Hi everyone,

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions, it was all helpful and all very much appreciated.

Go_Go_Godzilla very kindly made a submit-and-vote thread here for the first reading.

Please go and make suggestions for whatever you want to read first here, and if somebody has already suggested something you want to read, remember to upvote it!

Let's get things started now. I'll give it until Saturday for any last-minute votes etc, and then I'll post two starter readings in the sidebar and make a discussion thread for each of them. These will be left there for people to revisit as they please.

I'd like us to select two readings to start with so that we know what we're doing while the subreddit organises itself. For now, I'm going to say that these will be the chosen readings for March. It makes more sense to do choose two readings month-by-month than a new reading every two weeks. If the pace is too slow, we can increase it.

This gives us an extra week this time, so we can post three readings if y'all like?

I will make a new submit-and-vote thread for April's readings on a Saturday in March (I'll say the 17th for now). We'll see how it goes - I'll post any more changes or updates.

It will all be a little uncoordinated at first, we need to settle into a rhythm. I've never started a book club before, so please forgive me if I seem to lack organisation! And, as usual, all suggestions and constructive criticism are welcome. Please feel free to post them here or in the welcome thread.

Please remember that we're limiting ourselves to:

• One medium-length article or book chapter (15-30 pages)

Suggesting whole books of theory - while I admire your enthusiasm - won't help much. Please limit your submissions to an article or a chapter of a book. Introductions are fine, for example.

I'm flirting with the idea of having a theme of the month. If we started with Gramsci and Althusser, March's theme could be Ideology and Hegemony (just an example). What do you think?

Hello everyone,

There was a good amount of interest over at r/culturalstudies, so I thought I'd set up a sub.

Never having run an internet book club of any variety, I wasn't sure how this would proceed. There are a few issues of which I'd like to make you all aware, and I also have some ideas of my own about how we're going to run this thing, but really I need people to give me their opinions. I don't want to impose anything onto the group just because I was worried about something that wasn't worth worrying about.

I am looking for your input and suggestions on how we can make this work. Please don't hesitate to voice your concerns and/or ideas, and please read or at least skim the rest of this post.

Here are the potential issues that have come to my attention:

• Everybody is at a different level

Looking back, I think this is by far the biggest problem. Help, please?

Some people are professors while others are completely new to the subject of cultural theory and just want to dip their toes. If I put something difficult up, the toe-dippers may be left completely in the cold if they don't have a basic knowledge of, say, Marxist approaches to cultural criticism. Meanwhile, if a majority want go through any of the common essays found on most introductory university courses, the more experienced members may get bored and lose interest in the group.

This problem could be alleviated slightly if people make a post asking for help when you don't understand (or better yet, you can comment in each reading's post, see below). I will try to get links to useful resources and key terms in the sidebar, but that will help you only so far if you are a complete beginner.

We could start off the reading by just going through the basics... I'm hesitant about that, though, because it's bound to bore the more experienced members... Or we could just plunge right in... Or we could put together a sort of all-purpose general introduction giving basic outlines of Marx, Freud etc, but that would require a lot of time and effort, and I'm sure something like this could be found somewhere on the net...

• Deciding on each new reading

This is less of an issue for your average book club, but if we jump around from topic to topic things could quickly get confusing. One minute we're talking about mortality and aesthetics, next minute we're talking about gynocriticism.

It may be that jumping from topic to topic is fine, it may be that people start to get bored because they have no interest in the next reading, or a couple of people start to get annoyed because they keep asking for readings about the shifting perceptions of age (or whatever) and get science fiction theory instead.

One idea I had, is that each fortnight I will make a new post with five or six readings which everybody can vote on. These readings will be selected from the names and suggestions that will hopefully start getting thrown around during our discussions, thus keeping our progress reasonably organic.

Another way to get around this could be to make a new post every fortnight with a list of similar or related topics to choose from, and one or two suggested readings for each one, on which people can vote. This allows us to manually set an overall agenda for a few readings at a time.

Or we could have one central post, linked in the sidebar, where people can make and debate suggestions. This could be called the - gasp - Make and Debate Suggestions post. This method allows us, after some initial discussion, to get a kind of gameplan going, so that instead of jumping around we're going through topics in a meaningful and sensible order. Then we simply find a way of selecting from the suggestions, maybe in one of the ways already mentioned.

Or I could just choose the reading every week, but that's, like, not democratic, man.

In either case, perhaps we should all promise to do the reading every week, even if it's something that doesn't interest us (because that's bound to happen sometimes)?

Anyone got any bright ideas?

• Finding the readings

Like I said, I have access to JSTOR and other such websites, but I can't get whole books. I have no way of borrowing them from the nearest university library and I don't have the money to buy and scan them.

So unless some generous soul has access to a copy of a requested reading (e.g. a chapter from Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology), it looks like we may be stuck reading theoretical articles pulled from journals.

This can be equally, if not even more rewarding than reading the famous names. I do own a couple of anthologies with some famous essays in them which I don't mind scanning, but they're mostly on literature and that won't always work out.

It may mean, though, that members will have to do a little research to make sure we can actually get hold of their suggestions.

