Cultural Studies in the Future Tense by Lawrence Grossberg (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cultural Studies in the Future Tense by Lawrence Grossberg Eric Weisbard Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. By Lawrence Grossberg. Durham: Duke University Press. 2010. Cultural studies here is no vague term but the specific approach pioneered by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s under the leadership of Stuart Hall and encapsulated in such important books as Resistance Through Rituals, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, and The Black Atlantic. Lawrence Grossberg, though he only studied briefly at Birmingham, has long been the preeminent American champion of its methods, co-editing the immense 1992 compendium Cultural Studies and since 1990 the journal Cultural Studies. This book undertakes an impossible mission: to clarify the meaning of cultural studies for those now treating it as a grab bag of methodological options, contrast its origins with the very different moment we now find ourselves in, and seed a future for the field. At the core of it all is conjunctural analysis, the notion that one should apply theory to observable material so as to find the fracture points in social formations: their “problematic.” Cultural studies claims no grand victories, just highly contingent interventions. Grossberg values an “interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary” (15) scholarship, characterized by “modesty” rather than “imperializing discourse” (18–19). His repeated goal is to help us tell better stories—well, “produce better conjunctural stories” (101). Yet Grossberg is not shy in his claims, locating a centuries-in-the-making “liberal modernity” (69) that was already under siege in the 1970s and has since been decisively called into question by other visions of the modern. One of the real strengths of this book, unreplicable in a short review, is the author’s ability to gloss the massive literature of modernism, modernity, and modernization in service of his own synthesis. Our own conjuncture, Grossberg argues, entails a kind of “embedded disembededdness” (91) that fractures what should be social totality into economic, cultural, and political domains of apparent separation. This, rather than globalization or neoliberalism, is the beast we are up against. Grossberg in response wants to see conjunctural stories told about economics: the conversation about “value” (158), in a shifting space of actual and virtual capitalism, that economists and popular pundits refuse. He wants cultural studies of culture itself decoupled from much of what passes as media studies and Hall’s notion of “decoding,” reframed to better recognize what Joseph Nye calls culture’s “soft power” use [End Page 141] in empire and emotional and sensory valences. (To put it one way: cultural studies in the classic years loved punk rock; can it confront gaming?) And, in a chapter he endearingly confesses to be his “least satisfying” (4), he struggles to envision a cultural studies for politics that could be less theory driven and more able to address the complexities of the political in connecting the state, the body, and everyday life. What is the moral of this reckoning with conjunctural modernities? We are left with a graphic meant to represent the “stratifying machine” of the multiply modern (280). Time and space are the two axes. On this grid, overlapping, events of the moment get a circle; everyday life a pentagon; institutional space a rectangle; change and history a triangle. A final shape, a splotch, like a substance in a microscope slide, sits on top of the others: that is articulation, the way we mediate or belong to the real. It is all almost ostentatiously unclear. Early on, Grossberg writes: “Cultural studies attempts to strategically deploy theory (and empirical research)” (25). It would be good to see this important scholar reverse those terms, taking research—the illustrious development of a particular example—out of the parenthetical. Eric Weisbard University of Alabama Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association