Lawrence Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of many books, including Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future, Bringing it all Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies, and Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (the last two both also published by Duke University Press). He is a co-editor of collections including About Raymond Williams, New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Without Guarantees: Essays in Honor of Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies, and Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. He is a co-editor of the journal Cultural Studies.

Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

By Lawrence Grossberg

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4844-3

Contents

Thanks…………………………………………………………………………….xiIntroduction: We All Want to Change the World………………………………………….1one. The Heart of Cultural Studies……………………………………………………7two. Constructing the Conjuncture: Struggling over Modernity…………………………….57three. Considering Value: Rescuing Economies from Economists…………………………….101four. Contextualizing Culture: Mediation, Signification, and Significance…………………169five. Complicating Power: The “And” of Politics, and …………………………………..227six. In Search of Modernities………………………………………………………..259Notes……………………………………………………………………………..295Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….329Index……………………………………………………………………………..351

Chapter One

The Heart of Cultural Studies

In the past decades, “cultural studies” has gained public visibility both as something to be embraced and as something to be attacked (for many different reasons from all sides of the various political spectra). It has moved rapidly across geographical, disciplinary, and political spaces. Of course, outside of and long before this public visibility, people have been doing cultural studies, some without ever naming their project as cultural studies, or even wanting such a shared identity. It has appeared, largely after the Second World War, in a variety of places, arising from a variety of disciplines and intellectual projects. Admittedly, defining cultural studies is a risky business. Lots of people claim to be doing it. Yet the fact is that few people working in or against cultural studies agree on a definition. Any definition is likely to disown at least some people who want to locate themselves within cultural studies. This is often taken as evidence of the need to avoid offering one. It is sometimes assumed that any definition would inevitably police the boundaries, and that this would contradict the politics of cultural studies.

I think that we need to take the risk. Without some sense of the specificity of cultural studies, there is nothing to prevent it from becoming the latest administrative appropriation and marginalization of critical or politically inflected scholarship. More importantly, without this sense of specificity, precisely what it brings to the political-intellectual table is too easily lost, as it increasingly becomes an almost empty signifier of the study of culture, or the study of the politics of culture, which sends it back into a marketing strategy. So I hope that my efforts in this book will be read not as a glance backward, as if the relevant question were to judge various candidates, but rather as a projection forward, to embrace a project. I want to join a conversation about how we should use our energy and labor as scholars.

Let me state it very clearly. I do not think cultural studies is about culture, although culture is crucial to its project. Cultural studies is not the study of texts or textuality; it does not aim to interpret or judge particular texts or kinds of texts. It is not about reading social power off of texts, or reading social realities as texts. It is not the practice of reading the world in a grain of sand. Nor is it the study of national cultures, nor a new approach to language or area studies, although I do think it has something to say to all of these. Nor can it be defined by a focus on mass culture, or popular culture, or subaltern cultures. It is not about theory as a metaphor for or a guarantee of the inscription of power, whether in texts or social life.

I might begin by describing cultural studies this way: it is concerned with describing and intervening in the ways cultural practices are produced within, inserted into, and operate in the everyday life of human beings and social formations, so as to reproduce, struggle against, and perhaps transform the existing structures of power. That is, if people make history but in conditions not of their own making, cultural studies explores the ways this process is enacted with and through cultural practices, and the place of these practices within specific historical formations. But this too is inadequate, so I might try again.

Cultural studies describes how people’s everyday lives are articulated by and with culture. It investigates how people are empowered and disempowered by the particular structures and forces that organize their everyday lives in contradictory ways, and how their (everyday) lives are themselves articulated to and by the trajectories of economic, social, cultural, and political power. Cultural studies explores the historical possibilities of transforming people’s lived realities and the relations of power within which those realities are constructed, as it reaffirms the vital contribution of cultural (and intellectual) work to the imagination and realization of such possibilities. Cultural studies is concerned with the construction of the contexts of life as matrices of power, understanding that discursive practices are inextricably involved in the organization of relations of power. It attempts to use the best intellectual resources available to gain a better understanding of the state of play of power as a balance in the field of forces constitutive of a particular context, believing that such knowledge will better enable people to change the context and hence the relations of power. That is, it seeks to understand not only the organizations of power but also the possibilities of survival, struggle, resistance, and change. It takes contestation for granted, not as a reality in every instance, but as an assumption necessary for the existence of critical work, political opposition, and even historical change.

