PHILOSOPHICAL ADVENTURES
By Douglas Kellner http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html
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 one¹s 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 one¹s life and times have influenced one¹s own theoretical work
and I fear that the following reflections are more of a narrative construct
than ³scientific² 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.
I was born in the
Chelsea Medical Hospital on May 31, 1943. My parents had been married for about
three years and had been working for the U.S. government in Washington. My
father then joined the Navy, took some courses in economics and administration
at Harvard, and prepared to go to war. My mother gave birth to a child who
turned out to be a writer and philosopher, and organized a trek across the
United States with a six-week old baby. In a well-documented train ride, my
mother and two of her sisters took me from Harvard to Berkeley and then to
Carpenteria, California, south of Santa Barbara where the familial unit lived
in a paradise overlooking the Pacific Ocean, if one can trust the documentary
evidence of home movies.
The family idyl was short-lived as my father was sent to Hawaii where he served as pay-master in the Navy, roamed the beach with my Uncle Carl, and seemingly avoided trauma or mutilation. With the defeat of German and Japanese fascism, my father returned home from war, and got a job with Addressograph-Multigraph business machines. My parents rented an apartment in the modest building where my grandparents lived in downtown Los Angeles on South Hope Street.
And so my young and impressionable body was transported from an ecological paradise to urban Los Angeles. For the next few years we lived in downtown LA and family stories and photographs have my grandfather walking me everyday through Bunker Hill, later bull-dozed to build the Bonaventure and other high-rise corporate buildings, including a daily walk through the Biltmore Hotel lobby where my grandfather would buy a cigar. Later, I would get sick everytime my grandfather would visit and it was discerned that I was allergic to cigars, creating a life-long aversion to tobacco products.
My brother John was
born in 1947 and the nucleus of the typical American middle-class family was
emerging, although we were outgrowing the small LA apartment. My urban flaneur
existence came to an end around 1949 when my parents bought a house in Temple
City in a new housing development for about $4000. My artistic proclivities at
that time were crushed when I decorated the freshly painted downtown LA
apartment by drawing pretty pictures on the white walls with crayon. My parents
and grandparents were horrified with my aesthetic creations, and for the
first-time I can remember I was physically disciplined with my grandfather
taking out his belt, putting me across his knees, and spanking out any artistic
aptitude I may have had.
And so it was off to Temple City, a small town west
of LA, where Alfred Hitchcock¹s Shadow of a Doubt was set the year of my
birth, and which was quickly becoming suburbanized. At that time, the suburbs
where relatively new, but I was there and would continue to pursue the delights
of suburban living. In the following years I would successively live in Fall
Church, Virginia, Valley Stream, New York, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and Larchment,
New York. After selling business machines for several years in California, my
father returned to work for the U.S. government in Washington (1952-1956), and
then went back to work for Addressograph-Multigraph on Long Island (1956-1958).
He switched to Arbitron in New York City, a firm that did TV and radio-ratings
around 1958 and was transferred to their Chicago office (1961), and then
returned to New York, where my parents bought an up-scale house in Larchmont in
1965. Some years later, in the late 1960s, my father was fired in a merger
acquisition, and my family learned of the challenges of corporate downsizing.
Renouncing the corporate rat-race, my father decided to become a professor,
finishing his Ph.D. in communications and teaching at Marshall University in
West Virginia, where, coincidentally, my brother had settled after some years
in hippie communes to renovate homes, businesses, and public buildings.
My mother had been a
high-school Latin and English teacher and there were always books around the
house. I was a systematic and scholarly reader, starting with all the Golden
Books, and moving up to Classic Comic Books, of which I had an entire
collection. I discovered the library in Temple City and read all of the Winnie
the Pooh books and then Doctor Doolittle series; I also remember reading and
owning a full series of the Hardy Boys mystery books. Later summers, I would
systematically read Poe, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and whoever else caught my literary
fancy.
My first kiss was from
Linda Vickers, daughter of a famous film noir actress, who often sipped drinks
on her patio, as Linda and I played and ate peanut-butter sandwiches and drank
lemonade. My parents were socializing me to be a good capitalist and
protestant, to work hard, and to save money. Family friends and relatives would
deposit loose change and an occasional bill in a giant glass piggie bank that I
proudly displayed, and one day when friends were over we took my grandfather¹s
hammer and smashed the pig. With the money in hand, we romped through the
neighborhood, invited all the neighborhood kids to a party in the candy store,
and had a great time until my mother and some neighbors appeared to crush our
communist insurrection. I was ³discipline² by my father, locked in my room, and
told not to share the wealth with my little friends.
