Abstract
Douglas Kellner emerged in the late 1980s as a media theorist. This article reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, analyzing the developments and problems of his media theory. His path was influenced by so-called Western Marxism, notably by the Frankfurt School and, later, by British cultural studies. Kellner made both currents of European thought dialogue and incorporated them into French postmodernism, in a context configured by the ‘culture wars’ in the United States. All of this shaped the analysis of what he called ‘media culture’ and, a few years later, ‘media spectacle’, as well as his proposal for critical media literacy. It is argued that Kellner proposes an innovative synthesis in theoretical and methodological terms, outlined with Cultural Marxism. On the other hand, his proposition is not exempt from conceptual contradictions that generate analytical simplifications during the practice of research, as it moves between immanent to transcendent critique.
Keywords
Introduction
In the United States, communication theory and research are the result of a historical process that involved specific social and political circumstances, which stimulated the production of explanations guided by notions of democracy and the impact of technology on the nature of communication. These studies emerged from a combination of philosophical abstractions and sociological practices that accompanied the broad progress of the sciences, while relating to the interests of the humanities and the arts. Although American economic growth promoted the creation and expansion of research programs in the first half of the 20th century, communication studies failed to advance as a critical scholarship on society and its culture. On the contrary, these studies were predominantly empirical and acquired a bureaucratic character, as they were carried out through demands in support of the market and government. 1
This means that communication studies were born in American territory as part of a project of empiricist social sciences. This project has its roots in the Chicago School of Sociology, in the early 20th century. Another tradition of studies refers to Mass Communication Research, which emerged in the 1940s. Contrary to the empirical (quantitative) and instrumentalist (administrative) orientations, C. Wright Mills elaborated one of the main criticisms in defense of the non-positivist study in the social sciences. As a critical theorist, he became an important figure in building a bridge between sociology and mass culture among American scholars.
Parallel to the period of the last-mentioned traditions, the theorists of the Frankfurt School initiated a political-philosophical project based on the break with Soviet Marxism and the reworking of the critical approach, in order to project a broad critical theory of industrial society. Exiled to the United States in the mid-1940s, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer analyzed the mass production of cultural goods and formulated a critique of this process of commodification. 2 Coming from this school of thought, Herbert Marcuse also went into exile in the country, where he analyzed the new forms of domination intrinsic in advanced capitalism: a society shaped by technology, science and the media discourse, which subjugates more than liberates individuals, and works against critical thinking.
The emergence of a hierarchy of cultural forms also interested British Marxists, among them Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart who founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, in the 1960s. This approach expanded to North America in the 1980s, with Larry Grossberg being one of the exponents. 3 By that time, James W. Carey had already incorporated power and domination into his vocabulary and coined the term ‘American cultural studies’ evoking Mills and others. ‘In the end it was Carey who resisted cultural studies, as the British-derived version gained quick US traction in this period of (leftist) ferment’. 4
Hanno Hardt was one of those who contested the existence of a strong and continuous approach from ‘left’ perspectives in communication research in the United States, at least, until the 1960s, times marked by the New Left and the reception of currents of critical thinking, from European schools. Under the influence of global dynamics, these ‘left’ communication studies raised questions about access to the media and the relationship between participation and democracy. The rise of this type of cultural investigation has benefited from dialogue with other disciplines in the social sciences and the demand for debates about the uses of the media and their commercial and political interests, including their participation in government-sponsored interventions abroad. 5
The emergence of the New Left propelled the ‘left’ communication studies with visions that went beyond Marxism and sought to contemplate Black, feminist and LGBTQ studies, among other topics of civil rights – overflowing traditional concerns about the function of the media in society. This can be explained by the nature of the social movement, which was not born ‘in response to conditions of economic hardship but to political and cultural/psychological oppression’. 6
Mills’ Letter to the New Left emphasized this by criticizing the Soviet Marxism for restricting concerns to the economic plan and the working class, forgetting other aspects related to American society. Given his activism, he represented the valorization of the figure of the public intellectual. In his view, intellectuals were a key part of the New Left. 7 However, his early death in 1962, at the age of 45, caused him to be forgotten a few times even within the movement. For this reason, Marcuse made history as ‘the guru of the New Left’, 8 and inspired the next generation of left-wing intellectuals.
It was during this period of political turmoil and public debate of ideas that Kellner graduated in philosophy at Columbia University. He found in Marcusean thought a grounded but deconstructive critique of the orthodox Marxist theories, which proposed a violent revolution of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism, 9 while the Frankfurt School philosopher provided more realistic revolutionary perspectives, aiming at the New Left as the first step towards the social transformation of that time. For Kellner, while the ‘old left’ was closed to indoctrination, the New Left, guided by Marcuse, opened up to progressive agendas, addressing issues of gender and race, as well as class.