Yet it seems to me that even this misses something crucial about cultural studies; in fact, it misses precisely that which is the heart of cultural studies, what defines its specificity and its passion. As Stuart Hall (1992a, 292) put it once, talking about cultural studies in the United States:

It needs a whole range of work to say what it is in this context. What it is in relation to this culture that would genuinely separate it from earlier work or work done elsewhere. I’m not sure that Cultural Studies in the United States has actually been through that moment of self-clarification…. I do think it matters what it is in particular situations … it’s the precise insertion of a certain kind of critical practice at an institutional moment and that moment is precisely the moment of academic institutional life in this country.

That institutional life is only the most immediate context of our work as intellectuals, and it cannot be separated from its relations to other proximate and concentric contexts of social, political, economic, and cultural life—that is, from the entirety of the social formation.

I believe that the project of cultural studies, which binds different people and work together, involves a commitment to a particular practice of intellectual-political work, and to the claim that such intellectual work matters both inside and outside of the academy. Cultural studies is a way of inhabiting the position of scholar, teacher, artist, and intellectual, one way (among many) of politicizing theory and theorizing politics. The project of cultural studies is an effort to find an intellectual practice that is responsible to the changing context (changing geographical, historical, political, intellectual, and institutional conditions) in which it works. As such, it constructs for itself a more limited and modest claim to authority than one is used to from the academy; it refuses any and all dreams of universal, absolute, complete, and perfect truth, and at the same time, it refuses to give up the dream of truth to the burdens of relativism. Its modesty is based in its rigorous efforts to tell the best story that can be told, about any context, within that context. It accepts that knowledge and politics, as well as the tools of their production, are always, unavoidably, contextually bound. But it refuses to conclude that knowledge or judgments about competing knowledges are impossible; it wants to hold on to a more modest conception of the possibility and authority of knowledge. At the same time, its modesty undermines any assumption that being a cultural studies scholar (or having an expertise in culture and in practices of interpretation) makes one into an expert on everything and anything. Instead, cultural studies takes work!

I want to try to define that common project, to perhaps explicate something about the “heart” of cultural studies as both its center and the source of at least some of the passion behind the work. To do so I will start by telling two stories: the first, largely autobiographical, retrospectively reads my desire for cultural studies out of my experience at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom; the second will describe the project of cultural studies as the effort to produce knowledge based on a commitment to radical contextuality and a political engagement with the possibilities of social transformation. I will then try to conceptualize the category of context, identifying the conjuncture as the specific understanding of context in cultural studies. Finally I will briefly show how different formations of cultural studies can be seen as responses to different conjunctural problematics.

In Search of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

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) at Birmingham University in England. This was the result, as are so many important life-defining events, of the intersection of a number of fortuitous events and determined social forces. I was caught up, as were so many others, in a set of struggles and changes that seemed momentous at the time. This moment has been somewhat mythologized as “the sixties,” defined by the emergence of a number of interconnected and competing political struggles (black power, the anti–Vietnam War movement, a popular anti-government and anti-capitalist democratic socialism, a revised marxism, anti-colonial liberation movements, feminism, environmentalism, etc.) and cultural changes (e.g., youth culture and the explosion of mediated popular culture, but also the appearance of various subcultures and countercultures built of new spiritualisms, drugs, etc.). For those of us at universities, myself included, it was often the Vietnam War, and the protests against it, that played a large role in shaping our immediate futures, and in my case, in sending me to the CCCS.

To be honest, I had no idea what the Centre was. I had never heard of Richard Hoggart or Stuart Hall (then the founding director and associate director, respectively). I went with an interest in the “social life” of ideas (philosophies) and popular symbols, and an abiding interest in how popular music functioned to bind together politics and the popular on the one hand, and the various political and cultural fractions of what was then known as The Movement on the other. I had no idea what cultural studies was—my professors at the University of Rochester assured me that I would feel intellectually at home there—but fortunately, most people at the Centre were equally uncertain. To repeat a common phrase (first used I think by Angela McRobbie [1994, 48]), we all understood that we were making it up as we went along. It was in the often fraught, contradictory, and tension-filled, but for me always exciting, generous, and open-minded space of the Centre that the trajectory of my intellectual and political life was initiated.

