Online research in philosophy

As we move into a new millennium fraught with terror and danger, a global postmodern cosmopolis is unfolding in the midst of rapid evolutionary and social changes co-constructed by science, technology, and the restructuring of global capital. We are quickly morphing into a new biological and social existence that is ever-more mediated and shaped by computers, mass media, and biotechnology, all driven by the logic of capital and a powerful emergent technoscience. In this global context, science is no longer merely (...) an interpretation of the natural and social worlds, rather it has become an active force in changing them and the very nature of life. In an era where life can be created and redesigned in a petri dish, and genetic codes can be edited like a digital text, the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” has become greatly complexified. The new techniques of manipulation call into question existing definitions of life and death, demand a rethinking of fundamental notions of ethics and moral value, and pose unique challenges for democracy. (shrink)

The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves conflicts between modern and postmodern politics. In this essay, we articulate the differences between modern and postmodern politics and argue against one-sided positions which dogmatically reject one tradition or the other in favor of partisanship for either the modern or the postmodern. Arguing for a politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served by drawing on the most progressive elements of both the (...) modern and postmodern traditions. Developing a new politics involves overcoming the limitations of certain versions of modern politics and postmodern identity politics in order to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the coming millennium. (shrink)

"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, ... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness,".

Ice Cube "What's a brother gotta do to get a message through to the Red, White, and Blue?" Ice-T Rap music has emerged as one of the most distinctive and controversial music genres of the past decade. A significant part of hip hop culture, [1] rap articulates the experiences and conditions of African-Americans living in a spectrum of marginalized situations ranging from racial stereotyping and stigmatizing to struggle for survival in violent ghetto conditions. In this cultural context, rap provides a (...) voice to the voiceless, a form of protest to the oppressed, and a mode of alternative cultural style and identity to the marginalized. Rap is thus not only music to dance and party to, but a potent form of cultural identity. It has become a powerful vehicle for cultural political expression, serving as the "CNN of black people" (Chuck D), or upping the high-tech ante, as their "satellite communication system" (Heavy D). It is an informational medium to tune into, one that describes the rage of African-Americans facing growing oppression, declining opportunities for advancement, changing moods on the streets, and everyday life as a matter of sheer survival. In turn, it has become a cultural virus, circulating its images, sounds, and attitude throughout the culture and body politic. (shrink)

The past several decades have exhibited vertiginous change, surprising novelties, and upheaval in an era marked by technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism.1 This "great transformation," comparable in scope to the shifts produced by the Industrial Revolution, is moving the world into a postindustrial, infotainment, and biotech mode of global capitalism, organized around new information, communications, and genetic technologies. The scientific-technological-economic revolutions of the era and spread of the global economy are providing new financial opportunities, openings for political (...) amelioration, and a wealth of ingenious products and technologies that might improve the human condition. Yet these developments are accompanied by explosive conflict, crisis, and even catastrophe. The post-September 11 world reveals the contradictory dialectic of globalization in which the wide-reaching circulation of people, technology, media, and ideologies can have destructive as well as beneficial consequences. Hence, the turbulent transmutations of the contemporary situation are highly contradictory and ambiguous, with both hopeful and threatening features being played out on political, economic, social, and cultural fronts. (shrink)

In the realm of philosophy and other theoretical discourses, there are many different paths to the turn from the modern to the postmodern, representing a complex genealogy of diverse and often divergent trails through different disciplines and cultural terrains. One pathway moves through an irrationalist tradition from romanticism to existentialism to French postmodernism via the figures of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Bataille into the proliferation of French postmodern theory. This is the route charted by Jurgen Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of (...) Modernity (1987), a trajectory that ultimately leads for him to the dead end of irrationalism and the catastrophe of fascism. (shrink)

The Frankfurt School had a highly ambivalent relation to Judaism. On one hand, they were part of that Enlightenment tradition that opposed authority, tradition, and all institutions of the past -- including religion. They were also, for the most part, secular Jews who did not support any organized religion, or practice religious or cultural Judaism. In this sense, they were in the tradition of Heine, Marx, and Freud for whom Judaism was neither a constitutive feature of their life or work, (...) nor a significant aspect of their self-image and identity. (shrink)

The February 2004 release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a major cultural event. Receiving a tremendous amount of advance publicity due to claims of its anti-Semitism and adulatory responses by conservative Christians who were the first to see it, the film achieved more buzz before its release than any recent film in our memory.1 Gibson himself helped orchestrate the publicity with selective showings of The Passion and strategic appearances on TV shows where he came off as (...) something of a Hollywood eccentric, albeit one who was only too happy to admit to his past sins and to claim that he had achieved “salvation” through his adherence to Christianity. His film, he insisted, would be testament to the truth of Christ and how Christ died so that sinners like Gibson could be saved and enjoy eternal life. (shrink)

John Hartley opens his short history of cultural studies by evoking a sense of the contested nature of the field in the contemporary moment and the intense debates about its objects, scope, methods, and goals: “Even within intellectual communities and academic institutions, there is little agreement about what counts as cultural studies, either as a critical practice or an institutional apparatus. On the contrary, the field is riven by fundamental disagreements about what cultural studies is for, in whose interests it (...) is done, what theories, methods and objects of study are proper to it, and where to set its limits” (1). (shrink)

Since his death in 1979, Herbert M arcuse's influence has been steadily waning. The extent to which his work is ignored in progressive circles is curious, as M arcuse was one of the most influential radical theorists of the day during the 1960s and his work continued to be a topic of interest and controversy during the 1970s. While the waning of the revolutionary movements with which he was involved helps explain M arcuse's eclipse in popularity, the lack of new (...) texts and publications has also contributed. For while there have been a large number of new translations of works by Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas during the past decade, few new publications of untranslated or uncollected material by M arcuse have appeared, although there have been a steady stream of books on M arcuse.1 In addition, while there has been great interest in the writings of Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and other French "postmodern," or "poststructuralist," theorists, M arcuse did not fit into the fashionable debates concerning modern and postmodern thought.2 Unlike Adorno, M arcuse did not anticipate the postmodern attacks on reason and his dialectics were not "negative." Rather he subscribed to the project of reconstructing reason and of positing utopian alternatives to the existing society -- a dialectical imagination that has fallen out of favor in an era that rejects totalizing thought and grand visions of liberation and social reconstruction. (shrink)

After World War II, the United States participated in helping to produce an international set of institutions, treaties, and multilateral relationships to cope with political conflict and global problems. Internationalist multilateralism was complicated by the Cold War that split the world into competing camps and blocs. Facing a Soviet nuclear threat and challenges on the military, political and economic front, the US developed multilateral institutions and alliances with European and other allies to provide national security. Doctrines of containment and deterrence (...) combined with a global system of alliances protected the US from military assault and provided outlines of a global system from within which conflicts could be resolved and global problems dealt with. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were brief hopes that a more peaceful and secure world could be produced through strengthened multilateral global alliances and with major countries working together within international law. The first Bush administration and the two Clinton administrations developed globalist and multilateral politics and the 1990s exhibited remarkable economic prosperity, at least for those in the overdeveloped countries, and, with some marked failures, began to deal with human rights and violations of international law collectively and multilaterally within a global framework. The second Bush administration renounced internationalist and multilateralist policies and alliances. From the beginning, they rejected international accords such as the Kyoto Treaty on the environment and a series of arms limitations treaties ranging from attempts to cutback on nuclear weapon to controlling the small arms trade. After the September 11 terror attacks on the US, the Bush administration responded with unilateralist militarism, developed new doctrines of preemptive strikes, and waged violent but unresolved wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.. (shrink)