Inspired by Marcuse, Kellner has established himself in American academy as a theorist of technocapitalism since the publication of Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984) and Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity (1989). He reviewed Adorno’s conception of the culture industry and directed his studies towards the analysis of the phenomena of mass communication, in Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Post-Modern (1995). One of his best-known theses speaks of the existence of a ‘media culture’, and how it has become the dominant culture in contemporary society.
After briefly presenting the context in which Kellner graduated and became a renowned professor at the University of Texas at Austin (1973–1997) and after the University of California, Los Angeles (1997–present), this article seeks to rethink his critical media theory. This is situated in the field of the history of mass communication and American social thought, 10 and is justified as it interprets and discusses in depth the intellectual meaning of the work of one of the most cited contemporary thinkers. The proposal is to carry out a study of the history of ideas, 11 based on bibliographic and documentary analysis, aiming at the elaboration of critical and hermeneutical judgement of Kellner’s thinking about the media. This means that the contradictory aspects or counterpoints provided by the examined literature are also considered.
In the stage of bibliographic and documentary pre-analysis, about 15 books written or co-written by Kellner, since 1973, were selected. Then, checking the UCLA Education Graduate School of Education & Information Studies website, where he is George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair, a collection of more than 40 articles, chapters, essays and interviews by him was found. During the reading stage of all this material, the effort was to recognize the intellectual nucleus of each work and, consequently, to identify the one that would be the intellectual nucleus of his thought.
The result of the activity of reconstructing Kellner’s intellectual trajectory involved the study of three theoretical perspectives: the German critical theory, British cultural studies and French postmodern philosophy. In addition to these theoretical phases, it was possible to identify at least two praxis dimensions that concern his proposal for critical media literacy and another for critical media analysis – mainly about Hollywood cinematography, coverage of the Gulf War and the presidential elections in the United States.
Throughout the article, I propose to rethink the transition from Kellner’s idea of ‘media culture’ to ‘media spectacle’. The hypothesis that I put forward is that it represents a departure from the immanent critique and approaches a type of transcendent critique – whose goal is to categorize the media phenomenon under the logic of the spectacle, instead of analyzing its internal contradictions. Without losing sight of the analytical simplifications that this generates, at the same time I argue that Kellner manages to provide an innovative synthesis in theoretical and methodological terms, in line with the so-called Cultural Marxism.
Theoretical phases of Kellner’s work
After presenting his PhD dissertation on Heidegger’s concept of authenticity in 1973, Kellner put phenomenology and existentialism aside and was pulled by the New Left wave into Western Marxism. In the following years, he worked to become a theorist of technocapitalism, based on the German critical tradition, especially in Marcuse – for whom advanced capitalism generates social conflicts, as it simultaneously brings together forms of progress, repression and domination. 12 The philosopher’s Freudo-Marxist work served as a starting point for the young professor at the University of Texas to analyze the relevance of culture and the media in the US context. So, Kellner appropriated the Frankfurt School’s immanent critique to try to make an innovative contribution to media studies. His critique shows how the media relates to social conflicts and political struggles, while producing polysemic messages that reflect American culture.
It is worth noting that this reflection on the power of media culture is elaborated in a period dominated by the so-called ‘culture wars’, 13 which marked the scenario of the reception of cultural studies in the United States. Inserted in this context and assimilating this approach, Kellner sought to analyze how media productions are linked to gender and race ideologies, as well as class. Under this pretext, he tried to bring British studies closer to German theory, aiming at the elaboration of a critical cultural study for the media. Kellner’s proposal presents itself as an attempt to avoid unilateral approaches to the theories of manipulation and resistance, preferring to combine its merits and direct them in a new perspective. At that time, the key term was ‘media culture’.
However, approaching the 2000s, Kellner began to be interested mainly in media analysis based on Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle. In his opinion, Debord proposed a rival and parallel reflection to Jean Baudrillard, maintaining the Marxist project that the critic of the consumer society abandoned. Although Kellner saw Baudrillard as the most provocative philosopher of the postmodern turn, he decided to preserve the concept of Debord and apply it to the media. In place of ‘media culture’, the key term becomes ‘media spectacle’. So, the question at the table: what is the intellectual significance of this transition of ideas?
