A Study Bout Douglas Kellner’s Media Culture Politics

This paper took the famous contemporary western marxist theorists and media theorist Douglas kellner’s thought of media culture as a study object. From the the realistic context of media cultural colonization in contemporary capitalist society, with developing media cultural politics against the media cultural colonization, promoting man’s complete liberation as the main line, this paper has carried on the back to kellner’s thought of media culture, and constructed the kellner’s media cultural politics. The body of the paper consists of two parts. The first part includes chapter one, two, three, mainly to solve two questions:why did kellner develop media cultural politics and what kind of media cultural politics did him want to develop. The second part includes chapter four, five, six, seven, mainly to solve one question:how to develop media cultural politics.The first chapter of this paper, first of all, drew the outline of the problematic consciousness of kellner’s media cultural politics, namely the media cultural colonization of contemporary capitalist society. From the two aspects of media technology colonizing culture and media spectacle colonizing the vision, this paper analyzed the practical effect and possible harm of media cultural colonization in contemporary capitalist society, and then pointed out that, it is a must to develop media cultural politics in order to break the media cultural colonization, and the essence of media cultural politics is a kind of liberation of "look".The second chapter through carding kellner’s criticism of the postmodern cultural politics, revealed the limitations of postmodern cultural politics, and pointed out that the we have to develop media cultural politics bypassing postmodern cultural politics.The third chapter summed up and illustrated the multiple features of kellner’s media cultural politics. This paper first pointed out that in kellner’s view, the contemporary capitalist society is in the "transition between modern and post-modern". This meant that the modern theory and politics, the postmodern theory and politics in contemporary society do not have the sufficient explanation effect, the reasonable plan is to absorb the excellent thought of the two traditional creative and to rebuild a multiple critical social theory and cultural politics. On this basis, the article pointed out of that the media cultural politics which kellner planned to develop is a kind of multicultural politics. This multicultural politicsn, in short, is a combination of modern and post-modern politics, furthermore, is a combination of class politics and a variety of subjective politics, the combination of reason and desire politics, the combination of general politics and local politics, the combination of entity and symbolic politics.So, how to develop media cultural politics exactly? Although kellner did not tell us the clear way, he has repeatedly stressed that we cannot engage in cultural study without social theories, in turn, cultural studies can promote the development of social theory and politics. On the basis of this the paper pointed out that, kellner’s developing media cultural critical theory, and devote himself to the criticism practice of American media culture, is the realistic way to developing multiple media cultural politics against media cultural colonization.Thence, the second part of this paper addressed the issue of how to develop media cultural politics and studied the characteristics and critical practice of media cultural criticism theory. The fourth chapter discussed the theoretical source and characteristics of kellner’s media cultural criticism theory, and analyzed his inheritance and transcendence of the Frankfurt school and British cultural studies. Fifth, six, seven chapters, respectively from perspectives of the media culture industry、texts of media culture、 acception of media culture, discussed medium methodology characteristics and criticism practice of kellner’s media cultural criticism theory.The fifth chapter discussed kellner’s criticism of cultural studies’s departure from political economy after the postmodern turn, and explained his understanding of cultural political economics which was a method of cultural studies, then analyzed his specific criticism of the U.S. media culture industry;Chapter six discussed the multi-dimensional development of ideology category, and introduced two kind of ideological method to critique media culture text including contextual ideological critique and symptomatic ideological critique, then analyzed his specific criticism of "Rambo" film;Chapter seventh firstly analyzed the possibility and necessity of developing media politics and active involvement into cyberspace during the age of the Internet, and then expound the way presented by kellner to develop media politics, namely developing critical media literacy and improving audience’s comprehension ability about media, finally introduced the analysis framework of critical media literacy education.Epilogue part of the paper summed up the characteristics of kellner’s media cultural politics, and pointed out the problems, then made a brief analysis about its implications for us.