DOUGLAS KELLNER, MEDIA CULTURE

Kellner, Douglas. MEDIA CULTURE: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern. New York: Routledge, 1995. Ursinus College Myrin Library call number: 302.230973/K289.

BIOGRAPHIC AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC
Douglas Kellner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. With a colleague he maintains the Critical Theory site on the World Wide Web.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT
Miami Vice and the politics of image and identity (pp.238-247). In this section, Kellner sets out to demonstrate that the "subject" or self does not disappear in a postmodern production. He takes issue with Fredric Jameson's contention that the structured and enduring self disappears with the "waning of affect." In the tv series Miami Vice, a postmodern style is said to have been presented, and Kellner identifies various elements of that style. At the same time, he suggests that this style does not destroy character, does not simply replace it with surface intensities. He argues that the show "pulsates...with intense emotion, a clash of values, and highly specific political messages and positions." (p.239) That is, he sees the show as an artistic illustration of human sensibilities operating in postmodern social conditions.

QUOTABLE QUOTES
"...for a one-dimensional postmodern reading, an artifact like Miami Vice is all surface without any depth or layered meanings. On my reading, however, the form, narrative, and images constitute a polysemic text with a multiplicity of possible meanings which require multivalent readings that probe the various layers of the text. For my political hermeneutic, the show is read as a social text which tells us some things about contemporary society. In particular, I wish to suggest that provides many insights into the fragmentation, reconstruction, and fragility of identity in contemporary culture and that it also provides insight into how identities are constructed through the incorporation of subject positions offered for emulation by media culture." (p.239)

SIGNIFICANCE, EVALUATION, AND RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORK

Kellner's views on the self in postmodern conditions speaks to our original concerns about the authenticity of the self in the Genesis Documents.

We are interested in his opposition to Jameson's notion of the disappearance of a deep-structured, self-reflexive subject/self. From Kellner's reading, we can take it that the fragmentary, non-linear conditions of the postmodern environment do not construct the self. They influence the self, giving it a periodized demeanor. But he evidently locates a self elsewhere.

He sees Crockett and Tubbs in the show as "models" for the personal identity of viewers. Their ability to change identities--from good guy to bad guy--is a postmodern manipulation of the self, which, he says, viewers can copy. Implicit in that approach, however, is a "self" that does the changing by an act of will. This seems to put Kellner in the modernist school. He seems unwilling to say, here at least, that the self is ONLY the text. Elsewhere, he writes of the inability of the French deconstructionists to provide a theory that will affect society and politics in remediable ways. He turns to the motivations of the Frankfurt School for an attitude that will seek such a theory in the midst of postmodern conditions of living and postmodern ways of thinking. We begin to wonder (without having read enough of him at this point) whether Kellner's quest for workable theory compels him to retain a modernist formulation of self; this formulation would have to reject the deconstructionist definition of self as a destabilized locus of textual inscripting. --But this preliminary interpretation must be tested against an adequate reading of Kellner's work, still to be done in THE PROGRAMME at this writing.

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19 December 1996
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