This California adventure also came to an end as we
moved to Falls Church, Virginia and I learned about race and the South. Many of
our neighbors were Southerners who were horrified that my brother and I did not
hunt or fish and tried to properly socialize us into approved masculinity. I
tolerated fishing, but abhorred hunting and cannot to this day understand why
grown men would want to shoot animals. I could also not understand the
prejudices of my neighbors against blacks.
At this time, around 9 or 10 years of age, my
literary career began when my parents bought me a hectograph for Christmas and
I started printing out a literary journal, Ye Olde Courthouse Digest, an
amalgam of my serialized adventure stories, school gossip, and, so I would like
to think, social and political commentary. I was active in the community,
making Eagle Boy Scout as our local military folks trained us in survivalism
and counterinsurgency. I also played Little League baseball, Church basketball,
and was an ace in ping pong, badmitton, miniature golf, and other sports. I
went to Bible Studies in the summer, was head of the Methodist Young
Fellowship, and went to church three times a day on Sunday. I also became a
young capitalist, waking up every morning to deliver the Washington Post,
invested my earnings in the stock market, and eventually saved enough to later
finance a year in Paris.
Once
again suburban bliss was disrupted when I was about 12 and my parents moved to
Valley Stream, New York. Here, I was quickly initiated into multiculturalism
and racism when I discovered that the Jews, Italians, Swedes, Irish, and other
ethnicities all hated each other and invented a variety of names to call each
other that I had never heard of before. I myself was interested in cultural
difference and cultivated friends from all of these groups. I was, however, a
bit of a freak with a southern accent which I quickly lost and assimilated
myself by joining the football and track teams (which saved me from having to
get into fights everyday after school).
I discovered New York City at this time and
regularly took the bus and subway to Times Square for movies, to the Village to
walk around and take in the scene, and to Chinatown to buy fire crackers (I
later bought my first ounce of grass in Little Italy). In high school, I read
existentialism, liked the beats, and was trying to be cool. I don¹t remember
any teachers or classes that influenced me, except the typing class in the
ninth grade, where, the only boy in the class, I learned speed-typing, clearly
my most valuable high-school asset. I remember when I was one of ten to win a
New York State regents scholarship all of my friends howled with glee and the
smart kids were surprised.
My senior year in high school my parents moved to
Chicago, I stayed with family friends to finish up and graduate, and in the
confusion all of my college acceptences got in too late and I was senior year
without a college. My parents had gone to Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, my
father was on the Board of Regents there, and I got a full athletic and
scholastic scholarship, beginning an academic career that was fully subsidized
(although my father made me work in Chicago factories during the summers where
I discovered the dubious joys of proletarian existence). I had a philosophy
teacher, Robert Browne, who included Erich Fromm and Martin Buber in his
curricula, and the beginnings of a Frankfurt school mode of existentialism were
sewn. I read Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and the like, and began to self-consciously
study philosophy and imagine myself becoming a philosophy professor.
The most eventful college experience was pulling my
ankle tendon and ending my track career. The existential void was overwhelming
and could only be filled with heavy doses of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre,
Camus, and existential philosophy. A year in Copenhagen in 1963-64 aided my
Kierkegaard studies and I also discovered socialism at the foreign student club
where my attempts to defend U.S. capitalism and democracy were soundly
thrashed. A bad flu and free medicine taught me the rationality of socialized
medicine and I also learned the emancipatory possibilities of free love (this
was the early 1960s).
My parents returned to New York, and in the summer
of 1965 I took courses at the New School, reading Sartre¹s Being and
Nothingness. I was now set on becoming a philosopher and wanted to study in
New York, which was increasingly capturing my imagination as the place I wanted
most to live. Entreaties from my Uncle Bob to go to Michigan law school and
join his corporate law firm fell on deaf ears, as did a proposal from a former
neighbor to join AT&S¹s Junior
Executive Program. A Woodrow Wilson fellowship in 1965 got me into Columbia
University and I moved to the upper West Side, went to the West End bar every
night, and experienced the joys of New York life in the Œ60s.
