureaucracy and obligated to obedience. Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the guarantee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions freely.

334 Systems theory immediately abandons the notion of individual and collective agency.

360 The public sphere cannot be conceived as an institution and certainly not as an organization. ... the public sphere can best be described as a network for communicating information and points of view (i.e., opinions expressing affirmative or negative attitudes); the strains of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions.

Garnham

10 modernity: increased specialization, generalized structure of social coordination, and secularization

We are social creatures with modern organization having gains and losses

25 the economic, the ideological, and the coercive

75 He argues that path dependency provides a link between technological systems and social shaping

Rajagopal

The public sphere is an ideal type rather than a historical artifact.

Bourdieu

Three levels: the position of the field relative to the wider field of power ;the structure of the field (which is a product of the objective relative position and relations of force, power and capital); and the genesis of the agents habitus (their structured and structuring dispositions)

5 Bourdieu seeks to overcome the debilitating reduction of sociology to either an objectivist physics of material structures or a constructivist phenomenology of cognitive forms by means of a genetic structuralism capable of subsuming both.

102 systems are apparatus without struggle

102 products of the field can be systematic without being a system.

135 Habitus is intended to destroy its circular/mechanical models

13 Exposure to social conditions instills durable and transposable dispositions that internalize the necessities of that social environment.

12 social and mental structures are structurally homologous

19 Habitus and field are relational in the additional sense that they function fully only in relation to one another

7 objectivity of the first order: the distribution of material goods -- Bourdieu claims this has an epistemological priority; objectivity of the second order: classification and symbolism

77 'Theories are research programs that call not for theoretical debate but for a practical utilization that either refutes or generalizes them, or better, specifies and differentiates their claim to generality'

Benson

Baker

Luhmann

Function system that is recursively stabilized

An autopoetic system is operationally closed and structurally stable with no apparent input and output

Two realities

The technologies of copying and dissemination

12 “The system presupposes itself as a self-produced irritation, without being accessible through its own operations, and then sets about transforming irritation into information, which it produces for society (and for itself in society). That is precisely why the reality of a system is always a correlate of the system’s own operations, always its own construction.”

103 reproduction through autopoesis, which includes resolvable differences; recursive constitutive process capturing oscillation between memory and openness

16 “It is only then that operational closure occurs, with the result that the system reproduces its own operations out of itself; it no longer uses them to establish interactional contacts with the environment internal to society, but is instead oriented to the system’s own distinction between self-reference and other-reference. In spite of having a huge memory capacity, the system is set up to remember and forget quickly.”

105 “Public life is therefore a general social medium of reflection which registers the non-exceedability of boundaries and, thus inspired, the observing of observations.”

109 “Schemata are instruments of forgetting – and of learning; they are limitations to flexibility which make flexibility within prestructured barriers possible in the first place.”

Topics are the structural coupling to other domains

Generative

Conception

Origina/Engine

Boundaries/Constituents

Generative/Analytic