Kellner, Douglas

Bio Sketch

Douglas Kellner is an American philosopher and critical/media theorist (UCLA) known for his theory of "media spectacle," which extends the Frankfurt School critical tradition and Debord's spectacle into analysis of contemporary media, celebrity, and politics — including the Trump phenomenon.

Key Works

• Media Spectacle (2003) — the concept of media spectacle.
• American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism (2016) and The American Horror Show (2017).
• Preface to The Spectacle 2.0 (2017), on Debord, Trump, and the politics of the spectacle.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Spectacle
• Semiocapitalism

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Kellner's "media spectacle" is relevant to Geoffrey's spectacle & iconic architecture area as the media-theoretical sibling of architectural spectacle: his account of how events collapse politics into entertainment parallels how iconic buildings/imagery circulate as spectacle.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• The Spectacle 2.0 (Briziarelli & Armano eds.)
• The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism
• Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — cited by Tang (note 10): Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford UP, 1989), "especially pp. 19–25," recommended for "a lucid discussion of Baudrillard's development of Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production" — Kellner supplying the secondary frame for the essay's application of the political economy of the sign to China's decoration craze (see sign-value, consummative-mobilization).