Lawrence Grossberg

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Department of Communication Studies

Ghassan Hage once invited us to treat all intellectual offerings as gifts, and to receive them as such. I like to think of cultural studies as a gift, but a particular and even somewhat peculiar sort of gift. Fifty years ago, I stumbled upon the gift of cultural studies, which has since shaped much of my life. Let me try to describe this gift, alth...

This essay rejects efforts to understand the political field in the US as a war between two easily identified camps. It begins to think about the rise of the reactionary right (and Trump's place in it) by considering some of the stakes in play and strategies at work. Drawing on Gramsci's notion of organic crises, it considers how such crises are be...

In this chapter, I suggest that cultural studies is, at its heart, a pedagogical project. It is a critical practice embodying a commitment to complexity, contingency, and contextuality, addressed to the politics of discourse and culture, but always performed as an ongoing conversation challenging the certainties that too often guarantee our claims...

Conjunctural analysis is a conversation across many fields, discourses, knowledges and institutions, a conversation one seeks to advance by humbly offering the best contributions one can. Too often, a conjuncture is simply treated as a context defined by some boundary, often but not necessarily a given space and period of time. This article attempt...

In this essay, I suggest that cultural studies is, at its heart, a pedagogical project. It is a critical practice embodying a commitment to complexity, contingency, contextuality, addressed to the politics of discourse and culture, but always performed as an ongoing conversation challenging the certainties that too often guarantee our claims to kno...

This essay argues for the need for an ‘optimism of the intellect’ – in the form of the need for cultural studies – in the face of a growing ‘pessimism of the will.’ It illustrates the value of cultural studies by considering three contemporary problematics: post-truth, polarization and consent.

I am delighted to be here celebrating the unique career of Meaghan Morris, who is, after all, not just a precious intellectual partner (and sometimes mentor) but also a deeply valued friend.1 As it turned out, the invitation to speak at an event honouring Meaghan on the occasion of her retirement provided the pressure I needed to write something I...

A CONSIDERATION AND CRITIQUE OF THE ONTOLOGICAL TURN

REALITY IS BAD ENOUGH… DRAFT CHAPTER TWO

The essay offers one piece of a larger conjunctural analysis, in an effort to contribute to a better story of the contemporary organic crisis. It considers three elements of the complexity of the ‘crises’ of knowledge: First, it explores the increasingly felt social perception that knowledge (and the forms of authority that accompany it) has become...

In this interview, Lawrence Grossberg, an internationally renowned scholar of cultural studies, shares with us his ideas about the theories and practice of cultural studies and media studies, the organic crisis in the United States and the world in general, and the social, economic, and political problems that have troubled people’s minds in the Un...

Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture brings together communication experts with diverse backgrounds, from interpersonal communication, business and organizational communication, mass communication, media studies, narrative, rhetoric, gender studies, autoethnography, popular culture studies, and journalism. The contributors tackle such topi...

This paper considers the state of the ‘field’ of affect studies and its development – partly through the involvement of one of its authors – over the course of decades. It argues that rather than identifying affect as the ‘other’ of signification and representation, thus ‘subtracting’ it from the conjuncture, one should understand the question of a...

O artigo reflete sobre quatro questões relacionadas aos estudos culturais, em diferentes dimensões: a formação e a prática dos estudos culturais (pragmática), o conceito central de conjuntura (conceitual), a natureza e limites do materialismo e do pós-humanismo (filosófica) e, por fim, sobre o conceito de cultura (empírica). Tais discussões são imp...

Debates over the nature of contemporary capitalism, further stimulated by its most recent financial crisis, have led to a renewed problematization of value. Existing understandings of the process of valuation may not make visible what is new or unique in the contemporary conjuncture. This paper presents a diagram of value transformations that is co...

This prefatory note contextualizes the essays that follow by offering a brief history of the conflicted history of efforts to find a place for cultural studies inside the discipline of communication studies.

This paper offers a pedagogically useful way of understanding some of the complexities of the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari. It critically considers some of the ways this work is used in contemporary cultural theory and politics, and offers some suggestions for how the work of Deleuze and Guattari might enter into conversation with and b...

In this paper, I reread Raymond Williams's genealogy of the concept of culture from the perspective of the contemporary context. I argue for a more contextual approach to take note of the way the concept has changed and how it has been deployed differently in different historical moments.

This essay uses the first decade's Reports from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to describe the emergence and evolution of the project of cultural studies itself through the early work of the Centre.

This chapter contains section titles:

This essays considers what it would mean --and some of the kinds of work and inquiry it would demand --for scholars in cultural studies to take economies and economics seriously and to integrate such matters into conjunctural analysis. It locates the task within the present conjuncture, characterized as a set of struggles over what it means to be m...

This piece considers the financial crisis of 2008 through the lens of the derivative, by locating both the derivative and the crisis in the broader context of post-war US conjuncture. Drawing upon the work of Marx, Postone and von Mises, I argue that the derivative can be seen as a response to the collapse of any viable logic of commensuration. Its...

Este artículo explica mis compromisos y pasiones por los estudios culturales. Creo que las ideas importan, que tenemos mejores formas de acercarse las vastas tareas de transformar el mundo con el mejor conocimiento y entendimiento posibles. Y siempre he creído, durante toda mi vida académica, que los estudios culturales importan no porque sean la ú...

