Spatial materialism

Abstract

In a series of essays published in the 1990s, Lawrence Grossberg proposed a spatial-materialist cultural studies, arguing that our key metatheoretical assumptions about reality, agency, ethics and politics needed to be reconceptualized on amodern philosophical terrain – not within, or even against, the philosophical frameworks of modernism and postmodernism but outside them. To develop this alternative terrain, Grossberg has drawn on the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose work was based on a Spinozist ontology, a ‘monism of multiplicities’. Grossberg argues that Deleuzean philosophy provides cultural studies with a way out of the epistemological problematic that has dominated critical theory. He has used on Deleuzean ontology to argue against modernist, postmodernist and post-structuralist conceptualizations of identity and subjectivity and proposes, instead, that cultural studies develop a machinic theory of agency. Grossberg has also used Deleuzean philosophy to reconsider the ethics and politics of cultural studies, proposing a politics of ‘spatial becoming’. This essay seeks to highlight the productive conceptual moves that Grossberg makes, to clarify some concepts that remain ambiguous in his approach, and to identify certain claims that merit further critical consideration. Grossberg's work repositions cultural studies in relation to the discursive terrain of modern philosophy and theory, opening up new routes for thought and action. In doing so, it clarifies, rearticulates and, in many ways, radicalizes the critical interventions that reshaped cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. But Grossberg's most important contribution to cultural studies has remained implicit: by following Deleuze and Guattari, we are drawn into an affective state of theoretical affirmation and practical composition – a stance that is quite different from both modernist and postmodernist postures of critique.