If students are not trained to ask basic questions about the images which confront them, if they are not asked to examine the knowledge and assumptions which they already possess, they are being denied the opportunity to develop the most simple and essential critical tools.
Doug Kellner
Herbert
In the mid-1970s, I became
In the mid-1970s, I became involved in Marxist studies groups at the University of Texas at Austin. After going through key Marxian texts, including the Grundrisse and Capital, we decided to study the American political economy and, in particular, television. Our study group began with sustained study and discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s model of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse’s critique of the media within one-dimensional society.
We also became involved in alternative media and were given a chance to do a weekly public-access TV show, Alternative Views. Accordingly, from 1978 to the mid-1990s, Frank Morrow, myself, and others taped hourlong interviews combined with documentary programs to produce one show per week for years on end; they were eventually syndicated around the United States and briefly made me a celebrity in New York City, where the program was shown several times per week on the New York public-access channels. This project helped me to become a Deweyan public intellectual and to apply philosophical notions and abilities to issues of public concern in a public forum.
At the time, I was also deeply involved in study of the media and ideology, and in the 1970s I published in the Socialist Review one article on the concept of ideology (Kellner 1979a) and another on television ideology and emancipatory popular culture (1979b). Although I was associated with Herbert Marcuse’s wing of Frankfurt School critical theory after publishing my book Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984), I also liked Habermas’s work on communicative action, theory, and practice and other works and did not posit siding with Marcuse or Habermas as an either-or choice. But Habermas’s student Albrecht Wellmer, who came to New York to lecture on Habermas, felt differently. In a proselytizing mode, he presented Habermas’s work as far superior to Marcuse’s and Horkheimer and Adorno’s. This was the beginning of the development of a Habermasian camp, which would become a global intellectual subdiscipline that continues to this day.
Following Marcuse, I argued that media could be used as instruments of power, domination, and social control and yet could also be used as forms of resistance to hegemonic power and for alternative forms of pedagogy, politics, and communication. I also recognized that media were so powerful, so proliferating and omnipresent, that it was impossible to really grasp their complex, singular, and often weird effects (so I also was open to poststructuralist theories of the media).