In 1968, I was studying continental philosophy at
Columbia University when the student uprising erupted. My philosophical
allegiances at the time were primarily to phenomenology and Existentialism and
while I was unprepared for the explosiveness and impact of the student
rebellion, I became active in New Left politics, participating in major
anti-war demonstrations. Indeed, students all over the United States and Europe
were demonstrating against the Vietnam war, taking over University buildings
and even campuses, and in Paris in May '68, it appeared that a new French
revolution was in the making. To help understand these events, I went back and
read the works of Herbert Marcuse and by the time of the publication of An
Essay on Liberation
(1969), I both better understood Marcuse's writings and the philosophical
underpinnings of the student movement to which I was increasingly attracted and
involved.
In 1969, I left Columbia to write my dissertation on
"Heidegger's Concept of Authenticity" with the support of a German
government fellowship (DAAD). I choose to pursue this project at the University
of Tubingen, in the small southwestern German town where Hegel, Holderlin,
Schelling, and other luminaries had studied and which had a reputation as an
excellent place to study a broad range of German philosophical traditions.
Tubingen was permeated with the spirit of 60s radicalism and I bought pirate
editions (Raubdruck) at the University Mensa of Karl Korsch's writings on
Marxism, Georg Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness, Max Horkheimer and T.W.
Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and other texts of the Frankfurt school. I also
became involved in a Critical Theory study group and sat in on Ernst Bloch's
seminars, which alternated between seminars on the great philosophers and ones
on topics such as imperialism, fascism, and other political topics. From Bloch,
among other things, I learned that philosophy was highly political and that
politics required philosophical analysis and critique.
Near the end of my research on Heidegger, I picked
up Adorno's Jargon der Eigentlichkeit and discovered some early essays by Marcuse on his
teacher Heidegger, which carried out a sharp critique of Heidegger's thought
and which proposed a synthesis of phenomenological Existentialism and Marxism,
of Heidegger and Marx, to overcome the limitations in these traditions. I found
Marcuse's critiques of Heidegger convincing and his proposed amalgamation of
Heidegger and Marx fascinating. I also thoroughly investigated Heidegger's
relation to National Socialism and thus was not surprised by the later
revelations in the Farias, Ott and other volumes on Heidegger¹s Nazism.
I was thus rapidly moving toward the Critical Theory
of the Frankfurt School, a move intensified by a year in Paris. After two years
in Germany, I had more or less completed my dissertation on Heidegger and
received a good grounding in German philosophy. I was eager to improve my
knowledge of French and to immerse myself in French philosophy and culture.
During a thirteen month sojourn in Paris during 1971-1972, subsidized by my
paper route savings, I accordingly devoted myself to French language and
philosophy, and also drafted the first version of a book on Herbert Marcuse
whose work continued to interest me.
While in Paris, I was fortunate to hear the lectures
of Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard, and to read their recent
works, as well as the texts of Baudrillard, Derrida, and others. Listening to
Foucault¹s lectures was like being in Church, as he intently read from lecture
notes in a hushed auditorium. Levi-Straus was more lively and very friendly
when a friend took me to meet him. Deleuze was highly animated and used the
blackboard to scribble out his main concepts; I later saw him perform his
fabled contrast between modern analytical thought and rhyzomic thought at a
conference at Columbia in 1975. Lyotard was an extremely engaging lecturer,
coming out in blue jeans, lighting up a cigarette, bantering with students
about current political events, and then launching into a lecture on Kant or
another philosophical theme, usually without notes.
I initially read Derrida as a curious version of
Heideggerian philosophy and read Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lyotard as
supplementing the Frankfurt School. I saw similar attempts to develop syntheses
of Marx, Freud, and critical philosophy in both contemporary German and French
thought and did not see the differences as sharp as they appear to many today.
Thus, for me it was not a choice of the Germans or French, but of drawing on
both traditions to develop new philosophical syntheses.
Upon returning to the States in 1972, I offered
myself for sale for a position in continental philosophy at the APA slave
market and sold myself to the University of Texas at Austin, where I labored in
the area of continental philosophy for some 24 years. I was offered a job
teaching Marxist philosophy and my study in Europe gave me a good grounding in
the Marxian tradition and made the Texas offer attractive. This choice was
fortunate as Texas has a strong tradition in continental philosophy and a
pluralistic department that allowed a broad range of different types of
philosophical inquiry (although an anti-continental philosophy police squad
would emerge and become hegemonic, ending this phase of my philosophical
adventures).