Both New French Theory and Critical Theory explode the boundaries established in the division of labor which separates our academic disciplines into such things as economics, political science, philosophy, sociology, etc. Both claim that there are epistemological and metaphysical problems with abstracting from the interconnectedness of phenomena in the world, or from our experience of it. On this view, philosophy, for example, that abstracts from sociology and economics, or political science that excludes, say, economics or culture from its conceptual boundaries, (...) is by nature one-sided, limited, and flawed. Both Critical Theory and New French Theory therefore transgress established disciplinary boundaries and create new disciplines, theories, and discourses that avoid the deficiencies of the traditional academic division of labor. (shrink)

During the Gulf war, CNN correspondent Peter Arnett distinguished himself with its courageous reporting in Iraq while under fire by the U.S.-led coalition which dropped more bombs on Iraq than were unleashed in World War II. Reporting live from Baghdad throughout the war, Arnett provided vivid daily accounts of life in Iraq during one of the most sustained air attacks in history. From his live telephone reporting of the early hours of the U.S. attack on Iraq in January 1991 through (...) his live satellite reports of the effects of the daily bombing of Iraq, Arnett distinguished himself through his attempts to cut through the lies and disinformation of both sides and to provide accurate reporting on the effects of the U.S.-led coalition assault against Iraq. (shrink)

Since the appearance of the 1992 film Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (hereafter BtVS) and the popular 1997-2003 TV series based on it, Buffy has become a cult figure of global media culture with a panorama of websites, copious media and scholarly dissection, academic conferences, and a fandom that continues to devour reruns and DVDs of the 144 episodes. The series caught its moment and its audience, popularizing Buffyspeak, the Buffyverse (the textual universe of the show), and Buffypeople, who dedicated themselves (...) to promoting and explicating the phenomenon and exemplified the British cultural studies ideal of the active audience, able to both quote and interpret, while citing episode and season. A global popular, by the time the series reached its apocalyptic conclusion in summer 2003, it was widely recognized as one of the most striking cult TV shows of the epoch. (shrink)

After publishing a series of books that many recognize as major works on contemporary education and critical pedagogy, Henry Giroux turned to cultural studies in the late 1980s to enrich education with expanded conceptions of pedagogy and literacy.1 This cultural turn is animated by the hope to reconstruct schooling with critical perspectives that can help us to better understand and transform contemporary culture and society in the contemporary era. Giroux provides cultural studies with a critical pedagogy missing in many versions (...) and a sustained attempt to link critical pedagogy and cultural studies with developing a more democratic culture and citizenry. The result is an intersection of critical pedagogy and cultural studies that enhances both enterprises, providing a much-needed cultural and transformative political dimension to critical pedagogy and a pedagogical dimension to cultural studies. Crucially, Giroux has linked his attempts to transform pedagogy and education with the project of promoting radical democracy. Giroux's earlier work during the 1970s and 1980s focused on educational reform, pedagogy, and the transformation of education to promote radical democracy. In Border Crossings (1992), Giroux notes "a shift in both my politics and my theoretical work" (1). The shift included incorporation of new theoretical discourses of poststructuralism and postmodernism, cultural studies, and the politics of identity and difference embodied in the new discourses of class, gender, race, and sexuality that proliferated in the post- 1960s epoch. Giroux criticized those who ignore "the sea changes in social theory" within the field of education and called for a transformation of education and pedagogy in the light of the new paradigms, discourses, and practices that were circulating by the 1990s. One of the key new discourses and practices that Giroux was henceforth to take up and develop involved the burgeoning discipline of cultural studies.. (shrink)

Paul Lazarsfeld (1942), one of the originators of modern communications studies, distinguished between what he called a "administrative research," that deployed empirical research for the goals of corporate and state institutions, and “critical research,” that he associated with the Frankfurt School. Critical research situates the media within the broader context of social life and interrogates its structure, goals, values, messages, and effects. It develops critical perspectives by which media are evaluated and appraised. Since the 1940s, an impressive variety of critical (...) approaches to the media and television have developed. In this study, I will first present the Frankfurt School as an inaugurator of critical approaches to television studies and will then discuss how a wide range of theorists addressed what later became known as the politics of representation in critical television studies, engaging problematics of class, gender, race, sexuality, and other central components of media representation and social life. Then, I discuss how a postmodern turn in cultural studies contested earlier critical models and provided alternative approaches to television studies. I conclude with some comments that argue for a critical approach to television and media culture and in this text sketch out a comprehensive critical model that embraces production and political economy of television; textual analysis; and investigation of the effects and uses of television by audiences. As this study will indicate, such a multidimensional approach to critical media and television studies is found initially in the Frankfurt School and was developed by many other television theorists in diverse locations and from often conflicting perspectives, ranging from British cultural studies to critical feminism. (shrink)

Since cultural studies has become a global popular in the past two decades, philosophy has been an unthematized and often suppressed dimension of the enterprise. While many trained in philosophy, such as myself, have engaged in the practice of cultural studies, few have reflected on the philosophical dimension and the role of philosophy within the project. The lack of reflection and debate over the function of philosophy within cultural studies and general suppression of such concerns have rendered cultural studies vulnerable (...) to problematic philosophical positions and/or have vitiated the enterprise due to inadequately developed philosophical dimensions. (shrink)

Within the traditions of critical social theory and cultural criticism, there are many models of cultural studies. Both classical and contemporary social theory have engaged the relationships between culture and society, and provided a variety of types of studies of culture. From this perspective, there are neo-Marxian models of cultural studies ranging from the Frankfurt School to Althusserian paradigms; there are neo-Weberian, neo-Durkheimian, poststructuralist, and feminist studies of culture; and there are a wide range of eclectic approaches that apply distinctive (...) social theories to the study of culture. (shrink)

Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide (...) the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media 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 show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed. (shrink)

Social theory today is in crisis. During the 1960s, a variety of new theoretical paradigms emerged which put in question the prevailing quantitative, empiricist, and positivist conceptions of social theory and social research. Growing dissatisfaction with the dominant methodologies and theories produced by the mainstream promoted a search for alternative methodologies and conceptions of social theory and research. The new paradigms of phenomenology, enthnomethodology, structuralism, Marxism, feminism, and other critical theories offered new conceptions which claimed to be more adequate in (...) characterizing contemporary society and in providing inspiration and guidance for transforming it. These theories have caused much ferment in the field of social theory and have inspired heated debates over the nature, methods, and goals of critical social theory. (shrink)

In his major works, Albert Borgmann has explored in depth and detail the role of technology in contemporary life and provided compelling critical, philosophical perspectives. In this study, I primarily discuss Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992) in relation to the themes of his earlier Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984). While appreciating Borgmann's attempt to provide distinctions between modernity and postmodernity as historical epochs, I challenge his analysis of a postmodern divide and sketch out an alternative conception of (...) technology that critically engages some of Borgmann's positions. My argument will be that while technology threatens democracy, community, individual sovereignty, and other values many of us hold in common, it also provides the potential for a positive reconstruction of social life and an enhancement of human life. My provocation will be to deconstruct what I take to be a too sharp distinction in Borgmann's text between a "hyperreal" technosphere contrasted to a "real" world of concrete human interaction and focal activities. I attempt to show that some of Borgmann's own positive values can be realized in the cyberspaces of the new technologies and provide some examples. These reflections will force us to rethink the concepts of the public sphere, democracy, community, and technology. (shrink)