Ich kann nicht an eine wichtige Entscheidung denken (und nun stehe ich vor einer), ohne dass mir der „Cross Road Blues“ und die Legende des Musikers Robert Johnson in den Sinn kommt, der seine Seele an den Teufel verkaufte, um der größte Bluesmusiker aller Zeiten zu werden. Allerdings gelang es ihm nicht, sehr lange zu spielen. Man sollte die beson...

In 1968, as a result of a number of fortuitous events and unfortunate political forces, I went to study — all too briefly — at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).2 To be honest, I had no idea what the Centre was. I had never heard of Richard Hoggart or Stuart Hall. I went with an interest in the ‘social life’ of ideas (philosophies...

In his introduction to Keywords, Raymond Williams is at some pains to place his project in relation to that of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), seeking to register both a distance from and an affiliation to it. On the one hand, he stresses the social and political values that can be detected beneath the OED's appearance of impersonal authority...

El trabajo de Stuart Hall sobre la raza no puede separarse de su trabajo sobre los estudios culturales, y en particular, de su compromiso con un contextualismo radical. En este artículo, argumento que la obra de Stuart Hall sobre raza y racismo en el contexto de su compromiso de larga data con una práctica radicalmente contextualista y con la noció...

Stuart Hall's work on race cannot be separated from his work in cultural studies, and in particular, from his commitment to a radical contextualism. In this article, I argue that Stuart Hall's work on race and racism in the context of his own long-standing commitment to a radically contextualist practice, and in particular, with the notion of histo...

The tradition of mass media effects research and the work of Innis, McLuhan, Dewey, Carey, Williams, and Habermas are explored through their images of the cultural crisis and how they conceive of communication.

This paper examines the state of cultural studies, primarily in the United States and Northern Europe. Arguing for a radically contextualist and conjuncturalist understanding of the project of cultural studies, it suggests that cultural studies emerged in particular forms as a response to a particular geo-historical conjuncture. However, while the...

Ich kann nicht an eine wichtige Entscheidung denken (und nun stehe ich vor einer), ohne dass mir der „Cross Road Blues“ und die Legende des Musikers Robert Johnson in den Sinn kommt, der seine Seele an den Teufel verkaufte, um der größte Bluesmusiker aller Zeiten zu werden. Allerdings gelang es ihm nicht, sehr lange zu spielen. Man sollte die beson...

The articles appearing in this issue of Cultural Studies have certain themes and perspectives in common. Although they examine a variety of examples, they are all concerned, in one way or another, with cultural 'visibility'; that is to say, with the ways in which certain populations, practices and artefacts have been constituted as objects for spec...

Caught in the Crossfire reveals how the United States has been gradually changing from a society that celebrates childhood into one that is hostile to and afraid of its own children. Today kids are often seen as a threat to our social and moral values. In schools, some behavior is criminalized, and growing numbers of kids find themselves in penal a...

La mayoría de los intérpretes de la modernidad han considerado que la política moderna es ideológica y consensual. Sin embargo, la política moderna no es siempre una lucha por el consenso ideológico, sino que involucra una lucha por la «hegemonía». Este artículo describe las tres principales diferencias entre las luchas por el consenso ideológico y...

Nepantla: Views from South 1.1 (2000) 59-89 I began my research in cultural studies by focusing on issues of popular music and postmodernity, but the transversal paths that I mapped led me someplace else, to the intersection of three questions: The constitution and limits of philosophical modernity, the growing political and experiential dominance...

This article examines the current state of cultural studies. It argues for the need to delimit the field of cultural studies, proposing that the specificity of cultural studies as a way of politicizing theory and theorizing politics is given by its radical contextuality. It then goes on to consider some of the challenges that the contemporary conte...

This book offers a major reconceptualization of the term ?audience,” including the landscape of a given audience?the situated and territorializing… features of any way of seeing and defining the world. Given de Certeau’s hypothesis that listening, watching, and reading all occur in places and result in produce transformed paths or spaces, the contr...

Featuring new essays by such prominent cultural theorists as Tony Bennett, Homi Bhabha, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Constance Penley, Janice Radway, Andrew Ross, and Cornel West, Cultural Studies offers numerous specific cultural analyses while simultaneously defining and debating the common body of assumptions, questions, and concerns that have hel...

Contributors: Mavis Bayton, Jody Berland, Georgina Born, Marcus Breen, Reebee Garafolo, Line Grenier, Ross Harley, Steve Jones, Chris Lawe-Davies, Krister Malm, Paul Rutten, Will Straw, Roger Wallis, Peter Wicke

This paper considers the impact on cultural studies of its increasing internationalization. It argues for a conception of cultural studies which will enable it to escape from the consequences of its links with “modern” forms of power. It proposes a spatial and machinic model of power and attempts to rethink the meaning and place of identity within...

The most ambitious and broadly international collection on cultural studies ever published, this book is destined to shape research and teaching through the 1990s and beyond. It arrives at a time of high visibility for cultural studies but a time as well when cultural studies' long oppositional history is in danger--particularly in the United State...