In retrospect, I had piled up an enormous amount of
cultural capital during my three years in Germany and France that enabled me to
write a series of books on both the Frankfurt School and contemporary French
thought over the next two decades. My books on critical theory include Herbert
Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984), Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity (1989), and (with Stephen
Bronner) A Critical Theory Reader (1989). My books Karl Korsch: Revolutionary
Theory (1977),
Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage (1983), co-edited with
Stephen Bronner, Postmodernism/Jameson/ Critique (1989) and the many
articles that I have written on Marx and Marxism were nourished during my two
years in Germany and subsequent research trips. My books Jean Baudrillard:
From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1989), (with Steven Best), Postmodern
Theory: Critical Interrogations (1991), Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, and (number two with Best)
The Postmodern Turn (1997) were made possible by the work that I did on French theory
during a year in France and subsequent return trips to France.
Consequently, I found a broad range of continental
philosophy attractive. And yet I was not happy with the division of
Anglo-American philosophy into continental vs. analytical perspectives. While
much that passes for analytical philosophy today is abstract, academic, and
often useless, much that parades as continental philosophy is dogmatic
posturing and pretentious gibberish. But both the tools of conceptual analysis
and perspectives of continental philosophy can be applied together in specific
tasks and projects. Philosophy, in my optic, is both analysis and synthesis,
deconstruction and reconstruction. Consequently, I would defend pluralistic
perspectives that draw on the best work on all traditions.
Indeed, it is somewhat ridiculous for philosophers
in the United States to worship and fetishize European philosophers whose works
developed in a very specific socio-historical environment and whose ideas may
or may not be relevant to American conditions. Instead, we should see
continental philosophy as an important tradition whose ideas can be rethought,
reconstructed, and developed in new ways in our own unique historical
situation. Our own tradition of American philosophy also has some important
resources, and in recent work, as I note below, I find Dewey and pragmatism to
be of growing importance and would argue that we need to take seriously
American traditions of philosophy, and see what insights and contributions are
found in our native traditions.
Media Culture, the Public Sphere, and U.S. Politics
In the mid-1970s I was 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
American political economy and in particular television. We saw corporate
control of television, a la the Frankfurt school, as a major source of
corporate hegemony, but we were also impressed with the Trilateral Commission
report that the media, universities, and other institutions were promoting too
much democracy and threatening corporate hegemony, and we wondered what we
could do to contribute to this crisis for capital. Our group 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 religiously taped hour-long interview and documentary
programs, that 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 NY access channels. This project helped me to become a Deweyean
public intellectual, and to apply philosophical notions and abilities to issues
of public concern in a public forum.
I also became involved in cultural studies in the
1970s and have remained active in this field through the present. Around 1976,
I wrote Stuart Hall who was head of the then little-known Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham England, asking about his work and
his program. Stuart sent a three-page single-spaced typed letter and a stack of
his Centre¹s fabled stencilled papers and my media study group devoured them.
The combination of philosophy, social theory, and cultural studies that I was
engaged in eventually produced a series of works.
As noted, I have long tried to synthesize German and
French traditions, rather than to oppose them, and this project animated a book
co-authored with Michael Ryan, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film (1988). The idea was to combine critical theory and
post-structuralist methods to interrogate the politics and ideology of
Hollywood film. My two books on television also drew on both German and French
traditions, but attempted to rethink the problematics of the Frankfurt school
critique of the culture industries through a concrete study of American
television. This project informed my Television and the Crisis of Democracy (1990) and The Persian
Gulf TV War
(1992). In all of these texts, I use philosophy as providing weapons of
critique and tools of analysis that can be applied to concrete issues and
problems.
I thus do not use philosophy as abstract dogmas to
be religiously worshipped, but as a body of living thought to apply to
contemporary problems and issues. The best of continental philosophy is
critical and dialogical (i.e. Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, et
al), and its major thinkers have often drawn on the most productive elements of
their predecessors, while overcoming those aspects that are no longer useful or
relevant.
I have continued to apply the insights and methods
of philosophy to a vast array of cultural phenomena and my book Media
Culture: On Cultural Studies: Politics, Identity, and Society Between the
Modern and the Postmodern (1995) attempted to reconceptualize the project of cultural
studies by using the tools of philosophy and critical social theory. Within
cultural studies, I have argued for a multiperspectival model that combines
political economy, textual analysis, and study of audience reception and media
effects. The various philosophical positions I have studied - ranging from
Marxism to feminism to poststructuralism - can be applied to the
interpretation and critique of cultural and political phenomena and contribute
to developing a critical, multicultural, and political cultural studies.