Critical theory of advanced capitalism
Kellner is considered part of the third-generation of critical theory as his work contributes to analyzing how changes in capitalism are associated with the emergence of new technologies, the power of corporations and specific forms of social organization, and how it shapes the culture. For him, technocapitalism is an advanced configuration of capitalist society, in which technical and scientific knowledge and high technology transform all production processes, including that of culture. It is in line with the Marcusian understanding that we cannot deny the potentially beneficial impact of technology on human life, but we must recognize that it was not and is not being used to benefit humanity alone. On the contrary, new technologies are often used in favour of the ‘continued imposition of commodification and wage labor which exacerbates class inequalities while intensifying misery and suffering for millions of people throughout the world’. 14 They ‘also provide powerful forms of social control through more efficient, subtly concealed techniques of indoctrination and manipulation’. 15
His appropriation emphasizes, therefore, that the new media technologies operate by the imperative of capitalist logic, which, in the end, serves the unbridled profit of the dominant corporations. Beyond this theoretical point of view, Kellner’s identification with Marcuse is due to political activism. He distinguishes Marcuse from other colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research since the Freudo-Marxist philosopher was able to articulate his intellectual trajectory with political practice. Kellner considers that Marcuse is capable of providing more comprehensive philosophical perspectives on the processes of domination and alternatives of liberation. He stresses the idea of the individual’s full development in a non-repressive society, presenting a richer view of liberation than Soviet Marxism, as well as versions of critical theory or postmodern theory. 16
Kellner believes that German critical theory should not be understood as a unit, but as a type of characteristics that define it in terms of method, assumptions and positions. In common, all critical theorists were concerned with the fate of modernity and the development of systematic and comprehensive theories of organized society, combined with critical diagnoses of its limitations, pathologies and destructive effects. They elaborated reflective elements for a progressive defense – one of the main contributions of them is precisely this appropriation of the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical heritage, open to socially critical analysis that need developments and revisions as historical conditions change. 17
On the other hand, he believes that Adorno and Horkheimer are partially mistaken when defining the products of high culture by progressive characteristics, giving them a status of authentic art, while the products of mass culture are attributed negative values such as alienation. Kellner judges their position when they say that the products of popular culture lack emancipatory values or are consumed without resistance and in a uniform manner. He intended to overcome the limitations of the classic model with ‘more concrete and empirical analyses of the political economy of the media and the processes of the production of culture; the construction of media industries and their interaction with other social institutions throughout history; and of audience reception and media effects’. 18
For Kellner, the improvement of this methodological approach opens the way to understand how ideology works within everyday life, and how it is deeply articulated with the representations of sex, race and class promoted by media culture. However, ideological analysis is not just about interpreting the dominant elements that make up culture, but also consists of attempts to ‘specify any utopian, oppositional, counter-ideological, subversive, and even, if possible, emancipatory moments within ideological constructs which are then turned against existing forms of domination’. This analytical model practiced by the Frankfurt School is called immanent critique – ‘an immanent critique of bourgeois society thus turns its own values against contemporary social forms and practices that deny or contradict widely recognized values such as freedom or individualism’. 19
By doing an ideological analysis of media culture, Kellner continued the Frankfurt School tradition, while deconstructing and updating some of the foundations of first-generation theorists, who never engaged in an immanent critique of the media specifically.
For critical cultural studies
For him, it is important to contextualize the tradition of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, before appropriating it, which requires understanding that these studies emerged at a later time from the state and monopoly capitalism analyzed by the Frankfurt School, in a time of more diversified and globalized cultural production. This means that ‘British cultural studies have been in part responses to contestation by a multiplicity of social movements and distinct groups that have produced new methods and voices within cultural studies, such as a variety of feminisms, gay and lesbian studies’. 20 They should therefore be interpreted as academic expressions of resistance.
Kellner suggests that, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, but similarly to Marcuse, British scholars have devoted attention to youth cultures, seeing them as potentially new forms of opposition and social change. Unlike Frankfurt School theorists who focused on aspects of domination, cultural studies scholars tried to understand how subcultural groups resist dominant forms of culture, creating their own identities. CCCS scholars are noteworthy because they saw how different audiences interpret and use media culture in diverse ways, not responding to messages in a uniform manner. 21 According to him, this would be the main innovation and contribution of cultural studies to media analysis: to show how media culture involves processes of domination and subordination, but also resistance.
One of the CCCS mistakes over the years would be the overvaluation of reception studies. Kellner’s criticism has been directed at scholars who have used cultural studies to celebrate and legitimize a misleading discourse about popular culture. Thus, one of the merits of the critical tradition appears as a defect in the heirs of cultural studies. He suggests that instead of using ideological labels like ‘mass culture’ and ‘popular’, we could speak in terms of media culture, developing a true cultural study that covers all dimensions of the phenomenon. 22 For Kellner, both traditions predicted that the rise of consumer culture and the media represented an advanced stage of capitalism; ‘both saw culture as a mode of ideological reproduction and hegemony, in which cultural forms help to shape the modes of thought and behavior that induce individuals to adapt to the social conditions of capitalist societies’. 23
Independent critics such as Steve Hoenisch discuss Kellner’s attempt to combine the perspectives of critical theory and cultural studies. In his opinion, this approach operates with the following contradiction: Kellner conceives of culture as a highly participatory activity (assumption from the CCCS), at the same time that he starts from the premise (Frankfurt School) that American society lives in a culture colonized by media culture. ‘Willful participation — in the sense that Kellner uses the term to mean creation, cultivation, and identification — excludes colonization. Once it has been established that media culture is (willingly) participatory, the notion of colonization loses its import’. 24
Knut Lundby questions Kellner’s approach for other reasons, for example, when speaking in terms of contemporary culture, he is actually working with few reception studies and looking at production in the US market. Furthermore, Lundby believes that the Kellnerian concept of media culture needs to be contextualized historically. Otherwise, there is no way of knowing where the concept came from. Hans Mathias Kepplinger’s Realkultur und Medienkultur (1975) and Robert P. Snow’s Creating media culture (1983) are pioneering works, but are not mentioned by Kellner. For the critic, without reference to them and others, his concept becomes a result of the Frankfurt School’s advanced cultural industry process, combined with perspectives of resistance and struggle, informed by cultural studies. 25
Nevertheless, in my view, a significant part of this criticism should be relativized. First, because it is impossible for any scholar to engage all theorists, as well as contemplate all available literature in fields as broad as critical theory and cultural studies. Second, because Kellner does not propose to carry out a reception study or an interpretation of audiences, but to analyze the intersections between media culture and politics, focusing on the ideologies that are manifested both in the texts and in the representations of class, race and gender. In other words, the author’s work must always be judged within what he intends to do.