The boundaries of the field of communications have been unclear from the beginnings. Somewhere between the liberal arts/humanities and the social sciences, communications exists in a contested space where advocates of different methods and positions have attempted to define the field and police intruders and trespassers. Despite several decades of attempts to define and institutionalize the field of communications, there seems to be no general agreement concerning its subject-matter, method, or institutional home. In different universities, communications is sometimes placed in (...) humanities departments, sometimes in the social sciences, and generally in schools of communications. But the boundaries of the various departments within schools of communications are drawn differently, with the study of mass-mediated communications and culture{0} sometimes housed in Departments of Communication, Radio/Television/Film, Speech Communication, Theater Arts, or Journalism departments. Many of these departments combine study of mass-mediated communication and culture with courses in production, thus further bifurcating the field between academic study and professional training, between theory and practice. (shrink)

Occasionally literary and philosophical metaphors and images enter the domain of popular discourse and consciousness. Images in Uncle Tom's Cabin of humane and oppressed blacks contrasted (...) class='Hi'>to inhumane slave owners and overseers shaped many people's negative images of slavery. And in nineteenth century Russia, Chernyshevsky's novel What is to be Done? shaped a generation of young Russian's views of oppressive features of their society, including V.I. Lenin who took the question posed by Chernyshevsky's novel as the title of one of his early revolutionary treatises. In the twentieth century, George Orwell's vision of totalitarian society in his novel 1984 has had a major impact on how many people see, understand, and talk about contemporary social trends. {1} Subsequently, Herbert Marcuse's analyses and images of a "onedimensional man" in a "one-dimensional society" shaped many young radicals' ways of seeing and experiencing life in advanced capitalist society during the 1960s and 1970s --though to a more limited extent and within more restricted circles than Orwell's writings which are among the most widely read and discussed works of the century. (shrink)

There's no doubt about it, globalization is the buzzword of the decade. Journalists, politicians, business executives, academics, and others are using the word to signify that something profound is happening, that the world is changing, that a new world economic, political, and cultural order is emerging. Yet the term is used in so many different contexts, by so many different people, for so many different purposes, that it is difficult to ascertain what is at stake in the globalization problematic, what (...) function the term serves, and what effects it has for contemporary theory and politics. (shrink)

Globalization has been one of the most hotly contested phenomena of the past two decades. It has been a primary attractor of books, articles, and heated debate, just as postmodernism was the most fashionable and debated topic of the 1980s. A wide and diverse range of social theorists have argued that today's world is organized by accelerating globalization, which is strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state by transnational corporations and organizations, and (...) eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture. Contemporary theorists from a wide range of political and theoretical positions are converging on the position that globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment, but there are hot debates concerning its nature, effects, and future.2 Moreover, advocates of a postmodern break in history argue that developments in transnational capitalism are producing a new global historical configuration of post- Fordism, or postmodernism as an emergent cultural logic of capitalism (Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991; and Gottdiener 1995). Others define the emergent global economy and culture as a "network society" grounded in new communications and information technology (Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998). For its defenders, globalization marks the triumph of capitalism and its market economy (see apologists such as Fukuyama 1992 and Friedman 1999 who perceive this process as positive), while its critics portray globalization as negative (see, for example, Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Eisenstein 1998; and Robins and Webster 1999). Some theorists see the emergence of a new transnational ruling elite and the universalization of consumerism (Sklair 2001), while others stress global fragmentation of “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996). Driving “post” discourses into novel realms of theory and politics, Hardt and Negri (2000) present the emergence of “Empire” as producing evolving forms of sovereignty, economy, culture, and political struggle that unleash an unforeseeable and unpredictable flow of novelties, surprises, and upheavals. Discourses of globalization initially were polarized into pro or con celebrations or attacks.. (shrink)

Critical intellectuals were traditionally those who utilized their skills of speaking and writing to denounce injustices and abuses of power, and to fight for truth, justice, progress, and other positive values. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre (1974: 285), "the duty of the intellectual is to denounce injustice wherever it occurs." The modern critical intellectual's field of action was what Habermas (1989) called the public sphere of democratic debate, political dialogue, and the writing and discussion of newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and (...) books. Of course, not all intellectuals were critical or by any means progressive. With the rise of modern societies, there was a division between physical and mental labor, and intellectuals became those who specialized in mental labor, producing and distributing ideas and culture, with some opposing and some legitimating the established forms of society. (shrink)

During the past decades, the culture industries have multiplied media spectacles in novel spaces and sites, and spectacle itself is becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and everyday life. An Internet-based economy has been developing hi-tech spectacle as a means of promotion, reproduction, and the circulation and selling of commodities, using multimedia and increasingly sophisticated technology to dazzle consumers. M edia culture proliferates ever more technologically sophisticated spectacles to seize audiences and augment their power and (...) profit. The forms of entertainment permeate news and information, and a tablodized infotainment culture is more and more popular. New multimedia that synthesize forms of radio, film, TV news and entertainment, and the mushrooming domain of cyberspace, become spectacles of technoculture, generating expanding sites of information and entertainment, while intensifying the spectacle-form of media culture. Political and social life is also shaped more and more by media spectacle. Social and political conflicts are increasingly played out on the screens of media culture, which display spectacles like sensational murder cases, terrorist bombings, celebrity and political sex scandals, and the explosive violence of everyday life. M edia culture not only takes up expanding moments of contemporary experience, but also provides ever more material for fantasy, dreaming, modeling thought and behavior, and constructing identities. Of course, there have been spectacles since premodern times. Classical Greece had its Olympics, thespian and poetry festivals, its public rhetorical battles, and bloody and violent wars. Ancient Rome had its public offerings of bread and circuses, its orgies, its titanic political battles, and the spectacle of Empire with parades and monuments for triumphant Caesars and their armies, extravaganzas put on display in the 2000 film Gladiator.. (shrink)

The 2000 U.S. presidential election was one of the most bizarre and fateful in American history. Described in books as a “deadlock,” “thriller,” “the perfect tie,” and even “Grand Theft 2000,” studies of the election have dissected its anomalies and scandals and have attempted to describe and explain what actually happened.1 In this study, I will analyze how the turn toward media politics and spectacle in U.S. political campaigns and the curious and arguably archaic system of proportional voting in the (...) U.S. tilted the campaign toward George W. Bush and were prejudicial to the election of Al Gore. Gore received over 540,000 votes more than Bush, but because of the U.S. system of proportional voting won less electoral votes and lost the crucial state of Florida. In this chapter, I will argue that media representation of the two candidates and the anomalies of the U.S. system of proportional representation in an arguably archaic Election College were major factors in the highly controversial ascent to the presidency of George W. Bush. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court decision directly decided the election results and the story of Election 2000 is highly complex and contested. Yet focus on the media in the election and problems with the system of proportional representation provide revealing lenses on the events of the 2000 election and call attention to major problems in the U.S. system of representational democracy. (shrink)

The developing countries are currently undergoing a perhaps unprecedented technological revolution that has given new credence and life to the concept of alienation after a period of relative decline in which M arxian, existentialist, and other modern discourses were replaced with postmodern perspectives skeptical or critical of the concept of alienation. In this paper, I want to suggest that emergent information and communication technologies and the restructuring of global capitalism require us to rethink the problematics of technology and alienation. If (...) it is true that we are undergoing a Great Transformation, one of the epochal shifts within the history of capitalism, that the new technologies are taking us into a novel field of cultural experience and that the very nature of human identity and social relations are changing, then obviously we need to develop fresh theories to analyze these changes and politics to respond to them.2 For many, the changes underway on a global scale are as thorough-going and dramatic as the shift from the stage of market and competitive and laissez-faire capitalism theorized by M arx to the stage of state monopoly capitalism critically analyzed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.3 Theorizing this ongoing and epic transformation requires critical social theory to engage anew the relations between the economy, state, culture industry, science and technology, social institutions and everyday life as radically as the Frankfurt School revised classical M arxism in the 1930s. In this context, talking about technology and alienation is not just an academic affair, the latest twist in the discourse of alienation or of technology, but rather concerns the fate of the human being in the contemporary world and thus requires serious reflection and discussion whether the changes in society, culture, and human existence are or are not beneficial, and what we can do to promote a positive outcome and prevent a harmful one.. (shrink)

