Douglas Kellner
Douglas Kellner (born May 31, 1943) is an American academic who works at the intersection of "third-generation" critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, and in cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, or the "Birmingham School". He has argued that these two conflicting philosophies are in fact compatible.[1] He is currently the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
For the co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections, see Douglas A. Kellner.
Douglas Kellner
1943 (age 80–81)
Frankfurt School
Multiple technoliteracies
Kellner was an early theorist in the field of critical media literacy and has been a leading theorist of media culture generally.[2] In his recent work, he has increasingly argued that media culture has become dominated by forms of spectacle and mega-spectacle.[3] He also has contributed important studies of alter-globalization processes and has always been concerned with counter-hegemonic movements and alternative cultural expressions in the name of a more radically democratic society.[4] He is known for his work exploring the politically oppositional potentials of new media and attempted to delineate the term "multiple technoliteracies" as a movement away from the present attempt to standardize a corporatist form of computer literacy. Kellner has published multiple works on the 2016 United States presidential election, focusing on Donald Trump's media spectacles and authoritarian populism.[5][6]
Kellner has collaborated with a number of other authors, including K. Daniel Cho, Tyson E. Lewis, Clayton Pierce, and Rhonda Hammer.[7] Kellner collaborated with Steven Best on an award-winning trilogy of books examining postmodern turns in philosophy, the arts, and science and technology. He served as the literary executor of the documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio and acted as editor of "Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse," which collected six volumes of the papers of the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse.
Education and career[edit]
Kellner attended Doane College for his bachelor's degree, studying in Copenhagen for his junior year and graduating in 1965.[8] Kellner then went on to Columbia University, earning a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1973. During his time at Columbia, Kellner partook in student protests against the Vietnam War. During this time he also came to believe in the political nature of knowledge as well as the relationship between history and the production of ideas.[3] A historical understanding of philosophy's relationship to one's lived experiences became increasingly clear to Kellner through his research into German critical theory at the University of Tübingen in Germany. While studying there, he read the works of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch, all of whom were instrumental in a new form of Marxist criticism concerned primarily with questions of culture and subjectivity rather than with analyzing production.
Kellner then went from Germany to France, where he attended lectures and read books of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and other postmodern theorists. Hence, Kellner's philosophical explorations did not end with the Frankfurt School. With his co-author Steven Best, Kellner has gone on to write a series of books critically interrogating what has come to be known as postmodern theory. Although adopting many insights from postmodernists such as Foucault, as well as many feminist and critical race theorists, Kellner retains the centrality of critical theory as a macro-theoretical lens capable of building conceptual bridges between various political movements and capable of critically evaluating and mediating competing philosophical perspectives.
Throughout his philosophical adventures, Kellner has drawn from the Frankfurt School a concern for the industrialization and commercialization of culture under capitalist relations of production. This situation has become most acute in the United States with its highly commercial media culture. Combining insights and methodological tools from the Frankfurt School and from British cultural studies, Kellner has written on media culture as a complex political, philosophical, and economic phenomenon. In his view, media emerges as a "contested terrain" in which political struggles are played out in narrative and visual forms. Thus films, television, internet, etc. articulate dominant, conservative, reactionary social values but also offer progressive resistance against these values. As an example of Kellner's method of media analysis, he has read the image of the pop sensation Madonna as a complex representation of women that challenges gender, sexual, and fashion stereotypes while at the same time reasserting those very codes by offering a "new" notion of the self that is reliant upon hyper-consumerism.[9] Kellner's work in the area of media culture has been influential for educators concerned with fostering "critical media literacy" capable of decoding the complexities of the visual culture that surrounds us.
Another equally important line of inquiry defining Kellner's work is his interest in "techno-capitalism" or capitalism defined by ever sophisticated advances in technology.[10] Thus Kellner has been at the forefront of theorizing new technologies and their social, political, and economic impacts. His interest in technologies began in the mid-seventies while a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Here Kellner studied the political economy of television producing the renowned and original works Television and the Crisis of Democracy and The Persian Gulf Television War as well as launching his own very successful alternative culture public-access television cable TV show entitled Alternative Views.[11] As with his theories of media images, Kellner offers a dialectical approach to new technologies, highlighting their progressive and democratic potentials while also critiquing the undeniable reality of corporate interests that drive the technologies market. Again this work has become increasingly important for educators concerned with the role of technology in the classroom. Indeed, Kellner has focused studies in education on explicating media literacy and the multiple literacies needed to critically engage culture in the contemporary era. On this basis, he has called for a democratic reconstruction of education for the new digitized, mediated, global and multicultural era.
Controversies[edit]
In January 2006, Kellner was caught up in the Bruin Alumni Association's controversial "Dirty Thirty" project,[19] which listed UCLA's most politically extreme professors. The list was compiled by a former UCLA graduate student, Andrew Jones, who had previously been fired by his mentor David Horowitz for pressuring "students to file false reports about leftists" and for stealing Horowitz's mailing list of potential contributors to fund research for attacks on left-wing professors.[20]
The Association offered students up to $100 for tapes of lectures that show how "radicals" on the faculty are "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom".[21] Kellner was named number three; Peter McLaren, also in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, topped the list at number one.
Kellner responded in print with the view that the "attack exemplified right wing interventions within the cultural wars that have raged on campuses since the 1960s".[22]
Critiques/Reviews[edit]
Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics between the Modern and Postmodern[edit]
Many academics disagree with Kellner’s perspective on the Postmodern phenomenon, which entails the new sense of cultural identity streaming from postmodern nationalism, religion, and family. However, many academic sociologists appreciate Kellner’s type of cultural media analysis, where he demands media culture analysis requires use of social theory. Through the proper usage and application of social theory, Socialists can better understand the “postmodern phenomena” proposed by Douglas Kellner [26]
Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre[edit]
Sociologists discuss and debate the effectiveness of Kellner’s proposal to culturally profile the mass terrorists under the guise of a “gun heavy society”. His approach to the distinct social and cultural influences from the multiple shooters distinguishes Kellner’s breakdown from the typical psychological approach. However, sociologists appreciate and applaud Kellner’s attempt to connect the various connections between culture, society, and psychology in order to provide a full understanding of a sociological inquiry[27]
From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy[edit]
Sociologists often describe the Kellner’s perspective on the causes and motivations of terrorism from 9/11 originate from capitalist globalization from the United States’s influence. Kellner shows the potential solutions toward the post 9/11 war on terror, and these solutions often include the power of unified dialogue, cooperation, and commitment to global effort. Sociologists applaud Kellner for his initial attempts to decipher the actual means to propose a global solution toward terror, and his approach reveals a possibility for a peaceful resolution for post 9/11 terrorism.[28]
Books authored
Books edited
Book contributions
Essays and articles