Media culture or media spectacle?
After the 2000s, the media spectacle became, however, the key idea in Kellner’s approach. This transition concerns his interest in discussions about postmodernity, notably from Baudrillard’s reflection. 26 If Marx elaborated a study on commodity in terms of use and exchange value, Baudrillard proposes the addition of sign value. In that direction, Kellner made connections between Baudrillard and the German critical theorists, who wrote some of the first Marxist criticisms of the consumer society. But while they historically attributed passive characteristics to the consumer relationship, Baudrillard would have gone further and noticed more active relationships. In fact, postmodern theorists in general contrasted with neo-Marxist analyzes from the Frankfurt School by highlighting more dispersed, plural and decentralized forms of power. 27
But over time, Baudrillard took distance from Marxism, while Debord represented the revitalization of the Marxist project in response to the new social and cultural conditions of the 1960s and 1970s. This is revealed as his spectacle theory works with the dynamics of separation in capitalism. ‘Capitalist society separates workers from the product of their labor, art from life, and spheres of production from consumption, which involve spectators passively observing the products of social life’. 28
Although both thinkers shared some similar views – the media imposes a unilateral communication model – they proposed different alternatives to solve this ‘problem’. For Baudrillard, it would not be a bad idea to destroy the media, since its function is to mediate, therefore, to prevent genuine communication. On the other hand, Debord worked on transforming the media by advocating the development of alternatives. 29 Although Baudrillard used the term ‘spectacle’ only provisionally, Kellner judged conceptual relevance and incorporated this into his media theory, since the spectacle would be the defining characteristic of contemporary society. According to him, the logic of the spectacle shapes all forms of economics, politics, culture and everyday life, and ‘the future will depend upon what spectacles will emerge and how democracy can be reconstructed and reinvented in the face of the continuing reign of the spectacle’. 30
Agreeing with Oliver Boyd-Barrett that this term is too broad to be of compelling analytic value, 31 I will argue that Kellner’s analysis, from the 2000s onwards, often falls into a type of categorical critique that is not a beneficial methodological model for the investigation of cultural phenomena. Categorical critique is a judgement that labels specific phenomena with general concepts. This gives all phenomena the same label instead of studying them immanently – so all media events end up being framed within the same logic, that is, the spectacle. 32 It does not mean that Kellner does not have the merit of undertaking concrete examinations or historically contextualized critiques of a variety of episodes (Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, September 11 attacks, Trump administration, etc.), but that the use of the concept becomes indiscriminate, once that is applied repeatedly.
Furthermore, it is necessary to remember that, for Debord, the spectacle concerns the way in which individuals relate to images within our time. It is a relationship that is in itself a form of alienation from life. In the spectacle society, life is alienated, as individuals live as an image and appearance. The media appears in the background, as a technological mediation of spectacle relations. The spectacle is not about media content. In Kellner’s appropriation, the media is pulled forward from the discussion: the media spectacle. Otherwise, for Debord, the spectacle is a determined relationship between people and the media. 33
The praxis dimension of the multiperspectival approach
His approach is the result of a combination of perspectives from postmodern theories, cultural studies and critical theory. As theories help us to see further, Kellner believes that combining the best of each theory becomes the most efficient strategy for interpreting the complexity of images and texts from the media culture or now media spectacle, and understanding how they work to shape society’s desire, behaviour and identity.
This multiperspectival approach would have roots in Nietzsche’s thought, as the German philosopher questioned the claims of both philosophy and science to be the only way to the truth. His discipline brought together perspectives on history, social analysis, psychology, aesthetics, etc. Nietzsche’s thought thus offers ‘a powerful weapon to criticize the one-sidedness and reductionism of many forms of modern theory’. 34
Through these methodological assumptions, Kellner sought to make his theoretical studies acquire pedagogical and empirical-analytical characters. One pragmatic dimension of his multiperspectival approach is critical media literacy and the other is critical media analysis, in which he examines contemporary events in American society.
