Flow: A Concept from the Media ‘Fossil Record’
Introduction
This course investigates the historical formation of perceptual habits now associated with digital media (scrolling, binge-watching, immersive absorption, intermittent attention) through an ‘archaeological’ study of earlier media forms, especially broadcast television and video.
Beginning with Raymond Williams’s accounts of television ‘flow’ and ‘mobile privatisation’ in the 1970s, the course traces how, in the following decades, Fredric Jameson and David Foster Wallace transformed these ideas. Along the way, we examine adjacent and foundational concepts in the work of Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, and Susan Sontag before returning to the earlier philosophical problems of imitation, drama, and spectatorship in Plato and Aristotle, and the sublime in Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant.
Rather than treating contemporary digital culture as historically unprecedented, however, the seminar approaches it through what we might call a media ‘fossil record’: older cultural forms – and, before them, ancient concepts – whose assumptions were part of perceptual regimes that continue to shape us long after their apparent obsolescence.
The course expands on themes developed in my essay ‘A Brief History of Flow: What the Internet Learned from Television’ (Los Angeles Review of Books, Issue 49, 2026)
Sessions
Introduction
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility’ (1935)
‘Flow’
Raymond Williams, ‘Programming: Distribution and Flow’, in Television, pp.77-120
‘Mobile Privatisation’
Raymond Williams, ‘Programming: Distribution and Flow’, in Television, pp.77-120
‘Videotext’
Fredric Jameson, ‘Video: Surrealism without the Unconscious’, in Postmodernism, ch.3 (pp.67-96)
‘Postmodern Hyperspace’
Fredric Jameson, ‘Architecture: Spatial Equivalents in the World System’ and ‘Space: Utopianism after the end of Utopia’, in Postmodernism, chs.4 and 6 (pp.97-130, 154-80)
‘The Entertainment’
David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction’
Selections from David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)
Bibliography
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility’, in Selected Writings, Vol.3: 1935-1938, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) NB: other editions are available
Max L. Feldman, ‘A Brief History of Flow: What the Internet Learned from Television’, Los Angeles Review of Books, Issue 49 (2026)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991)
David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction’ (1990/3), in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (London: Abacus, 1997)
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) (London: Routledge, 2011)
See also:
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979)
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)