New
Technologies, New Literacies, and the Reconstruction of Education
The Austin
adventures came to an end in the mid-1990s when George W. Bush became Governor
of Texas and a rightwing cabal took over the UT-Philosophy Department. Austin
had been a great place to live with a vibrant counterculture and political
culture and for decades the University of Texas had been an excellent location
to teach. But as the University became more rightwing during the Bush years,
many of us saw the (w)righting-on-the-wall, saw Austin and UT drowning in the
sewer of corruption and mediocrity that distinguished Bush family politics, and
decided to move on, leaving Texas to the Bushites.
Fortunately, a
job at UCLA materialized and I joined the UCLA Graduate School of Education in
1997, along with Sandra Harding who also appears in this volume. Ironically,
many of those who I consider the top philosophers of my generation have left
philosophy departments, raising some serious questions about the contemporary
institutional status of philosophy. On the whole, it seems like contemporary
American philosophy seems frozen, in a state of paralysis. While the domimant
analytical philosophy suffers from theoretical sclerosis, a hardening of the
categories, and undergoing a slow public and academic death, the situation of
continental philosophy is also dispiriting. In the 1980s, it looked as though
contemporary philosophy was entering a frutiful state of pluralism with a
blossoming of continental philosophy, mutating into ³Theory,² crossing over
into every discipline. On the philosophical frontlines, there was also a
reappropriation of Dewey and pragmatism, of other strands of American
philosophy, as well as the move into new fields such as feminism, African
American and Latino philosophy, philosophy of technology, environmental
philosophy, philosophical media studies, and the philosophy of electronic
culture and communication.
These trends
continue within the broader philosophical-intellectual world, but often not in
philosophy departments, and they have been pushed to the margins of the
academic discipline of philosophy. Most distressing, not only has reaction and
retrenchment set in with analytic philosophy, but continental philosophy is
segregating itself into circles in which specific philosophers are revered as
the Voice of Truth, of the revered Word. Thus the ontotheological dimension of
philosophy that Derrida decred has its Renaissance in schools of contemporary
philosophy. Living philosophy, however, is always synthesis, always in motions,
always taking in the novel, absorbing challenging ideas, trends, and theories,
constantly developing and reshaping philosophy, in dialogue with other
disciplines and contemporary culture and experiences.
During my several
years of service at UCLA as George F. Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of
Education, I have focused on researching the relevance of new technologies to
education, politics, and everyday life, as well as continuing work in
philosophy, social theory, and cultural studies. I have published an article on
new technologies and new literacies in Educational Theory, several articles
on multimedia and new forms of textuality in various books and journals, and a
series of articles on the Internet and politics. A Blackwell reader Media
and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, co-edited with Gigi Durham (2001),
contributes to my work in cultural studies while my work on alternative media
continues with a biographical introduction and collection of writings, Art
and Politics: An Emile de Antonio Reader, co-edited with Dan Streible
(2000).
In addition, I
have produced three web sites for courses in technology and society, cultural
studies, and philosophy of education, as well as helping to develop websites on
postmodern theory and critical theory. I would like to eventually bring
together this research to produce a book on New Technologies and New
Literacies: Challenges for the Millennium, that would follow the Deweyean
project of democratizing education as an instrument of progressive social
transformation.
Whereas much of
the dominant literature on the new technologies tends to be either celebatory
or derogatory, I provide what I intend to be a balanced appraisal of the costs
and benefits of deploying new technologies. In particular, in debates
concerning whether books or computer data bases and resources provide the basis
for contemporary education, I mediate between these extremes, arguing that
education today should be based on a balance between book material and new
computer and multimedia-based material. Likewise, I argue that traditional
literacy in print culture and traditional skills of reading and writing are
more important than ever today, but that we need to teach new literacies to
supplement the skills of the past.
Moreover, I am
articulating the discourses of democracy, globalization, and new technologies
in several projects including a book The Postmodern Adventure,
co-authored with Steven Best (2001). We are currently working on the dialectics
of biotechnology with studies on cloning and stem cell research. Bioethics
appears as a vital field within contemporary culture, as new biotechnologies
emerge and transform the very nature of human beings.
Finally, I have continued my work in critical theory with two published
collections of the writings of Herbert Marcuse Toward a Critical Theory of
Society (2001) Technology, War, and Fascism (1998). I was chosen to
edit Marcuse¹s unpublished and/or uncollected texts by Peter Marcuse and am
currently preparing a volume on Marcuse and the New Left, returning to an era
and texts that deeply influenced me.