Critical media literacy
According to Kellner, there is a historical debate about how the field of media pedagogy should advance. Two approaches have especially stimulated this discussion in recent decades. The first is characterized as a traditional protectionist, while the second is a liberal multiculturalist. The first group of educators would tend to reinforce the view of the media as a manipulative institution, and encourage students in the search for information and in the development of aesthetic taste through alternative media. Forms of resistance through high culture are also encouraged. Books are considered to be the main source of knowledge, as opposed to the newspaper, television and radio. 35
Kellner is part of the second group of educators, in line with critical media literacy. In opposition to protectionism, this seeks to teach students to read and decode texts from both mainstream and alternative media. Critical media literacy, as he advocates it, would analyze ‘media culture as products of social production and struggle’, and teach ‘students to be critical of media representations and discourses, but also stressing the importance of learning to use the media as modes of self-expression and social activism’. 36
Media literacy could offer individuals greater empowerment over the culture and allow them to create their own meanings and identities to shape and transform the material and social conditions of their reality. For Kellner, in many situations, people are not critically aware that they are being educated and positioned at all times by media culture, from journalism to entertainment. Media culture acts, in this sense, as a form of invisible pedagogy, which is unconsciously absorbed. For this reason, he believes that critical approaches, which do not ignore the media, but which value it in the educational context, are fundamental to public awareness. It is important to understand how media culture builds meanings and influences the identity and behaviour of all of us, at some level. The suggestion is that media literacy should advance as a pedagogical project for all students; as a subject diluted in different courses, which does not include only undergraduate students in communication programs. 37
His proposal was influenced by the works of John Dewey 38 and Paulo Freire 39 and he intends to update these pedagogies with the potential of the Internet. Kellner is especially in agreement with the Brazilian pedagogue when he says that the criticism should not be addressed to the media itself, but to the excessively commercial form that it is used in capitalist society. The same would apply to the Internet, as Kellner sees it as a set of potential spaces for representation and self-expression for those individuals historically excluded from mainstream media. The new platforms have become spaces that can provide valuable opportunities for individuals to intervene in cultural policy. 40
In other words, this proposal suggests that critical media literacy should not be treated as a traditional pedagogy, composed of a canon of readings and a set of tested teaching procedures. It is about an approach still under construction that is finding strategies to transform digital media tools into new opportunities for social emancipation.
Critical media analysis
Kellner states that media culture is a field of dispute and that its products have different effects in certain contexts. His analysis presupposes a dialectical approach to text and context, using texts to read social realities and context to help situate and interpret media productions in American society. The development of this approach ‘is based on the hypothesis that cultural critique cannot be illuminating, unless it knows how to situate the text under analysis in its historical context’. 41
In Camera Politica (1988), Kellner and Ryan conducted a study of the social history of Hollywood cinematography between the years 1967 and 1987. They understand that the production of cinematographic narratives is deeply linked to the social, political and economic context of the United States. In their analysis, even liberal bias films can collaborate in promoting the conservative cause. For example, films that deal with the racial issue (such as Claudine and A Piece of the Action) attacked social institutions and value individual initiative, or socially critical films (such as those by Jane Fonda and Sidney Lumet) proposed individual solutions to collective problems, reinforcing the conservative appeal to individualism and the attack on statism.
The authors claim that even those fears and anxieties that seem less political can be read politically, because what they indicate is the presence of desires that are not being satisfied under the current system of domination. ‘Consequently, the political meaning of a culture is not given as something which preexists the representations in that culture. Those representations are themselves constitutive of that meaning. Consequently, such meaning is malleable, constructable, indeterminate’. 42 That is, the meaning can change according to material and social circumstances.
In Cinema Wars (2009), Kellner reinforces the understanding that American society has historically been a field of intense political struggles, and that the media culture is also a battleground between competing forces. There are films with very distinct positions: they are liberal, or radical or conservative. However, most of them are politically ambiguous, displaying a contradictory mix of values and motivations. ‘From this viewpoint, contemporary Hollywood cinema can be read as a contest of representations and a contested terrain that reproduces existing social struggles and transcodes the political discourses of the era’. 43
Television and the Crisis of Democracy (1990) is a historical-political study of television networks in the United States. Kellner shows how television operates in a dynamic between the state, the market and civil society. He raises the hypothesis that television collaborates with conservative hegemony, but recognizing that there is an intricate game of powers – this ‘reproduces the status quo in a highly conservative manner, and sometimes it promotes (liberal) change and social reforms’. 44 This argument gained strength in The Persian Gulf TV War (1992): the Pentagon ‘sold’ the image of a clean technological war, in which the American military was controlling events and achieving victory, and the largest television channels reproduced that. Although Kellner admits that individuals were not merely passive spectators of media coverage, as there were pro and anti-war demonstrations, he suggests that the media was able to manipulate public opinion. 45
In Media Spectacle (2003), Kellner comments that no event escapes the logic of the spectacle. For example, in politics, the media spectacle is part of the US’ presidential history, from John F. Kennedy to Bush II, producing narratives that favoured or ruined the image of the regimes. The type of narrative that the media built up determined the legacy of success or failure for each president. Thus, ‘the media are complicit in the generation of spectacle politics, reducing politics to image, display, and story in the forms of entertainment and drama’, 46 which has undermined participatory democracy.