The current explosion of new technologies and furious debates over their substance, trajectory, and effects poses two major challenges to critical social theory and a radical democratic politics: first, how to theorize the dramatic changes in every aspect of life that the new technologies are producing; and, secondly, how to utilize the new technologies to promote progressive social change to create a more egalitarian and democratic society in an era marked by rampant technological development and the seeming victory of market (...) capitalism over its historical opponents. (shrink)

While Nietzsche is notorious for seeing philosophy as a mode of autobiographical confession, other philosophers, such as Habermas, see philosophy as a discipline of rigorous argumentation and theory construction that constitutes a form of discourse to be sharply separated from literature and narrative. As with philosophical antinomies, these one-sided positions need to be overcome and we should see philosophy both as a commentary on the times framed by one’s social positionality and life-experiences, and a discursive practice that attempts to produce (...) more general theoretical arguments and knowledge. Yet it is extremely difficult, I have found, to reflect on how one’s life and times have influenced one’s own theoretical work and I fear that the following reflections are more of a narrative construct than “scientific” commentary. Yet since such binary oppositions are ripe for deconstruction, I will gamely attempt to describe my philosophical adventures and speculate on what might have influenced my theoretical and political itinerary. (shrink)

In an age of spectacle politics, presidencies are staged and presented to the public in cinematic terms, using media spectacle to sell the policies, person, and image of the president to vast and diverse publics. The media are complicit, reducing politics to image, spectacle, and story in forms ranging from daily news to synoptic or topical documentaries to fictional films that narrativize especially dramatic events or entire presidential dynasties. Consequently, publics come to see presidencies and politics of the day as (...) narrative and spectacle in an era when entertainment and information inexorably merge, and politics and everyday life are modeled on media forms, with entertainment becoming a dominant mode of media culture and a potent and seductive factor in shaping everyday life. (shrink)

Bush administration foreign policy has exhibited a marked unilateralism and militarism in which US military power is used to advance US interests and geopolitical hegemony. The policy was first evident in the Afghanistan intervention following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and informed the 2003 war against Iraq. In From 9/11 to Terror War (Kellner 2003) I sketched out the genesis and origins of Bush administration foreign policy and its application in Afghanistan and the build-up to the Iraq war. In (...) this study, I will update and develop my critique of the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes and its application in the 2003 Iraq invasion, concluding with a critique of unilateralism and militarism, and defense of multilateral and global solutions to problems such as terrorism, so-called “weapons of mass destruction,” and “rogue regimes.”. (shrink)

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan emerged as a guru of the emergent electronic media culture. His book Understanding Media (1964) was celebrated as providing key insights into the role of the media in contemporary society and McLuhan became one of the most discussed and debated theorists of the time. During the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard was promoted in certain circles as the new McLuhan, as the most advanced theorist of the media and society in the so-called postmodern era. His analysis of (...) a new, postmodern society rests on a key assumption that the media, simulations, and what he calls "cyberblitz" constitute a new realm of experience and a new stage of history and type of society. Both McLuhan and Baudrillard provide provocative theses on the role of the media and new technology in constituting the contemporary world. They provide important and influential models of the media as all-powerful and autonomous social forces that produce a wide range of effects. In this study, I first explicate McLuhan’s media theory and how it can be deployed to produce analyses of modernity and postmodernity that connect McLuhan’s work with Baudrillard. I then explore how McLuhan’s media theory shaped Baudrillard’s theory and the similarities and differences in their work. I lay out what I consider the important contributions of their work, but am also concerned to delineate the political implications of their media theory and to point to alternative theoretical and political perspectives on the media and the contemporary moment. (shrink)

The September 11 attacks on the U.S. dramatized the relationship between media spectacles of terror and the strategy of Islamic Jihadism that employs spectacular media events to promote its agenda. But U.S. administrations have also used spectacles of terror to promote U.S. military power and geopolitical ends, as is evident in the Gulf war of 1990-1991, the Afghanistan war of fall 2001, and the Iraq war of 2003. In this paper I argue that both Islamic Jihadists and two Bush administrations (...) have deployed spectacles of terror to promote their political agendas; that both deploy Manichean discourses of good and evil which themselves fit into dominant media codes of popular culture; and that both deploy fundamentalist and absolutist discourses. Criticizing the role of the U.S. broadcasting media in presenting the September 11 terror spectacle and subsequent Bush Terror War, I argue against both Islamic terrorism and U.S. militarism, and call for multilateral and global responses to terrorism and rogue regimes. I also argue that the Internet is the best source of information concerning complex events like Terror War, while mainstream U.S. corporate media, especially broadcasting, have become instruments of propaganda for the Bush administration and Pentagon during spectacles of terrorism and war. Finally, I suggest limitations of the politics of the spectacle and argue that the record of the spectacles of Terror War in recent years disclose highly ambiguous, unpredictable, and negative political effects. (shrink)

While T.W. Adorno is a lively figure on the contemporary cultural scene, his thought in many ways cuts across the grain of emerging postmodern orthodoxies. Although Adorno anticipated many post-structuralist critiques of the subject, philosophy, and intellectual practice, his work clashes with the postmodern celebration of media culture, attacks on modernism as obsolete and elitist, and the more affirmative attitude toward contemporary culture and society found in many, but not all, postmodern circles. Adorno is thus a highly contradictory figure in (...) the present constellation, anticipating some advanced tendencies of contemporary thought, while standing firming against other regnant intellectual attitudes and positions. (shrink)

It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form. To be sure, the spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressing motion.... the spirit that educates itself matures slowly and quietly toward (...) the new form, dissolving one particle of the edifice of its previous world after the other,.... This gradual crumbling... is interrupted by the break of day that, like lightning, all at once reveals the edifice of the new world. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807.. (shrink)

All the utopian talk of information superhighways and the great media societies of the future helps to mask the fact that contemporary capitalist societies are in a situation of seemingly permanent crisis with increased human suffering due to deteriorating social conditions. In the United States, more than 34 million people live below the poverty level; over 3 million are homeless; over ten million are out of work; and millions lack basic health insurance and guaranteed medical care (Hoffman 1987).