These projects
were rudely interrupted by the theft of the presidency by George W. Bush in the
2000 presidential election. I was appalled and stunned that this totally
unqualified candidate would emerge as president of the United States and close
scrutiny of the Battle for the White House led me to conclude that the theft of
election 2000 was one of the great crimes of U.S. history. I accordingly put
aside all other work and wrote a study of Grand Theft 2000 that
will be published by Rowman and Littlefield in the Fall of 2001.
Ultimately, my philosophical adventures provided me
with the conditions of the possibility of seeing philosophy as an adventure
that contains the dimensions of all the traditional domains of philosophy, as
well as social theory, cultural criticism, and social and political critique.
While some analytic philosophers develop their arguments in journal articles or
books, often focusing on very narrow topics, the great continental thinkers
provide vast philosophical vistas that include philosophy of history,
metaphysics, social theory, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and other normative
concerns. The major continental philosophers were concerned with the key issues
of their day, focusing on the problems of the present age, and drawing on the
relevant sciences, ideas, and discourses of their period.
I share this focus on today and its problems -- a
perspective also found in Dewey and American pragmatism. In this sense, I
suppose, my work is very much in the tradition of the Frankfurt School which
transcended narrow disciplinary boundaries and undertook studies of a vast
array of contemporary phenomena from supradisciplinary perspectives. This
project continues to appeal to me, as does its attempt to relate theory to
practice, to politicize theory, and to make it an instrument of social action
- as illustrated by my recent book Grand Theft 2000. Thus, rather than seeing
the end of philosophy in a postmodern turn, I see philosophy as confronting
novel challenges in an era of new media, technologies, cultural forms, and
political configurations and believe that the adventure of philosophy can best
carry on by engaging these phenomena.
The
Postmodern Adventure, co-authored with Steven Best. New York and London:
Guilford and Routledge, 2001.
Media
and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, co-edited with Gigi Durham. Blackwell,
2001.
Toward
a Critical Theory of Society. London and New York: Routledge,.
Film,
Art and Politics: An Emile de Antonio Reader, co-edited with Dan Streible,
University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Technology,
War, and Fascism. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
The Postmodern Turn, co-authored with Steven
Best. New York and London: Guilford Press and Routledge, 1997.
Articulating
the Global and the Local. Globalization and Cultural Studies, co-edited
with Ann Cvetkovich. Westview, 1996.
Media
Culture. Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the
Postmodern. Routledge: 1995; Finnish translation, Mediakulttuuri,
Tampere: Vastapaino, 1998.
Baudrillard.
A Critical Reader, edited with Introduction. Blackwell, 1994.
The
Persian Gulf TV War, Westview Press, 1992.
Postmodern
Theory: Critical Interrogations, co-authored with Steven Best. London and
New York: Macmillan and Guilford Press, 1991.
Television
and the Crisis of Democracy. Westview Press, 1990.
Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique,
editor; Maisonneuve, 1989.
Critical
Theory, Marxism, and Modernity, Cambridge and Baltimore. Polity Press and
John Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Jean
Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-Modernism and Beyond. Cambridge, England
and Palo Alto, Cal.: Polity Press and Stanford University Press, 1989; Japanese
translation forthcoming.
Critical
Theory and Society. A Reader, co-edited with Stephen Eric Bronner,
Metheun/Routledge, 1989.
Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film, co-authored with Michael Ryan, Indiana
University Press, 1988.
Herbert
Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, University of California Press (USA) and
Macmillan Press (England), 1984.
Passion
and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, co-edited with Stephen Eric
Bronner. New York: Universe Books and Bergin Publishers (USA) and London: Croom
Helm (England), 1983; second edition, Columbia University Press, 1988.
Karl
Korsch: Revolutionary Theory. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press,
1977; British edition, London: Pluto Press, 1981; Spanish translation, El
Marxismo Revolucionario de Karl Korsch, Premia, 1981.
Heidegger¹s
Concept of Authenticity. Ph.D Dissertation, Columbia University, 1973.
(with
Rhonda Hammer) (2001) "Multimedia Pedagogical Curriculum for the New
Millennium," Multi/Intercultural Conversations. New York: Peter
Lang: 343-360.
"New Technologies/New Literacies: reconstructing
education for the new millennium," Teaching Education, Vol. 11, No.
3 (2000): 245-265.
Globalization
From Below? Toward a Radical Democratic Technopolitics," Angelaki
4:2 (1999): 101-113.
"New
Technologies, TechnoCities, and the Prospects for Democratization," in Technocities,
edited by John Downey and Jim McGuigan, London: Sage Publications, 1999:
186-204.
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