The Centre was a response to significant social and cultural changes characterizing postwar British life (e.g., immigration, the impact of U.S. culture, the “disappearance” of the working class, new international relations) and the political challenges they posed. More broadly, the Centre was a response, on the one hand, to the rapid processes of social change and the increasingly visible impact of cultural changes, which seemed to bring the messiness of the world onto the academic agenda, and on the other hand, to changes in and challenges to the institution of the academy and the forms of academic practice, which seemed to call for a reconsideration of at least a part of the function of the intellectual.

I did not stay at the Centre as long as I would have liked; I simultaneously fled the traces of the Vietnam War in Britain and embraced the countercultural possibilities of an itinerant Swiss anarchist theater commune. No doubt, the brevity of my sojourn at the CCCS had consequences, both positive and negative. Most importantly, what I took away from the Centre was not any sense or even any particular part of the theoretical trajectory that defined the history of the Centre, nor did I leave with a specific set of problematics (as I will talk about soon) that came to be associated with different eras and groups at the Centre. Instead, what I took away was an understanding of cultural studies as a response to a series of frustrations with and criticisms of existing academic practices and as an attempt to do the work differently.

Hoggart had created the Centre to realize his particular vision that culture (primarily literature and art but also expressive culture more broadly understood) made available, to those trained to find it, a distinctive kind of social knowledge that is unavailable through any other means. It is a kind of knowledge that Hoggart (1996; 1970) describes at various times as poetic, metaphoric, intuitive, and subjective. It is a privileged knowledge of or access to what Williams (1961) called the “structure of feeling.” Producing such knowledge requires a careful scrutiny of “the words on the page” through “literary-critical analysis,” moving between what Hoggart (1970) called “reading for tone” (in all its psychological, cultural, and aesthetic complexity) and “reading for value,” which was different from making value judgments. “Reading for value” seeks to uncover the complex field of values that is embodied, reflected, or resisted in the work. Crucially, Hoggart argued that such literary-critical methods could be fruitfully brought to bear on a wider range of human activities and products than traditional literary critics might have imagined. In particular, Hoggart wanted to move such analysis from the realm of high culture into the class, popular, and media cultures that increasingly occupied the center stage of modern Western societies.

This literary-critical practice defined one of the weekly seminars that constituted the regular business of the Centre. Once a week, Hoggart (or another faculty member or visiting researcher) presented the students with a mimeographed copy of passages from some text—at the beginning, from works of high literature, but as the year progressed, from more popular literary works, and even excerpts from mass media. While the works were identified at first, as the year moved on, we were often given works without any identification and asked to figure out where they might have come from. Sometimes we were asked to compare passages, determining by such careful scrutiny which were “high literature,” which popular literature, and which mass media. The entire year in that seminar was spent honing the skills necessary to read for tone and values.

The other seminars were: (1) a reading seminar, later called the theory seminar, under the guidance of Stuart Hall, in which we read an enormously wide range of texts in sociological and anthropological theory, pragmatism, existentialism, semiotics, etc., and in which participants explored how to theorize the project, largely, if naively, in terms of the relations between culture and society as it had been formulated by Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart; and (2) a research seminar, in which individuals presented their own research, and eventually, a collective and collaborative—group—research project was formulated around a particular text, “Cure for Marriage.” It was here, in practice and in research, that the participants tried to figure out what cultural studies was, and what it meant to do it: what did it mean to understand culture in relation to society, and society through culture? And it was here that participants tried to come to terms with the demand for complexity and interdisciplinarity that was implicit in Williams’s (1961, 63) definition of cultural studies as “the study of the relationships between elements in a whole way of life.” Cultural studies is “the attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships.”

I was attracted, not to the critical practice (e.g., reading values off of texts), but to the larger questions that, for Hoggart and Hall, founded the project of cultural studies. The question Hoggart (1969, 18) posed to the texts was not, as it became at a later moment at the Centre, what people do with a text, but “What relationship does this … complex text have to the imaginative life of the individuals who make up its audience?” For Hoggart, culture gives us knowledge of life embodied, life lived in all its complexity, the experiential wholeness of life, or what Auden called (and Hoggart was fond of quoting) “the real world of theology and horses.” Culture gives us access to the texture of life as it is lived, as it develops in a particular historical and moral context; it tells us what it felt like to be alive at a certain time and place.

(Continues…)

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