This approach focused on the power of the media spectacle – and how everything can be explained through it – has strongly shaped his subsequent analyzes, including the most recent ones like American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism (2016). It is said basically that Trump was able to master ‘new media as well as dominating television and old media through his orchestration of media events as spectacles and daily Twitter Feed’. 47
It is worth examining the methodological application made by Kellner in the studies summarized above. Despite being the oldest, the analysis presented in Camera Politica (1988) is, in my opinion, the most sophisticated in terms of critical-reflexive analysis compared to Television and the Crisis of Democracy (1990) and The Persian Gulf TV War (1992). I believe that his analysis of cinema is more faithful to the immanent critique method, because he analyzes films ‘from the inside’. To analyze ‘from the outside’ would be to say that Hollywood and companies manage society through blockbusters. His argument goes far beyond that: the films are a reflection of society’s desires and expectations; Hollywood does not have the power to shape society, but to stimulate or repress certain feelings; American culture is contradictory, reflecting on film narratives with multiple meanings.
Kellner reinforces a different understanding in studies on television, where the examination has little to do with the contradictory meanings of the messages. On the contrary, he understands the media as a predominant institution subject to the interests of the government and commercial corporations – and its content is a direct result of that obedience. His central argument is that the mainstream media tended to basically promote the interests of the corporations that own them. In the case of the Gulf War, he suggests that the television channels almost mechanically adopted the government’s vision and interfered in the development of the war. For these reasons, these two studies are only partially guided by the immanent method.
I consider that these studies on television present an opening for the so-called transcendent critique, which starts to predominate in the following works of the author, as in Media Spectacle (2003). In my view, this last type of work harms the analysis and favours the classification of the phenomena, as his report captures a series of aspects of the media that interest him, subordinates everything to a specific concept. It is an approach that works from top to bottom, classifying various phenomena according to the abstract and reified concept, rather than analyzing them by dissecting their internal and external relationships. In the case of Kellner’s approach, the shaping concept is the spectacle.
Reports based on the spectacle have standardized most of his studies in the past two decades. The distancing from immanent critique leads Kellner to predictable explanations of cultural reality, which was previously understood in terms that the cultural productions themselves employed, since the objective was to explore their internal inconsistencies. 48 He often ignores the fact that the cultural asset that is cinema and television does not allow them to be simply controlled by external forces – this does not mean that there are no attempts at control. This shift to the transcendent critique emphasizes the belief that there is someone like a corporation or a government that commands the entire media process. I am not denying that this cannot happen at some level, but that is not a rule. The rule is: media productions must obtain an audience; to win over the audience, they cannot ignore social feelings, the expectations of specific groups or the general public.
Critics have even accused him of leftism. In my opinion, academic leftism becomes harmful as it becomes an ideological prejudice in research practice. More explicitly, ideological prejudice leads to the error of seeing only what is believed, to the impossibility of seeing reality in its contradictions, and to the exclusion of opposing views. The studies that Kellner carries out on journalistic coverage (conflicts, elections, etc.) are examples to be evaluated – and compared with his studies on cinema, which are notably guided by an immanent quality critique. 49 Taken by ideological presuppositions, he sometimes absents himself from this work by unilaterally addressing particular issues of concrete cases, although he most of the time theorizes media culture as a contested terrain, with its own contradictions.
The main objective in research practice should not be the defense of an ideology (right vs. left, liberal vs. conservative, etc.), but the search for knowledge of reality. This is an activity of re-elaborating ideas. The lack of knowledge of the multiple processes that involve reality, in turn, has no other intention than to improve the idea that already exists. However, it is also fair to defend Kellner. In general, his left-wing political attitude does not affect reflection. On the contrary, it was precisely his activism that led him to critical theory and cultural studies. His critics find it difficult to understand the complexity of this dynamic of being and acting in contemporary times: the leftist militant coexists with the critical theorist; sometimes this is predominantly from an intellectual and academic point of view, but not many others. 50
Even a critical theorist needs criticism
As has been shown, Marxism advanced in the fields of social sciences and communication studies in the United States after the emergence of the New Left. However, for the conservative critic Allan Bloom, this movement left a retrograde legacy for the American academy, as it accelerated the decline of the humanities and the transformation of the university into an administrative structure, devoid of any significant intellectual content. 51 At the same time, this period would have been marked by the beginning of the disappearance of public intellectuals in the country.
