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Douglas Kellner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Media culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music. Book argues that media culture is now the dominant form of culture.
Douglas Kellner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Media culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music. Book argues that media culture is now the dominant form of culture.
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Douglas Kellner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Media culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music. Book argues that media culture is now the dominant form of culture.
Droits d'auteur :
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Formats disponibles
Téléchargez comme DOC, PDF, TXT ou lisez en ligne sur Scribd
Douglas Kellner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin
and author (with Michael Ryan) of Camera Politica: The politics and ideology of Hollywood films and (with Steven Best) of Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Kellner has also published Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism; Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity; Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond; Television and the Crisis of Democracy; The Persian Gulf TV War. He has edited Jameson/Marxism/Critique and Baudrillard: A Critical Reader and co-edited (with Stephen Bronner) Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. Media Culture Media Culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music, and other artifacts to discern their nature and effects. The book argues that media culture is now the dominant form of culture which socializes us and provides materials for identity in terms of both social reproduction and change. Through studies of Reagan andRambo, horror films and youth films, rap music and African- American culture, Madonna, fashion, television news and entertainment, MTV, Beavis and Butt-Head, the Gulf War as cultural text, cyberpunk fiction and postmodern theory, Kellner provides a series of lively studies that both illuminate contemporary culture and provide methods of analysis and critique. Many people today talk about cultural studies, but Kellner actually does it, carrying through a unique mixture of theoretical analysis and concrete discussions of some of the most popular and influential forms of contemporary media culture. Criticizing social context, political struggle, and the system of cultural production, Kellner develops a multidimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens the field and opens it to a variety of disciplines. He also provides new approaches to the vexed question of the effects of culture and offers new perspectives for cultural studies. Anyone interested in the nature and effects of contemporary society and culture should read this book. Kellner argues that we are in a state of transition between the modern era and a new postmodern era and that media culture offers a privileged field of study and one that is vital if we are to grasp the full import of the changes currently shaking us. The book has three parts and a brief introduction, where he talks about: Media culture and society, Cultural studies and social theory, Acknowledgements Part I is intituled Theory/context/methods and it contains the following chapters: Theory Wars and cultural studies ( he talks about the Frankfurt School, British cultural studies and its legacy), Media culture, politics and ideology: from Reagan to Rambo (he talks about ideology and media culture, Rambo and Reagan, Top Gun, The Gulf War), For a cultural studies that is critical, multicultural and multiperspectival. In part two: Diagnostic critique and cultural studies we have the following chapters: Social anxiety, class and disaffected youth (Poltergeists gender and class in the age of Reagan and Bush, Diagnostic critique: from Poltergeist to Slackers and Beavis and Butt-head), Black Voices from Spike Lee to rap (the films of Spike Lee, Rap and black radical discourse. Resistance, counterhegemony and everyday life), Reading the gulf war: production, text, reception (disinformation and the production of news, the media propaganda war, warrior nation). Part three: Media culture, identities, politics includes: Television, advertising and the construction of postmodern identities (Identity in postmodern theory, Advertising images, the postmodern), Madonna, fashion and image (Fashion and identity, The Madonna phenomenon, Madonna between the modern and post modern), Mapping the present from the future: from Baudrillard to Cyberpunk. Also we have conclusion: From the future back to the present: Critical media pedagogy, Media and cultural activism, Media and cultural politics. In this book, Kellner talks about a media culture has emerged in which images, sounds, and spectacles help produce the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, shaping political views and social behavior, and providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities. Radio, television, film, and the other products of the culture industries provide the models of what it means to be male or female, successful or a failure, powerful or powerless. Media culture also provides the materials out of which many people construct their sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality, of “us” and “them.” Media culture helps shape the prevalent view of the world and deepest values: it defines what is considered good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories and images provide the symbols, myths, and resources which help constitute a common culture for the majority of individuals in many parts of the world today. Media culture provides the materials to create identities whereby individuals insert themselves into contemporary techno-capitalist socieities and which is producing a new form of global culture. . Media culture is a culture of the image and often deploys sight and sound. The various media—radio, film, television, music, and print media such as magazines, newspapers, and comic books—privilege either sight or sound, or mix the two senses, playing as well on a broad range of emotions, feelings, and ideas. Media culture is industrial culture, organized on the model of