Cigarettes, cycling, gawking, gandering, and imbibing. These are a few of the forms of distraction or "distributed attention" that Petra Loeffler--a film and media scholar currently teaching media philosophy at Bauahus University -- discusses with us in this episode. Drawing examples from her recent book Distributed Attention: A Media History of Distraction, Dr. Loeffler explains the rise of distraction as a bourgeois pastime in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, its transformation into an object of scientific fascination and mass entertainment during the nineteenth-century, and its persistence as an object of medical, political, and philosophical preoccupation in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Music courtesy STEREO TOTAL -- creators of a carnivalesque delight for the ears.

Image courtesy Diaphanes Verlag.

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This episode features film theorist Steven Shaviro's lecture "'Every time I try to Fly': Hamony Korine's Spring Breakers," held on Nov 22, 2013 at the Post-Cinematic Perspectives conference (organized by Dr. Lisa Åkervall and Dr. Chris Tedjasukmana of the Free University) in Berlin, Germany. Episode #12 features an additional in-depth interview with Dr. Shaviro about this lecture and topics including post-cinema, neoliberalism, non-continuity, and digital media.

Addendum: Slides to the talk online at http://www.shaviro.com/Presentations/Spring/#/

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Another Cultural Technologies Bootleg: This episode features German philosopher and social theorist Juergen Habermas's 2010 lecture on "'The Political': The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology" held at NYU. Habermas unpacks the merits and shortcomings of Carl Schmitt's concept of the political and flaws in Schmitt's account of the relation between European secularization and the rise of political liberalism. Excerpted from the website of "The Power of the Relgion in the Public Sphere," where complementary lectures by Cornel West, Charles Taylor, and Judith Butler may also be found. For transcripts of Habermas's talk, get a copy of the published collection of essays based on the conference. Oh, and if you missed the last podcast featuing an interview with John McCormick on "Carl Schmitt and Technology," give it a listen too.

Episodes on Foucault, biopolitics, German media theory, and visual culture coming down the pipe in the next few months. Stay tuned.

And as always--tunes courtesy the good folks at Stereo Total.

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Another Cultural Technologies Bootleg: This episode features a chat among French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen, and literary critic W. J. T. Mitchell on the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, following which Stiegler muses about time, technology, love, and death in the age of electronic media. And Hansen chimes in about Amazon algorithms stalking his desires. (Original recording took place in Mark Hansen's and W. J. T. Mitchell's 2004 media theory course at the University of Chicago.)

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Music courtesy STEREO TOTAL -- creators of a carnivalesque delight for the ears.

The image is an old school flyer made by Katarzyna Okinczyc on the occasion of a visit by Stiegler to Northwestern University that same year.

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