Kellner, Douglas

Douglas Kellner (1943–) has blended German critical theory, French postmodernism, and British cultural studies in a syncretic mix applied to late 20th-century and early 21st-century American media and culture issues in more than 30 authored, coauthored, and edited books since the 1980s. Born in 1943 in New York City, Kellner earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1973. He was a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, Austin from 1973 to 1997 and thereafter held the George Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. While conducting his dissertation research on the work of phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, Kellner spent two years in Germany, where he also became steeped in the work of the Frankfurt School theorists, especially Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, and where he attended the seminars of Ernst Bloch. Kellner then spent a year in Paris, studying the work of postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard, among others. He became involved with British cultural studies in the 1970s, and his later work has taken a pluralistic approach drawing on all three traditions.

Kellner's books on critical theory include Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984) and Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity (1989). His postmodern works include Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1989) and The Postmodern Turn (1997, with Steven Best). Kellner's participation in a Marxist studies group in Texas led to the study of television from a Frankfurt School perspective and to a weekly public access television program, Alternative Views, as well as two books on television, Television and the Crisis of Democracy (1990) and The Persian Gulf TV War (1992). In these books, he intended to apply critical theory to analyze how television failed to inform the public or misinformed the public, thereby impeding democracy. He further combined cultural studies, philosophy, and critical theory in Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern (1995). He has described his work as the application of philosophical approaches from Marxism to feminism to the study of cultural and political issues through development of critical and political cultural studies. He has published research on new technologies and education in various venues from journals to books. His stated goal in this area is to mediate between the technologically sublime and technological horror in evaluating the impact of new technologies on education. His balancing includes basing education on book media as well as computer and multimedia material. Building on traditional print literacy, Kellner argues for adopting new technology skills in addition to those from past media cultures.

After the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, Kellner turned his attention to what he considered a major crime of the century in Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election (2001). In this and subsequent works about media in the early 21st century, Kellner analyzes how [Page 188]media contribute to the assault on democracy and, at the same time, how democratic media can help improve democracy. Applying a cultural studies model introduced in Media Culture, Kellner studies the 2000 election as a postmodern media spectacle and a traditional power struggle. He views media spectacle as entrenched in politics and culture as part of a media environment awash in a blending of information and entertainment as infotainment. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001, Kellner analyzed the Bush administration's rhetoric of fear and attacks on civil liberties in the Patriot Act as examples of the politics of lying, which were, however, limited and reversible in the light of future events. Kellner also focused his media criticism on television coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003; he analyzes the government's propaganda, which the media duly channeled to the public, including the assertion that Iraq was concealing weapons of mass destruction. Dialectically, however, while the media helped advance President Bush's agenda, the media spectacle created by President Bush's “Mission Accomplished” slogan aboard an aircraft carrier ultimately negated the war rationale. Writing about the media and presidential election of 2004 in Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy (2005), Kellner argued that corporate media control, the rise of infotainment and media spectacle, the emergence of conservative media propaganda, and the Bush administration media attacks and manipulations endangered democracy. Elaborating on the Frankfurt School's critique of the culture industries, Kellner identifies media spectacles as pivotal in organizing all aspects of political and cultural life. As part of a computer-networked system that sells communities and entrances consumers, media culture merges entertainment and information forms. Multimedia forms also combine radio, film, and television to create spectacles of technoculture in a symbiosis of political life and media spectacle.

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