Russell Jacoby asks who were the great public intellectuals in the 1960s? They were not mostly Americans, but Europeans: Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse etc. There were exceptions and C. Wright Mills was probably the main one. The heirs of the New Left became successful philosophers, sociologists, historians and ‘revolutionary dreamers’. 52 However, unlike Mills, they are part of a generation that prioritized the academic career and, consequently, had no relevant roles in the public debate on major social issues. Its heirs became competent professionals, but limited to the university, contributing little to public life and American culture. The intellectual loses her/his public character and becomes ‘private’, as she/he no longer addresses society directly, but the college auditoriums and the readers of journals.
Kellner, like many others, would not agree with this view, according to which the expansion of the academy is linked to the decline of public culture in the United States. For Kellner, intellectuals did not necessarily lose space or disappear from the public sphere. On the contrary, he seems to believe that the space for debate is greater today, due to the emergence of new technologies capable of creating new environments for discussion. The democratization of access to university has made the student community grow in the country, so more people would be studying, researching, intellectualizing and, perhaps, becoming politicized. As a result, the university is an important part of the public sphere insofar as it supports the construction of participatory democracy. Still, the university represents the place of resistance for radical political theory and practice for the purpose of social transformation.
Through this background, this article illuminated the phases of Kellner’s thinking about the media and society. Initially, it was shown that critical theory arrived in the United States in the 1940s, with the exile of Frankfurt School theorists during Nazism. Later, it was cultural studies that grew up in a context of culture wars. However, cultural Marxists were not mostly British, or German, or postmodern French. It was the Americans who entered intellectual history as cultural Marxists. Cultural Marxism was an expression produced in the United States: at first, it was welcomed by the heirs of the New Left, and then it received a strongly pejorative meaning by right-wing conservatism.
American left-wing intellectuals worked on the idea of Cultural Marxism mainly from the appropriation of cultural studies, as the political debate around issues such as sexuality and drugs gained academic legitimacy, in the 1970s. 53 Cultural Marxism was diluted by the idea of multiculturalism on which these cultural studies were based in the early 1990s. Between those decades, American conservatives began to attack Marxism and criticize media productions.
Kellner became an intellectual and theorized the technocapitalist society in this context where the gains achieved by the left movement in the academic field of popular culture were a kind of counterpart to its defeat in politics. For him, ideology is the key concept in Marxist analysis, as it describes how the ideas of a dominant class promote the economic interests of that class and cover up the relations of exploitation, oppression and injustice in a whole society. For orthodox Marxists, cultural forms are determined by the economic base. Not agreeing with this, critical Marxists reworked the ideological analysis, reducing the determinism of economic conditions and giving relative autonomy to culture. They provided political perspectives for the study of forms of power that pertain to culture.
Kellner is an example of a scholar who embarked on Cultural Marxism. However, Kellner has particularities: his interest is in a cultural phenomenon that is the media. His thesis addresses the media as a mediating institution, positioned between the market, the state and civil society. It is an institution that forms a specific culture. Media culture imposes itself as the dominant cultural form in contemporary society. Later, his thesis was modified, while Kellner appropriated Debord. He begins to say, then, that the spectacle is the phenomenon that dominates the contemporary order. The media serves as the main stage for the spectacle, being its biggest promoter. Nothing seems to escape the logic of the spectacle.
Cultural Marxism is not a distinctive merit of Kellner, however. I have argued throughout this article that his first merit, as an heir to the critical tradition, was to propose a multiperspectival approach: he elaborates an analysis of American culture through different perspectives, based on elements of critical theory, cultural studies and postmodern theories. His work reveals eclectic wealth and encourages us to lose our theoretical prejudices, to see the internal contradictions of each theory as well as its limitations and contributions in relation to others.
Kellner emphasizes that the innovation of cultural studies is the indication of resistance in complement to the concept of domination from the Frankfurt School. Although critical theorists have identified resistance movements, they have not been complacent about the idea of resistance, as they have not necessarily considered it a form of critique. Resistance is often not critical, it is often destructive; other times it is progressive; in others, retrograde. Cultural studies generally did not work to show this. Kellner did not solve this problem, because, in his view, resistance is always an indication of progressive critique that opens up for radical political action.
In line with the history of ideas, this article also made it possible to identify that in Kellner’s work there is a conceptual shift from ‘media culture’ to ‘media spectacle’. Problematizing what seems simple, I tried to explore the hypothesis that this conceptual shift reveals a transition from the method of immanent critique to transcendent critique – whose main objective becomes to categorize the media phenomenon under the logic of the spectacle, instead of analyzing the polysemic and ambiguous meaning of the messages of media culture. By this, I do not mean that his theory stopped conceiving the media as contested terrain, but that, over time, his examinations based on concrete cases present a markedly externalist approach and end up providing less sophisticated narratives in relation to the previous ones.