In this study, I demonstrate the consequences of the triumph of neoliberalism and media deregulation for democracy. I argue that the tremendous concentration of power in the hands of corporate groups who control powerful media conglomerates has intensified a crisis of democracy in the United States and elsewhere. Providing case studies of how mainstream media in the United States have become tools of conservative and corporate interests since the 1980s, I discuss how the corporate media helped forge a conservative hegemony, (...) failed to address key social problems, and promoted the candidacy of George W. Bush in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Key Words. (shrink)

George Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society has generated an unprecedented number of sales and scholarly interest, as demonstrated by highly impressive sales figures, new editions of the book, and the growing critical literature dedicated to the phenomenon of which this book is a part (see also Alfino, Caputo and Wynard 1998 and Kincheloe and Shelton, forthcoming). Ritzer's popularization of Max Weber's theory of rationalization and its application to a study of the processes of McDonaldization presents a concrete example of applied (...) social analysis which clarifies important developments in the present moment, calling attention to their costs and benefits, their positive and negative sides. The wide-spread reception -- and the controversy it has evoked -- suggests that Ritzer has touched upon some vital nerve centers of the contemporary era which I suggest have to do with discontents over modernity and ambivalent attitudes toward the rapid transformation of the present for which the term "postmodernity" has been coined. (shrink)

In this study, I chart the genealogy and development of new trends in high-tech warfare which have emerged in the past decade and note challenges and dangers. I discuss the Bush administrations’s military program and foreign policy moves, highlighting the ways that the Bush II cabal intensifies the dangers of high-tech war, while undermining efforts at collective security, environmental protection, and global peace. My argument is that the volatile mixture of a highly regressive and unilateralist and militarist administration with the (...) development of high-tech weapons provides a clear and present danger of a protracted and frightening period of war. The mixture of rightwing unilateralism and militarism dramatically erupted in the Bush administration’s military response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 and is intensifying the dangers to world peace in the Bush military campaign against terrorism which they are labeling “World War III.”. (shrink)

The 1991 war against Iraq was one of the first televised events of the global village in which the entire world watched a military spectacle unfold via global TV satellite networks.1 In retrospect, the Bush administration and the Pentagon carried out one of the most successful public relations campaigns in the history of modern politics in its use of the media to mobilize support for the war. The mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere tended to be a compliant (...) vehicle for the government strategy to manipulate the public, imperiling democracy which requires informed citizens, checks and balances against excessive government power, and a free and vigorous critical media (see Kellner 1990 and 1992). Indeed, if the media do not adequately inform citizens, provide a check against excessive government power and corruption, and adequately debate the key issues of the day, democracy is undermined. M oreover, the U.S. media, especially CNN, completely dominated global coverage of the event. CNN had cameras and reporters in Baghdad throughout the war, a large crew in Israel, and live coverage of all U.S. military and government press conferences. Thus its images, discourses, and material tended to shape global coverage of the event. This meant that the Bush administration and Pentagon was able to control the flow of images and discourses and thus to manage the TV spectacle of the Gulf War.2 In this chapter, I first discuss the production of the text of the "crisis in the Gulf" and then "the Gulf war." This will involve analysis of disinformation and propaganda campaigns by the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and their allies, as well as dissection of the constraints produced by the so-called pool system. I also indicate how the political economy of the media in the United States facilitated the manufacturing of consent for U.S. government policies. Then I analyze the meanings embedded in the text of the war against Iraq and the reception of the text/event by the audience.. (shrink)

Momentous historical events, like the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent Terror War, test social theories and provide a challenge to give a convincing account of the event and its consequences. In the following analyses, I want first to suggest how certain dominant social theories were put in question during the momentous and world-shaking events of September 11, and offer an analysis of the historical background necessary to understand and contextualize the terror attacks. I take up the claim that (...) “everything has changed” in the wake of September 11 and attempt to indicate both changes and continuities to avoid one-sided exaggerations and ideological simplicities. I argue that the terror attacks show contradictions in the nature of globalization and new technology that requires dialectical analysis of these phenomena. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of September 11 and the subsequent Afghanistan Terror War and 2003 war against Iraq for critical social theory and democratic politics, envisaging a new global movement against terrorism and militarism and for democracy, peace, environmentalism, and social justice. (shrink)

Michael Jordan is widely acclaimed as the greatest athlete who ever lived. The announcement of his retirement in January 1999 unleashed an unparalleled hyperbole of adjectives describing his superlative athletic accomplishments. Yet his continuing media presence and adulation after his retirement confirmed that Jordan is one of the most popular and widely known sports icons throughout the world. In China, the Beijing Morning Post ran a front paged article titled "Flying Man Jordan is Coming Back to Earth" (...) and in Bosnia Jordan's statement declaring his retirement was the lead story on the evening television news, pushing aside the war in Kosovo.[1] An icon of the global popular, Jordan is "a kind of new world prince," in the words of Pulitzer Prizewinning author David Halberstam, who recently published a biography of the basketball legend (1999): "You hear time and again about people being in Borneo or somewhere and coming across a kid in a tattered Michael Jordan T-shirt. He's the most famous American in the world.". (shrink)

Paul Virilio is one of the most prolific and penetrating critics of the drama of technology in the contemporary era, especially military technology, technologies of representation, and new computer and information technologies. For Virilio, the question of technology is the question of our time and his life-work constitutes a sustained reflection on the origins, nature, and effects of the key technologies that have constituted the modern/postmodern world. In particular, Virilio carries out a radical critique of the ways that technology is (...) transforming the contemporary world and even the human species. (shrink)

In theorizing the postmodern, one inevitably encounters the postmodern assault on theory, such as Lyotard's and Foucault's attack on modern theory for its alleged totalizing and essentializing character. The argument is ironic, of course, since it falsely homogenizes a heterogeneous "modern tradition" and since postmodern theorists like Foucault and Baudrillard are often as totalizing as any modern thinker (Kellner 1989 and Best 1995). But where Lyotard seeks justification of theory within localized language games, arguing that no universal criteria are possible (...) to ground objective truths or universal values, Foucault steadfastly resists any efforts, local or otherwise, to validate normative concepts and theoretical perspectives. For Foucault, justification ensnares one in metaphysical illusions like "truth" and the only concern of the philosopher-critic is to dismantle old ways of thinking, to attack existing traditions and institutions, and to open up new horizons of experience for greater individual freedom. What matters, then, is results, and if actions bring greater freedom, the theoretical perspectives informing them are "justified." From this perspective, theoretical discourse is seen not so much as "correct" or true," but as "efficacious," as producing positive effects. (shrink)

Moreover, presidential politics -- on the level of campaigns and governing -- have also exhibited a growing politics of image and spectacle. In our media-saturated society, politicians become celebrities who fine-tune their image through daily photo ops, spin out their message of the day and, like celebrities, employ image management firms to make sure their performance is playing well with the public.

In the current ongoing Terror War, both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden deploy certain similar figures of speech, fusing their metaphysical and political discourses while reserving the demonology. In his speech to Congress on September 20, 2001 declaring his war against terrorism, Bush described the conflict as a war between freedom and fear. The coming Terror War was, he explained, a conflict between “those governed by fear” who “want to destroy our wealth and freedoms,” and those on the (...) side of freedom. Bush insisted that “you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” and laid down a series of non-negotiable demands to the Taliban while Congress wildly applauded. Bush’s popularity soared with a country craving blood-revenge and the head of Osama bin Laden. Moreover, proclaiming what his administration and commentators would describe as “the Bush doctrine,” Bush also asserted that his administration held accountable those nations who supported terrorism –- a position that could nurture and legitimate military interventions for years to come. (shrink)

During the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard has been promoted in certain circles as the new McLuhan, as the most advanced theorist of the media and society in the so-called postmodern era.[1] His theory of a new, postmodern society rests on a key assumption that the media, simulations, and what he calls "cyberblitz" constitute a new realm of experience and a new stage of history and type of society. To a large extent, Baudrillard's work consists in rethinking radical social theory and politics (...) in the light of developments of the consumer, media, information, and technological society. Baudrillard's earlier works focus on the construction of the consumer society and how it provides a new world of values, meaning, and activity, and thus inhabit the terrain of Marxism and political economy. From the mid-1970s on, however, reflections on political economy and the consumer society disappear almost completely from his texts, and henceforth simulations and simulacra, media and information, science and new technologies, and implosion and hyperreality become the constituents of a new postmodern world which -- in his theorizing -- obliterate all the boundaries, categories, and values of the previous forms of industrial society while establishing new forms of social organization, thought, and experience. (shrink)

