Department of Communication & Media Studies

A Review of Gunster, Shane. 2004. Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. This is not the first attempt at a rapprochment between cultural studies and critical theory, nor is it the only recent attempt to update the analysis of the culture industry for the 21st century. In this re-examination of Adorno and Benjamin, Shane Gunster thinks that their claim about the logic and effects of commodification points to a blindspot in cultural studies. For Gunster, all that is meaningful, polysemous, pleasurable and contradictory about popular culture melts into a commodity form, a totalizing logic that capitalism imposes on "mass culture." He makes a convincing case that the culture industry thesis is not only about cultural form, but about the role the capitalist culture industry plays in weakening human autonomy and impoverishing experience. By re-dialecticizing their critical theory, Gunster hopes to renovate the culture industry thesis and coax cultural studies and critical theory into a dialogue with one another on the commodification of culture. As cultural studies puts forth the "creative industries" thesis, such a dialogue may help us cut our conceptual losses.

Abstract: This essay develops a technocultural studies approach to political elections and polling. First, I shift our attention from polling as a cultural form to developments in polling technology that are transfiguring this form. I then examine the production and circulation of ...

In the late 1970s, the Czech-born émigré and philosopher Vilém Flusser was lecturing on communication theory in France. The Commodore 64 and Apple Macintosh computers, as well as Minitel, were -new‖ media in the 1980s. Computational media, telecommunication, and automation compelled Flusser to look more deeply into the emerging digital galaxy, and he turned to media theory at the zenith of his interdisciplinary career. Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future? are part of a media theory trilogy, originally published in German, that also includes Towards a Philosophy of Photography, which was published in 1983 and translated in 2000. With the advent of microcomputing, Flusser came to understand the camera as a programmed apparatus, the ancestor of all apparatuses that exemplify the subordination of thinking in letters to thinking in numbers. 1 The other two books, published in 1985 and 1987, respectively, were written in a period of accelerated electronic and computational media change. A decade before the Internet revolution and two decades before the mobile communication revolution, Flusser describes a tendency for images to become electronic and apparatuses to become smaller and cheaper. He uses metaphors of the ‗web' and the ‗net' to illuminate -telematic society.‖ His deeply historical, richly philosophical, and sometimes prescient essays stand at the entrance to the postindustrial communication era. He sees past fleeting technical innovations to long-term processes of transformation. His writing about writing delves into the human migration from alphabetic codes and historical consciousness to binary computer codes, systems thinking, and cybernetic consciousness. As indebted to Norbert Weiner's cybernetics as he is to Edmund Husserl's phenomenological writings, Flusser prefers the metaphor of the -global brain‖ to Marshall McLuhan's (1962) -global village,‖ and he expands his definition of electric media as neuro-prosetheses to the point where machines simulate thinking. Like McLuhan, who believed the message of electricity was implosion and that cybernation would usher in a new single, organic consciousness, Flusser believed that another human, connected, cocreative world was in formation.

This article presents a case study of a televised encounter between representatives of the fields of television, journalism, and academic media study. The article moves from a description of what was, and could be, said during Moses Znaimer's A Colloquium on TVTV to an analysis of invisible fields of cultural production and their effects. I argue that Pierre Bourdieu's work on television offers a valuable sociological perspective on television, intellectuals, and public knowledge, but that Canadian Learning Television's use of media studies may have paradoxical effects. Unless media scholars reflect upon these effects and begin to negotiate the terms and conditions of our appearance on television, our involvement may not increase the power of our analysis.

This article develops a political economy of Indymedia practice. After reviewing other current approaches to the Indymedia phenomenon, democratic media activism, and traditions of dissent, I draw upon Pierre Bourdieu's unique sociological perspective to offer an analysis of the Ontario Independent Media Centre as a website of social struggles against neo-liberalism. This study reveals that Indymedia practice is a simultaneously structured and spontaneous form of collective media work on the margins of the political and journalistic fields. Whether such experiments in democratic communication will survive and develop will depend on whether Indymedia centres can become more central to the educational field.

This article argues that Maurizio Lazzarato's (2014) book Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity is useful for apprehending the employment of contract faculty. After setting the scene of the university, I examine the mixed semiotics of the York University budget. I then look inside CUPE Local 3903's history and politics, and focus on the video This Is Contract Faculty Time: York Faculty in Support of Contract Faculty. In the next section I describe how mixed semiotics operates at the bargaining table. Finally, I review the outcome of collective bargaining with respect to job security, political action , and truth-telling. This case of academic labour struggle shows that semiotization and subjectivation need to be better understood. I conclude with some remarks on challenges, academic freedom, and ways of reforming the faculty employment system.

In this article, I explore three films that comprise Swedish director Roy Andersson's "Living Trilogy"-Songs from the Second Floor (2000); You, the Living (2007); and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). My aim is to push the philosophical bearing of Andersson's films towards Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy of art and cinema. How should we understand his cinematic way of looking, intermedial images, and production of sense? First, I trace Andersson's concept of the "complex image" and aesthetic of "trivialism." Second, I outline Nancy's approach to "presentation" and the "evidence of film." Third, I describe Andersson's "axiomatics" of looking and collection of characters. Finally, I consider the ways this co-existential trilogy suggests a realization of a Nancian ontology of being-with and exposure to the sense of a world. I contend that Andersson's style is a praxis and a regard for this world. What his fragmentary films communicate to us can be illuminated by Nancy's idea that some cinema makes evident a sense of the world.

This article proposes that the advent of Trumpism was an historical moment of danger that compels us to analyze the micropolitics of the present. In the first part, I describe the constellation that gave rise to Trumpism. In the second part, I recall Goffman’s concept of face-work and discuss how it remains relevant for describing Trump’s aggressive face-work. In the third part, I take Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality as a point of departure for understanding micro-fascism. As an abstract machine, Trump’s faciality engendered and diffused fascisizing micropolitics around a messenger/disrupter in chief. It worked in connection with a landscape and relative to a collective assemblage of enunciation that extracted a territory of perception and affect. In the micropolitics of the present, the defining feature of Trumpism was how the corrupt abuse of power and the counterforces limiting his potency collided on an ominous, convulsive political reality TV show that threatened US democracy.

Keywords: Trumpism, face-work, faciality, assemblage, micropolitics, impeachment, coronavirus pandemic