For Debord, the spectacle is the social relations that become commodified. Debord did not mean that the content of the media is the spectacle. To think like that is not to understand the French thinker in his fullness. Kellner sometimes takes the most simplistic path. For Kellner, the spectacle is a cultural category, explored by the media, which dominates all spheres of society. Kellner appropriates the idea of spectacle to apply it to the analysis of the media: the spectacular way in which the media narrates and shows all the events. Thus, Kellner intends to be a Debord updater at the level of communication studies, but often becomes a reducer, because Debord’s theory went beyond the media – it is a theory about the society.
What are the justifications for this form of appropriation? My conclusion is that Kellner intends to break with the immobility that results from reflections such as that of Debord and the Frankfurt School, because he wants to rescue the political action that the negative judgements of both currents of thought condemned. He speculates that the criticisms of both are at some level conformists because they lead to the understanding that political action is no longer a solution. In this sense, Kellner found the counterpoint in Marcuse’s philosophy, as this opens up to a new political aspect, such as refusal of conformism.
And this is a strong paradox of Kellner’s thought: he begins his intellectual trajectory supported by Marcuse, to end with Debord. Disputing the lack of political action in Baudrillard, Kellner reduces the philosopher to nihilism, ignoring that Debord’s thinking is marked by a similar problem. Perhaps, Kellner does not see this because Debord died as a Marxist, and Baudrillard did not. But the choice to follow or abandon Marxism is not in itself a critical political attitude. This means that Kellner goes back theoretically when trying to advance a political vision in which, in fact, there is no action and that he himself has rejected in the past.
It was not only on the theoretical plane that Kellner stepped back. By overestimating the idea of spectacle, Kellner also distanced himself from his great merit: the multiperspectival approach. So, where there were multiple perspectives of viewing American culture and perceiving its contradictions, the tendency is now to have just one dominant perspective: the spectacle. In this sense, it would not be an exaggeration to say that there is an impoverishment in his new approach.
Regarding practical philosophy, my analysis suggests that education has taken the place of politics in Kellner’s work. In the times of the New Left, Marcuse turned his eyes to art, since this ‘breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle’. 54 Today, Kellner believes that instead of art, education can redeem us from that. Education starts to be thought of politically as a transformative practice capable of building progressive responses to technological and social changes contested in theory. Under this assumption, he developed his proposal for critical media literacy. This becomes his way of intervening in the media field as an engaged intellectual, that is, media literacy corresponds to the pragmatic dimension of his theoretical reflection. But what are the implications of this proposition?
Apparently, he wants to make us understand the media as he describes it. But is this a pedagogy or would it be a theoretical intervention of political intent (from the left-wing) aimed at influencing media activity, according to what he believes? If so, there are losses and misunderstandings. For example, when Kellner defends public communication, he does not realize that it is often state-owned with institutional intent; or that the alternative media can also be a right-wing and conservative expression; or that the Internet, as organized today, promotes cultural forms with a commercial character. 55
Media literacy is valuable when guided by critical multiperspectivism; when it does not signal a single way of seeing the world; when it presents several theoretical perspectives to broaden the view of reality; when it shows that a certain cultural product does not contain just one meaning, that its messages are polysemic and politically ambiguous at different levels. Therefore, media literacy should rescue the immanent critique, seen in Kellner’s early studies, and from which he took distance when he began to value a type of categorical analysis, more linked to transcendent criticism. This approach does not seem to help explain the phenomenon and its historical context. On the other hand, this type of approach favours simplifications such as: all cultural productions are an extension of the media spectacle.
A pedagogy in line with critical multiperspectivism would teach that media culture is a reflection of society’s conflicts. Throughout his case studies, Kellner has moved away from this understanding, but this does not disqualify his contributions as a whole. Kellner has many merits and the multiperspectival approach is one of them. He is an intellectual who has a practice of opposing the specialization of knowledge, a trend that has dominated the university environment. In fact, unlike what is usually seen in the academy, Kellner is not an expert who preaches the war between theories. He proposed something different since he studied deeply the different currents of thought, being able to point out the differences and similarities between them.
So, what can his legacy teach us? We can learn from Kellner to study the dissonances that are specific to each theory, before confronting them for their generalities. Doing so without realizing their internal conflicts has not contributed to critical social research. Kellner is a scholar who has been able to identify and properly judge the pros and cons of different intellectual traditions. And he made a theoretical appropriation in his own way. However, it is misleading to think that a union of the ‘best of the best theories’ – still less the concept of spectacle alone – can explain everything. No theory can explain every culture, because the dynamics of reality always surpass the theory. On the other hand, Kellner got it right by working on analyzes that contextualize media phenomena in social history, contributing to the reflection of the complex reality in which we live.
He also has great merit in theorizing and analyzing the media under critical guidance. This idea of critique is what, perhaps, remains the strongest throughout his work, from the 1970s to today. In this regard, Kellner deserves to be recognized as an heir to the critical tradition. But he leaves us the lesson: even critical thinking needs criticism.