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent Terror War, Jean Baudrillard has written a series of reflections on the contemporary moment that have evoked the excitement and controversy of his earlier work. For many years, Baudrillard had complained that the contemporary era has been one of “weak events,” that the energies of history seemed to be depleted, and that politics has become increasingly banal and boring. He claimed in an essay "Anorexic Ruins," published in 1989, that the Berlin wall was (...) a sign of a frozen history, of an anorexic history, in which nothing more can happen, marked by a "lack of events" and the end of history, taking the Berlin wall as a sign of a stasis between communism and capitalism. Likewise, at one time, Baudrillard read the New York Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as symbols of the stasis of global capitalism and a frozen history in which the two superpowers develop a system of binary regulation. (shrink)

Brecht's relationship to Marxism is extremely important and highly complex. From the 1920s until his death in 1956, Brecht identified himself as a Marxist; when he returned to Germany after World War II, he chose the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where his actress wife Helene Weigel and he formed their own theater troupe, the famed Berliner Ensemble, and were eventually given a state theater to run. Yet Brecht's relationship to orthodox Marxist officials and doctrine was often conflictual, and his own (...) work and life were highly idiosyncratic. Of a strongly anti-bourgeois disposition from his youth, the young Brecht was also initially repelled by Bolshevism. He experienced the German revolution of 1918 with some ambivalence and dedicated himself to literary and not political activity during the turbulent early years of the Weimar republic. He recorded in his Diaries, for example, a negative response to a talk he heard on 1920 on the Soviet Union in which he was repelled by the concept of socialist order he heard discussed. He indicated a negative impression of Bolshevism and conclude his entry by noting that he rather have a new car than socialism! (shrink)

The movement of cultural studies that has been a global phenomenon of great importance over the last decade was inaugurated by the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1963/64 led at the time by Richard Hoggart (1958) and Stuart Hall. During this period, the Centre developed a variety of critical approaches for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts. Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and movements of the 1960s and the (...) 1970s, the Birmingham group came to focus on the interplay of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. They were among the first to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular cultural forms on audiences. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture in varied and different ways and contexts, analyzing the factors that made audiences respond in contrasting ways to media texts. (shrink)

Computers and new information technologies have greatly increased the power of surveillance by government and large corporate entities. The state is a repository of a growing array of data bases that provide it with information on its citizens. Corporations also now possess increasing power to accumulate information on potential consumers. This power to collect information is significant and can be instrumental in securing loans, insurance, and credit; increases the power of law enforcement agencies; makes possible surveillance of workers and the (...) workplace by managers; and provides information on consumer habits and preferences that can be useful to the marketing and promotion of consumer goods. The intensifying computerization of information raises important questions concerning privacy and individual rights in the current information revolution, such as: who collects what kind of information, what is done with this information, and what rights do individuals have concerning privacy and the circulation of information about them? (shrink)

In the humanities, the term critical theory has had many meanings in different historical contexts. From the end of World War II through the 1960s, the term signified the use of critical and theoretical approaches within major disciplines of the humanities such as art history, literary studies, and more broadly, cultural studies. From the 1970s, the term entered into the rapidly evolving area of film and media studies. Critical theory took on at the same time a more specialized sense describing (...) the work of the Frankfurt School that itself rapidly spread through many disciplines of the humanities and social sciences in the English-speaking world from the 1970s on. (shrink)

In a 1986 article, "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Fredric Jameson concludes his study by contrasting the "situational consciousness" of first and third worlds in terms of Hegel's master/slave dialectic. On Hegel's theory, the slave "whats what reality and the resistance of matter really are" while the master "is condemned to idealism. Elaborating on this analysis, Jameson writes: "It strikes me that we Americans, we masters of the world, are in something of that very same position. (...) The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities ... This placeless individuality, this structural idealism which affords us the luxury of the Sartrean blink, offers a welcome escape from the 'nightmare of history,' but at the same time it condemns our culture to psychologism and the 'projections' of private subjectivity. all of this is denied to third world culture, which must be situational and materialist" (Jameson 1986, p. 85). This passage strikes me as providing a useful opening to discuss the relationship between modern Western philosophy and the new Philosophy of Liberation which has emerged above all from Latin America. One of the insights of the Philosophy of Liberation is that Western Philosophy is the philosophy of the center, of the metropoles, of white European males. Its concepts, problems, and problematics are identified with philosophy itself and other perspectives, other positions, are condemned to the margins (Dussel, pp. ). On this view, Western Philosophy is the philosophy of the masters of the world, of the dominant countries, cultures, and class. Is the Philosophy of Liberation, then, -- pursuing Hegel's master-slave metaphor --the philosophy of slaves, of the dominated, of the oppressed and if so what particular insights does this perspective reveal that is lost to western philosophy.. (shrink)

The critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School continues to excite interest and controversy. The critical theorists have deeply influenced contemporary social theory, philosophy, communications theory and research, cultural theory, and other disciplines for six decades. The dream of a interdisciplinary social theory continues to animate the sociological imagination. In recent decades there have been many different attempts to articulate the connections between the economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions of contemporary society in the spirit of critical theory.

The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves conflicts between modern and postmodern politics. In this essay, we articulate the differences between modern and postmodern politics and argue against one-sided positions which dogmatically reject one tradition or the other in favor of partisanship for either the modern or the postmodern. Arguing for a politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served by drawing on the most progressive elements of both the (...) modern and postmodern traditions. Developing a new politics involves overcoming the limitations of certain versions of modern politics and postmodern identity politics in order to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the coming millennium. (shrink)

The unfolding of the panorama of images of US prisoner abuse of Iraqis and the quest to pin responsibility on the soldiers and higher US military and political authorities is one of the most intense media spectacles of contemporary journalism. Evoking universal disgust and repugnance, the images of young American soldiers humiliating Iraqis circulated with satellite-driven speed through broadcasting channels, the Internet, and print media and may stand as some of the most influential images of all time.

Forced to flee from Nazi Germany in 1933, Fromm settled in the United States and lectured at the New School of Social Research, Columbia, Yale, and Bennington. In the late 1930s, Fromm broke with the Institute of Social Research and with Escape from Freedom began publishing a series of books which would win him a large audience. Escape From Freedom argued that alienation from soil and community in the transition from feudalism to capitalism increased insecurity and fear. Documenting some of (...) the strains and crises of individualism, Fromm attempted to explain how alienated individuals would seek gratification and security from social orders such as fascism. (shrink)

The Frankfurt School had a highly ambivalent relation to Judaism. On one hand, they were part of that Enlightenment tradition that opposed authority, tradition, and all institutions of the past -- including religion. They were also, for the most part, secular Jews who did not support any organized religion, or practice religious or cultural Judaism. In this sense, they were in the tradition of Heine, Marx, and Freud for whom Judaism was neither a constitutive feature of their life or work, (...) nor a significant aspect of their self-image and identity. (shrink)

Ernst Friedrich's War Against War is an important document in the struggle against the barbarism of modern warfare. Outraged by the unprecedented brutality and massive destruction of the First World War, Friedrich sought out and then published this collection of pictures and other visual artifacts which illustrate not only the human suffering and death produced in the war but also the lies and hypocrisy of the political and economic forces which promoted it. Aiming at an international audience, Friedrich had the (...) book's introduction written in four languages-- German, Dutch, English and French--and accompanied his collection of images with captions in these languages.{1} It was the first extensive published collection of photographic images of the atrocities of World War I, and thus brought the public face to face with a powerful panorama of the horrors of war through the media of photography and other mass images. Friedrich hoped that when they actually saw the reality of modern warfare, people everywhere would become more critical of war, the military, and militarism. (shrink)