mass production and is produced for a mass audience according to types (genres), following conventional formulas, codes, and rules. It is thus a form of commercial culture and its products are commodities that attempt to attract private profit produced by giant corporations interested in the accumulation of capital. Media culture aims at a large audience, thus it must resonate to current themes and concerns, and is highly topical, providing hieroglyphics of contemporary social life. But media culture is also a high-tech culture, deploying the most advanced technologies. It is a vibrant sector of the economy, one of the most profitable. Media culture spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and demonstrate to the powerless that if they fail to conform, they risk incarceration or death. The following studies help provide an understanding of media culture and suggest ways that it can be understood, used, and appreciated. He provides each reader with resources to learn to study, analyze, interpret, and criticize the texts of media culture and to appraise their effects. I examine some of the ways that media culture intersects with political and social struggles and helps shape everyday life, influencing how people think and behave, how they see themselves and other people, and how they construct their identities. He argues that media culture is a contested terrain across which key social groups and competing political ideologies struggle for dominance and that individuals live these struggles through the images, discourses, myths, and spectacles of media culture. Culture in the broadest sense is a form of highly participatory activity, in which people create their societies and identities. Culture shapes individuals, drawing out and cultivating their potentialities and capacities for speech, action, and creativity. Media culture is also involved in these processes, yet it is something new in the human adventure. Individuals spend tremendous amounts of time listening to the radio, watching television, going to see films, experiencing music, going shopping, reading magazines and newspapers, and participating in these and other forms of media culture. Thus, media culture has come to dominate everyday life, serving as the ubiquitous background and often the highly seductive foreground of our attention and activity, which many argue is undermining human potentiality and creativity. This book will explore some of the consequences for a society and culture colonized by media culture. It will probe the nature and effects of the way in which this form of culture is deeply influencing many aspects of our everyday life. A major theme of this book concerns how the forms of media culture induce individuals to identify with dominant social and political ideologies, positions, and representations. Media and consumer culture work hand in hand to generate thought and behavior that conform to existing values, institutions, beliefs, and practices. Yet, audiences may resist the dominant meanings and messages, create their own readings and appropriations of mass-produced culture, and use their culture as resources to empower themselves and to invent their own meanings, identities, and forms of life. Moreover, media culture itself provides resources which individuals can appropriate, or reject, in forming their own identities against dominant models. Media culture thus induces individuals to conform to the established organization of society, but it also provides resources that can empower individuals against that society. Theories of the media and culture are, I believe, best developed through specific studies of concrete phenomena contextualized within the vicissitudes of contemporary society and history. Thus, to interrogate contemporary media culture critically involves carrying out studies of how the culture industries produce specific artifacts that reproduce the social discourses which are embedded in the key conflicts and struggles of the day. This involves seeing how popular texts like the Rocky or Rambo films, rap music or Madonna, TV cop shows, or advertising and media news and discussion, all articulate specific ideological positions and help reproduce dominant forms of social power, serving the interests of societal domination, or of resistance to the dominant forms of culture and society—or have contradictory effects. In the studies he attempts to to demonstrate how some of the most popular cultural texts of the day are involved in current political and cultural struggles. The study of popular and mass-mediated culture has widely been labelled “cultural studies” and in this book he provides some models of a media cultural studies that is critical, multicultural, and multiperspectival. His studies were conceived and begun during a specific historical moment, that of the triumph of conservatism in the United States and most Western capitalist democracies. Accordingly, after setting out his concept of the sort of cultural studies and social theory needed to understand our contemporary media culture in an opening chapter on the theory and culture wars of recent years, he examines in Chapter 2 the politics and ideology of Hollywood film in the Age of Reagan and demonstrate how popular film reproduced the hegemonic conservative discourses of the era carries out some concrete studies of contemporary Hollywood films, while delineating a model of a critical and multicultural media cultural studies. He argues that one needs a cultural studies that criticizes the intersection of class, gender, sex, race, and other key determinants of culture and identity in order to more fully conceptualize the ideological dimensions of cultural texts and to appraise the full range of their effects. Next, in Chapter 3, he indicates the need to read media culture against its ideological grain, to ferret out critical and subversive moments, and to analyze how the ideological projects of media texts often fail. He also explicates a concept of diagnostic critique that uses media culture to diagnose social trends and tendencies, reading through the texts to the fantasies, fears, hopes, and desires that they articulate. A diagnostic critique also analyzes how media culture provides the resources for producing identities and advances either reactionary or progressive politics—or provides ambiguous