History, theory and cultural politics: Towards a minor discourse of mass media and postmodernity

This study engages to understand and interpret postmodernity. Arguing against dominant formulations of postmodernism, this project seeks to recast the problematics and to reenter the complex historical fields by registering the most crucial and yet not fully articulated dimensions of an ongoing collective project: history, theory and cultural politics and the convergence of these lines of forces in the somewhat neglected domain of the mass-media. In relation to the dominant stream of postmodernism, then, this project hopes to constitute itself as a "minor discourse": it addresses taken-for-granted issues, attacks the dominant territory from within, refuses to be armed with established theoretical machineries, takes seriously the materials lower down the cultural map, and resists received teleological finality. In short, "toward" a minor discourse signals a becoming, an incomplete and open-ended theorizing in motion, and an attempt to generate new lines of flight.; Chapter I outlines the critical issues involved in this project. Chapter II will trace previous critical positions on the masses and the media. Chapter III intends to articulate postmodern interpretive analytics or strategies of assemblage, which will be developed from immanent readings of Foucault's genealogy and archaeology, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatics, and Baudrillard's guerrilla terrorism. Chapter IV seeks to locate the historical logics of configurations, that is, the movement from modernity to postmodernity. Chapter V tackles aspects of the working logics of postmodern cultural politics in three axes: power, desire and the symbolic. In order to avoid over-inflating the status of mass-media, mass-media will be situated within the historical formation of postmodernity in Chapter IV and their structural relation to cultural micropolitics will be connected in Chapter V. As a privileged domain of cultural politics, mass-media will be given detailed treatment in Chapter VI. Chapter VII concludes the project by considering a possibility to initiate a new critical space between postmodernism and cultural studies.