Frederick Engels and Karl Marx were among the first to develop systematic perspectives on modern societies and to produce a critical discourse on modernity, thus inaugurating the problematic of modern social theory. In most of the narratives of classical social theory, Marx alone is usually cited as one of the major founders of the problematic, while Engels is neglected. It is Marx who is usually credited as one of the first to develop a theory of modernity and a critical social (...) theory that links the rise of modern societies with the emergence of capitalism. Yet Engels preceded Marx in focusing attention on the differences between modern and premodern society, and then on the constitutive role of capitalism in producing a new modern world. As I show in this study, from the late 1830s into the 1840s, Engels played a leading role in theorizing the distinctive features of the modern world, and he inspired Marx to see the importance of capitalism in constructing a distinctively new modern society. Consequently, I argue that Engels preceded Marx in his analysis of the historical originality and novelty of modern societies and their rupture from traditional societies. Study of the work of the early Engels and the beginning of his collaboration with Marx thus provides fresh perspectives on their relationship and the role of Engels in creating their shared theoretical and political positions. This analysis will also suggest that the critical theory of modern societies and political economy of capitalism remains a major contribution of Marx and Engels to contemporary thought. (shrink)

The Public Broadcasting System’s series Frontline has served as one of the major documentary and public affairs program on American television since its debut in 1983. Emerging at a time when the U.S. television networks were dramatically cutting back on documentary and public affair’s television, producer David Fanning and his team have produced a series of award-winning programs on issues ranging from programs on the Gulf War, Afghanistan war, and Iraq to producer Ofra Bikel's investigation of the Little Rascals sexual (...) abuse case to Martin Smith and Lowell Bergman's chronicle of America's drug wars. (shrink)

Baudrillard, Jean (1929) was born in the cathedral town of Reims, France. His grandparents were peasants, his parents became civil servants, and he was the first member of his family to pursue an advanced education. In 1956, he began working as a professor of secondary education in a French high school (Lyceé) and in the early 1960s did editorial work for the French publisher Seuil. Trained as a Germanist, Baudrillard translated Germany literary works including Brecht and Peter Weiss, although he (...) turned to the study of sociology and for some decades was a sociology professor at Nanterre. (shrink)

Fredric Jameson is generally considered to be one of the foremost contemporary Englishlanguage Marxist literary and cultural critics. Over the past three decades, he has published a wide range of works analyzing literary and cultural texts, while developing his own neo-Marxist theoretical perspectives. In addition, Jameson produced many important critiques of opposing theoretical schools and positions. A prolific writer, he has assimilated an astonishing number of theoretical discourses into his project, while intervening in many contemporary debates and analyzing a diversity (...) of cultural texts, ranging from the novel to video, and from fairy tales to postmodernism. (shrink)

The Frankfurt School refers to the work of members of the Institut für Sozialforschung, which was established in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923 as the first Marxist-oriented research centre affiliated with a major German university. Under its director, Carl Grunberg, the institute’s work in the 1920s tended to be empirical, historical and oriented towards problems of the European workingclass movement, although theoretical works by Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács and others were also published in its journal, Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus (...) und der Arbeiterbewegung. (shrink)

John Hartley opens his short history of cultural studies by evoking a sense of the contested nature of the field in the contemporary moment and the intense debates about its objects, scope, methods, and goals: “Even within intellectual communities and academic institutions, there is little agreement about what counts as cultural studies, either as a critical practice or an institutional apparatus. On the contrary, the field is riven by fundamental disagreements about what cultural studies is for, in whose interests it (...) is done, what theories, methods and objects of study are proper to it, and where to set its limits” (1). (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas has been the most prolific and influential representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School. He has not only continued the theoretical tradition of his teachers Adorno and Horkheimer and his friend Marcuse, but also significantly departed from classical critical theory and made many important contributions to contemporary philosophy and social theory. In particular, he has opened critical theory to a dialogue with other philosophies and social theories such as the hermeneutics of Gadamer, systems theory and structural (...) functionalism, empirical social sciences, analytic and linguistic philosophy, and theories of cognitive and moral development. He has been synthesizing these influences into a theory of communicative action, which presents the foundation and framework of a social theory that builds on the tradition of Marx, Weber and classical critical theory, but also criticizes his predecessors and breaks new theoretical ground. (shrink)

"Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we draw by pain and effort out of the heart of life, that we disentangle and make clear. Other men serve it, I know, in art, in literature, in social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a hundred names... I do not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme.".

French theorist Jean Baudrillard is one of the foremost contemporary critics of society and culture who is often seen as the guru of French postmodern theory. A prolific author who has written over twenty books, reflections on art and aesthetics are an important, if not central, aspect of his work. Although his writings exhibit many twists, turns, and surprising developments as he moved from synthesizing Marxism and semiotics to a prototypical postmodern theory, interest in art remains a constant of his (...) theoretical investigations and literary experiments. (shrink)

Conservatives have traditionally defended values of truth and integrity while attacking dishonesty and lying. During the Clinton administration, conservative defenders of the value of truth like William Bennett, constantly attacked Bill Clinton for lying and dishonesty. Yet few, if any, conservatives have spoken up to criticize the Bush administration for its systematic policy of deception and lying.

Media and computer technologies are creating dramatic changes that are producing an explosion of rhetoric and hype touting the benefits of the new information superhighway where individuals will supposedly get data and entertainment on demand, hook up into new virtual communities, and even create new identities. Such ideological hyperbole has accompanied the introduction of all new technologies, but this time the structures of contemporary capitalist economies, politics, society, culture, and everyday life are dramatically changing, requiring radical social theory to rethink (...) its assumptions, models of society, and politics. In this article, I wish to argue that if Marxism is to have a future it must theorize the new media and computer technologies and revise its analyses of contemporary capitalist societies and socialist politics accordingly. I will also argue that the Marxian theory provides powerful perspectives to make sense of the momentous changes currently transforming every dimension of social reality, but that it needs to be reconstructed and updated as well. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse's late 1970s essay "Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society," written shortly before his death in 1979 and published here for the first time, articulates his vision of liberation and sense of the importance of ecology for the radical project. The essay argues that genuine ecology requires a transformation of human nature, as well as the preservation and protection of external nature from capitalist and state communist pollution and destruction. Rooting his vision of human liberation in the Frankfurt (...) School notion of the embeddedness of human beings in nature, Marcuse believed that until aggression and violence within human beings was diminished, there would necessarily be continued destruction of nature, as well as violence against other human beings. Consequently, Marcuse stressed the importance of radical psychology and transforming inner nature, both to preserve external nature and to diminish violence in society. (shrink)

There is nothing I want more than to become enlightened about the whole highly complicated system of antagonisms that constitute the 'modern world' (Nietzsche).