It also presents a problem if any beginners want some basic reading to get up to speed with. I don't have any Freud and only a little Marx, for example. Then again, your local library could rectify this issue.

• Is reddit the best medium for this?

Somebody suggested that we use one of the Google entities for this group. Having tried out a Google group and Google+, however, I really can't see what could facilitate discussion better than reddit. If anybody has any better suggestions, please do write them in.

Okay, so those are some potential issues that I've spotted. The following are my ideas so far for how we're going to run this, and again, do comment if you have a better suggestion:

• The size limit should be one medium-sized article or book chapter

I will arbitrarily set this at 10-30 pages. This is cumulative, so we can do two articles at eight pages each if we want. It's also relative to the difficulty of the reading, so nobody should suggest 30 pages of Derrida or Wittgenstein, for example.

• One reading every two weeks

This is roughly half the pace of the average undergraduate single introductory course, which will do at least 10-30 pages every week. This way, because we're all busy, it gives us enough time to absorb and think about a response to each reading.

If it's way too slow we can pick it up to one a week, or whatever everybody is comfortable with.

Links to the current reading and the next reading will be posted in the sidebar.

• Readings decided in advance

I've suggested ways we can decide on each new reading above, but I think we should always be at least one reading (two weeks) ahead. In other words, we should always know what will be the upcoming reading. That way we stay organised. We can start, then, by deciding on the first TWO readings (four weeks) so that we can then settle into the right rhythm.

And my maths is atrocious so if that last sentence is wrong, please correct me.

• I will make a new post for each new reading

So let's say this fortnight's reading is Michel Foucault's 'What is an author?', I will make a "'What is an authour?' Discussion and responses" post so that we can talk about it as and when we read it.

This way we can keep a productive ongoing dialogue about each reading, and has the added bonus of allowing us to go back to older authors and read through the comments. That should help us make meaningful, imaginative connections between different readings. I can also archive all of these discussion posts together and add a link to that in the sidebar, so that we can quickly and easily go back and review our thoughts on old reading.

Okay, so that's all I have so far. Please, please send in your comments and suggestions and I hope you didn't die of old age while you were reading this!

P.S. Why the hell aren't university lecturers doing this? This just seems like a great way to have ongoing discussion about your studies.

This is the place to comment on this reading: add your thoughts, voice your questions, denounce, applaud, whatever you want to say.

Below you'll find some brief introductory notes and some further reading, including links to places where you can find material to suggest for the next discussion if you want to pursue this line of enquiry.

Introduction

From a Georgetown University website:

"In their seminal 1945 essay, "The Culture Industry," Frankfurt school theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer use the Marxist idea of the alientation of labor to draw parallels to the condition of consumers in a capitalist society. Moving through nearly all aspects of the popular culture of their time--movies, radio, music--they argue that the logic of modern capitalism deskills labor and concurrently dumbs down culture. The result is a world in which a mass public has trouble distinguishing between the real world and the illusory world created by the industry of culture.

Like the other theorists of the Frankfurt school, Adorno and Horkheimer critique society as being in a state of false consciousness, a consciousness which hides the reality of domination and oppression of the masses under capitalism. The role of the media in this framework is to offer to consumers propaganda which lulls them into accepting their conditions.

[...]

This essay is one of the most influential critiques of popular and consumer culture in the middle of the 20th century. It was the theme taken up by 50s and 60s critics such as Vance Packard, Herbert Marcuse, and other critics... While we may consider it as an historic document--criticism of a particular historical moment in the West--we may also consider the ways in which its grounding in classic Marxism enables a more transcendent understanding of the interaction of commodity capitalism and popular consumption culture."

Areas where this essay has been particularly influential include, obviously, media and film studies, but it is widely cited in books on various topics. You can find it in readers on stardom and celebrity, popular culture, and city culture, for instance. If this article really grabs you, try suggesting an essay in one of these readers for another discussion. Or you could suggest looking at some other members of the Frankfurt School (see here) or other influential cultural Marxists (any of the critics mentioned here).

For newcomers, two short (but very good) introductions to Marxist literary and cultural criticism can be found here and here.

Further reading

Adorno:

• His later reflections on the original essay: The Culture Industry Reconsidered

• A similar line of argument, but one that focuses more on aesthetics and poetics than on sociology: On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening

Two articles I pulled at random from JSTOR:

• Shane Gunster, Revisiting the Culture Industry Thesis: Mass Culture and the Commodity Form, Cultural Critique, No. 45 (Spring, 2000), pages 40-70.

• Robert Hullot-Kentor, The Exact Sense in Which the Culture Industry No Longer Exists, Cultural Critique, No. 70 (Fall, 2008), pages 137-157.

Some notes by Dave Harris and Colleagues are available on the original essay here and the 'Culture Industry reconsidered' essay here. I haven't read through these myself yet, they're quite lengthy.

If there's any further reading I've overlooked, feel free to suggest it!

The chapter is taken from Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. 2002, Stanford University Press. Pages 94-136.

Another translation is available here from marxists.org.

I'm not a cultural studies major, economics and music are my background. I've read a decent amount of philosophy, marx and sociology lit though. So yeah, I'm definitely interested in a group like this. What's going on??

I have same CTR how can I exchange this plz help me