texts and effects that can be appropriated in various ways. In Part II, he carries through some concrete studies of diagnostic critiques that interrogate dominant representations of class, race, gender, sexuality, youth, and contemporary politics. In Chapter 4, he illustrates the concept of diagnostic critique through a reading of the Po l t e rgeist films which he argues articulate middle-class fears of downward mobility, homelessness, dissolution of the family, and threats from other classes and races in cinematic form. He then develops readings of the film Slacker and the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head to provide a diagnosis of the plight of disaffected youth in the current moment. Thus, whereas Chapter 2 showed how Hollywood films transcoded the dominant political discourses during the era of conservative hegemony from 1980 into the 1990s, Chapter 4 shows how the desires, anxieties, and insecurities of ordinary people also find expression in media culture, allowing the depiction of crisis tendencies beneath the ideological facade of a happy, secure consumer society. In Chapter 5, he delineates a model of a multiperspectival cultural studies and illustrate this concept with a detailed study of the films of Spike Lee, which provide an exemplary instance of the cinematic exploration of key issues of race, gender, and class in the contemporary moment. Drawing on black feminist and political criticism of his films, he examines Lee’s work and the contributions and limitations of his style, texts, and politics. Contrasting Lee’s films with the contemporary rap music of Public Enemy, Ice-T, Ice Cube, Sister Souljah, and others suggests some of the range of socially critical cultural texts being produced today and the ways that radical blacks are pushing beyond the previously established limits of mainstream culture to articulate their experiences of oppression, rage, and rebellion. During the Reagan-Bush era, television grew in cultural and political importance, through the political spectacles and daily photo opportunities produced by the Reagan Administration and the spectacle of the “Gulf War” which he analyzes in Chapter 6. After Reagan, there followed the Bush regime and his effort during the “Gulf War” to establish a “New World Order.” In Chapter 2, he indicates how certain Hollywood films produced images that could be mobilized to produce consent to the U.S. war against Iraq in the early 1990s. In Chapter 6, he shows how the tools of cultural studies can be utilized to critique the production of “Gulf War,” to provide a critical reading of the text, and to help explain its effect on the audience and why the public so massively supported the war. Over the past decade, media culture has thus been playing an increasingly important role in political elections, in the daily political battles, and in legitimating the political system. Global media events like the Gulf War demonstrated the efficacy of U.S. weapons systems and the hegemony of U.S. military power, while events like the spectacular 1994 TV funeral of Richard Nixon demonstrated the power of the presidency. Moreover, new forms of television entertainment appeared during the era and in Chapter 7, he analyzes some key moments of television culture in the 1980s, including Miami Vice and other “new look” TV, often labelled “postmodern.” The rise of Music Television (MTV) revolutionized the music industry, giving rise to new multimedia stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson. He also explores some ways that advertising provides models of gender and identification, as well as inducements to buy specific products. Just as image came to play a key role in the politics of the era, so too did it come to play a central role in the media culture of the period and in everyday life, in which one’s image, look, and style, became increasingly important in the constitution of individual identity. Within this context, he provides readings in Part III of Miami Vice, MTV, advertising, and Madonna in relationship to the claim that they were exemplary in producing shifts to what has been identified as a new postmodern culture and new postmodern identities. He argues in Chapter 8 that Madonna’s shifts in image and identity articulate transformations in values and politics of the epoch. He claims that her contradictions capture conflicting aspects of her cultural moment and that the “Madonna phenomenon” is symptomatic of key trends of the era, so that interpreting her texts, and Madonna as a text herself, can illuminate features of the present moment. Yet he argues that Madonna is a phenomenon of her own production, promotion, and marketing strategies, and that one needs therefore to focus on the political economy of culture to properly interpret “the Madonna phenomenon.” In “Mapping the present from the future: from Baudrillard to cyberpunk” (Chapter 9), he explores cyberpunk fiction and postmodern theory as artifacts of media culture which in turn provide fictional-theoretical visions of a society increasingly dominated by media and information. Focusing on the similarities between the social analysis of Baudrillard and the novels of William Gibson, he interprets both as attempts to map our present moment which is constantly slipping into the future. Through a close reading of Neuromancer, he argues that both Baudrillard and Gibson are providing visions of the future which serve to illuminate the present. This analysis suggests that Baudrillard is best read as dystopic science fiction, although cyberpunk can also be read as a new form of social theory that maps the consequences of a rapidly developing information and media society in the era of techno-capitalism. In a conclusion, he indicates some remaining tasks for cultural studies and some of the issues that cultural studies should address in the future. His studies ultimately propose developing syntheses of social theory, cultural criticism, and media pedagogy to illuminate our contemporary society, culture, and politics. Combining philosophy, social theory, cultural critique, and political analysis, he presents some perspectives on society and culture, methods of cultural criticism, and make some proposals for the reconstruction of cultural studies and critical social theory.
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