Sergi Eisenstein's Potemkin provides a powerful example of how a film can present a revolutionary and socialist political perspective and ideology. A thoroughly modernist film, Potemkin is highly innovative in form and is often taken as a model of editing; it has regularly appeared on many lists of the greatest films of all time and since its release in 1925 has been a major critical success. Formally, the film embodies Eisenstein’s theory of montage, that the juxtaposition of images can generate (...) meanings and on the level of ideology, the film serves as effective propaganda for the Bolsheviks. (shrink)

Public access television has been one of the most interesting and controversial developments in the intersection between media and democracy within the past several decades. Beginning in the 1970s, cable systems began to offer access channels to the public, so that groups and individuals could make programs for other individuals in their own communities. Access systems began to proliferate and access programming has been cablecast regularly in such places as New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Madison, Urbana, Austin, and (...) perhaps as many as 4,000 other towns or regions (Linder.. (shrink)

The translation of Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle finally provides an English-speaking audience with access to one of the most influential texts in the French Nietzsche tradition. First published in France in 1969, Klossowski's text consummated over three decades of intense work and discussion on Nietzsche's most enigmatic and original ideas. Working with Bataille and the famous College de Sociologie, Klossowski published a series of important studies of Nietzsche culminating in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which Foucault described (...) in a letter to Klossowski as "the greatest book of philosophy I have read" in addition to Nietzsche himself. Deeply influencing Deleuze, Lyotard, and other major Nietzscheans, Klossowski's work remains a seminal text of the contemporary French reading of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Albert Borgmann's new book Holding onto Reality. The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (1999) continues the interrogation of the epochal significance of new information technology he began in Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992). For Borgmann, the postmodern divide involves, among other things, a shift from involvement with "focal" things and practices (i.e. activities such as eating, gardening, running, and the like), to immersion in media fantasies, or the thrills of cyberspace and virtual reality. Borgmann continues his (...) defense of "reality" against the champions of the hyper or virtual realities of cyberspace and new technologies, focusing on the concept of information and its vicissitudes under the impact of new computer and information technology. (shrink)

Andrew Feenberg's Questioning Technology (1999) is his third book in a series of studies which undertake to provide critical theoretical and democratic political perspectives to engage technology in the contemporary era. In Critical Theory of Technology (1991), Feenberg draws on neo-Marxian and other critical theories of technology, especially the Frankfurt School, to criticize determinist and essentialist theories. In this ground-breaking work (which will go into its second edition in 2001), he discusses both how the labor process, science, and technology are (...) constituted as forms of domination of nature and human beings, and how they could be democratically transformed as part of a program of radical social transformation. In Alternative Modernity (1995), Feenberg turns to focus on constructivist theories and the ways in which individuals and groups can reconstruct technology to make it serve more humane and democratic goals. His most recent book draws on his earlier work while polemically developing his own positions within contemporary debates over technology. (shrink)

During the Gulf war, CNN correspondent Peter Arnett distinguished himself with its courageous reporting in Iraq while under fire by the U.S.-led coalition which dropped more bombs on Iraq than were unleashed in World War II. Reporting live from Baghdad throughout the war, Arnett provided vivid daily accounts of life in Iraq during one of the most sustained air attacks in history. From his live telephone reporting of the early hours of the U.S. attack on Iraq in January 1991 through (...) his live satellite reports of the effects of the daily bombing of Iraq, Arnett distinguished himself through his attempts to cut through the lies and disinformation of both sides and to provide accurate reporting on the effects of the U.S.-led coalition assault against Iraq. (shrink)

Walter Adamson begins his study of Marx and contemporary neo-Marxism with a rehearsal Marxism's oft-cited problems: oppressive regimes which rule in the name of Marxism, the lack of a fully-developed Marxist morality, inaccurate descriptions of contemporary capitalism, and problems in the relation between the Marxian theories of history and society and visions of socialism. Fortunately, Adamson does not simply engage in another tedious demolition job or ideological denunciation of the god that failed in the manner of the French 'new philosophers' (...) and 'post-structuralists' or one-time American New Leftists like Isaac Balbus. Instead Adamson quickly asserts Sartre's position that '"there is no going beyond" a philosophy "so long as man has not gone beyond the historical moment" it expresses' (2) and that, as of yet, we have neither transcended this historical moment nor has a superior philosophy or political ideology appeared. (shrink)

In theorizing the postmodern, one inevitably encounters the postmodern assault on theory, such as Lyotard's and Foucault's attack on modern theory for its alleged totalizing and essentializing character. The argument is ironic, of course, since it falsely homogenizes a heterogeneous "modern tradition" and since postmodern theorists like Foucault and Baudrillard are often as totalizing as any modern thinker (Kellner 1989 and Best 1995). But where Lyotard seeks justification of theory within localized language games, arguing that no universal criteria are possible (...) to ground objective truths or universal values, Foucault steadfastly resists any efforts, local or otherwise, to validate normative concepts and theoretical perspectives. For Foucault, justification ensnares one in metaphysical illusions like "truth" and the only concern of the philosopher-critic is to dismantle old ways of thinking, to attack existing traditions and institutions, and to open up new horizons of experience for greater individual freedom. What matters, then, is results, and if actions bring greater freedom, the theoretical perspectives informing them are "justified." From this perspective, theoretical discourse is seen not so much as "correct" or true," but as "efficacious," as producing positive effects. (shrink)

The 2003 Iraq war was a major global media event constructed very differently by varying broadcasting networks in different parts of the world. While the U.S. networks framed the event as "Operation Iraqi Freedom" (the Pentagon concept) or "War in Iraq," the Canadian CBC used the logo "War on Iraq," and various Arab networks presented it as an "invasion" and "occupation." In this study, I provide critique of the U.S. broadcasting network construction of the war that I interpret as providing (...) a conduit for Bush administration and Pentagon propaganda. (shrink)

The “Frankfurt School” refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and (...) domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995). (shrink)

For some decades now, British cultural studies has tended to either disregard or caricature in a hostile manner the critique of mass culture developed by the Frankfurt school. [1] The Frankfurt school has been repeatedly stigmatized as elitist and reductionist, or simply ignored in discussion of the methods and enterprise of cultural studies. This is an unfortunate oversight as I will argue that despite some significant differences in method and approach, there are also many shared positions that make dialogue between (...) the traditions productive. Likewise, articulation of the differences and divergences of the two traditions could be fruitful since, as I will argue, both traditions to some extent overcome the weaknesses and limitations of the other. Consequently, articulation of their positions could produce new perspectives that might contribute to developing a more robust cultural studies. Thus, I will argue that rather than being antithetical, the Frankfurt school and British cultural studies approaches complement each other and can be articulated in new configurations. (shrink)

In the realm of philosophy and other theoretical discourses, there are many different paths to the turn from the modern to the postmodern, representing a complex genealogy of diverse and often divergent trails through different disciplines and cultural terrains. One pathway moves through an irrationalist tradition from romanticism to existentialism to French postmodernism via the figures of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Bataille into the proliferation of French postmodern theory. This is the route charted by Jurgen Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of (...) Modernity (1987), a trajectory that ultimately leads for him to the dead end of irrationalism and the catastrophe of fascism. (shrink)

Moreover, presidential politics on the level of campaigns and governing have also exhibited a growing politics of the image and spectacle. In our media-saturated society, politicians become celebrities who fine tune their image through daily photo opportunities, spin out their message of the day, and, like celebrities, employ image management firms to make sure that their performance is playing well with the public.

In The Virtual, Rob Shields puts virtuality in with the key categories of contemporary social theory such as subjectivity, agency, structure, and the spaces and temporalities between the modern and the postmodern. Shields has rescued the term and the idea of the virtual from utopian futurists like Howard Rheingold and Nicholas Negroponte who use it to hype emergent technologies and forms of culture as the magical vehicles and entry points to new worlds and identities. The works of these digerati, ideologues (...) for multimedia technology and culture, now appear ideological, outdated, and no more than huckstering of the new when confronted with the current state of affairs in the technoculture and its attendant war- and terrorism-torn world. (shrink)

Globalization appears to be the buzzword of the 1990s, the primary attractor of books, articles, and heated debate, just as postmodernism was the most fashionable and debated topic of the 1980s. A wide and diverse range of social theorists are arguing that today's world is organized by accelerating globalization, which is strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state by transnational corporations and organizations, and eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture.1 (...) M arxists, world systems theorists, functionalists, Weberians, and other contemporary theorists are converging on the position that globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment. (shrink)