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An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg. Personal Reflections on the Politics and Practice of Cultural Studies

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An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg. Personal Reflections on the Politics and Practice of Cultural Studies ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 32.2 (December 2010): 107–120 ISSN 0210-6124 An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg. Personal Reflections on the Politics and Practice of Cultural Studies Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy University of Zaragoza [email protected] LAWRENCE GROSSBERG, one of the leading exponents of the cultural studies project today, is Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Anthropology and Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Apart from over one hundred already published articles and essays, he is also the author and editor of numerous books, including It's a Sin: Essays on Postmodernism, Politics and Culture (1988), We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (1992), Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays in Popular Culture (1997); Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America’s Future (2005), as well as the forthcoming, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (2010). Professor Grossberg is also co-editor (with Della Pollock) of the journal Cultural Studies, which is one of the longest-running and most respected academic journals in its field, and one of the founders of the influential and thriving world Association for Cultural Studies (ACS). 1) Professor, by way of introduction and/or presentation, I have picked an item from your life history that, I believe, may be fairly incomprehensible to newcomers trying to situate you and your work within the field of cultural studies. How is it that an American under- graduate in Philosophy and History should end up studying at Birmingham University at the end of the sixties? LG: An interesting question. It is perhaps not as strange as it might appear on first glance. As it turns out, Richard Hoggart, the founder of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, had spent a year visiting at my university, before I was there, and had become friends with some of my professors, so they were among the very few academics in the U.S. who knew anything about the CCCS. And you have to remember when I graduated: 1968. These were, shall we say, tumultuous times and because of my political activities and the realities of the military draft, it seemed reasonable for me to leave the country. Fortunately, I had won a Wilson Fellowship to pay for my graduate education. My professors suggested that I use it to go to the Centre where, they assured me, my interests would be deepened and my politics supported, while being able to keep a low profile. 2) In intellectual and cultural histories of the field, the origins of your considerable contribution to the project of cultural studies are usually traced back to the political, methodological, theoretical training you received at the Birmingham school, but your days 108 Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy as a graduate student at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies were really quite short-lived weren’t’ they? What happened? LG: I did not keep a low profile! I got involved in a student strike at Birmingham, which brought my presence there—I was described as an outside agitator—to the attention of various authorities. And, simultaneously, I met a very politicized and countercultural theatre group who invited me to go with them to the continent. I remember a wonderful evening with Richard Hoggart, sharing a bottle of whiskey, where he helped me to decide to stand up to my fears and go with the group. So it seemed at the moment that the wisest course of action was to leave the country rather quickly. 3) When on tour, did this theatre group ever come over and perform in Spain? If so, what were your impressions of, and experiences in, Franco-ist Spain? LG: The group traveled all around Europe in 1969 and 1970, and we tried to go to Spain. We even had some performances booked if I remember correctly, but when we got to the border, there was no way the border guards were going to let in these two van loads of hippie communist anarchists …, so no, I never did get to Spain. 4) Looking back, which would you say was the most important of your undergraduate experiences in shaping your decision, and henceforth your intellectual trajectory and professional career: your university training in History and Philosophy, your studies at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or your theatre venture? LG: You ask what were the most important determining factors in shaping my intellectual trajectory and professional career. And I would have to answer, all of them. I am a great believer in complexity and overdetermination. I think my undergraduate education shaped my love of philosophy and defined my interest—partly through my participation in the counterculture—in the relation of culture and politics. My time at Birmingham defined the project—a particular way of being an intellectual and doing political intellectual work—that has driven my entire career. And my experience in the theatre company taught me how to perform and helped me develop my own style. 5) Once ‘settled’ as Professor of Communication Studies at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, did your cultural studies’ ‘streak’ ever become a matter of controversy or prove to be a challenge for you professionally? LG: My first teaching job, which only lasted for a year, was at Purdue University in Indiana. I did not like it, and they had no interest, really, in any of my work. So I took a job in Speech Communication back at Illinois. Now perhaps I should back up. When I got to Birmingham, one of the things you had to do was define an individual research project, and I decided to continue the work I had begun as an undergraduate on popular music. Let me be clear—what I was interested in was not popular music, but the counterculture and politics, and I was convinced that, somehow, music was one of the keys one needed to unpack and understand the politics of the counterculture. So, at Illinois I continued my interests. I was defined, and presented myself as having three fields: philosophy (and I was one of the people who created as it were something that is still called the philosophy of communication); cultural studies (although almost no one ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 32.2 (December 2010): 107–120 ISSN 0210-6124 An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg 109 outside of Illinois had ever heard of it); and popular music (rock and roll, and again, I suppose, I was one of the people who helped eventually to establish the idea of popular music studies as a legitimate field, although again, I was never interested in the study of popular music for its own sake). Now the truth is that just about all of my professors— with the exception of Jim Carey—thought I was crazy and constantly tried to discourage me. There would be no jobs, they said. None of these fields had any legitimacy or even recognizability at the time. And, for the most part, what I encountered from the university in general, and in the discipline of communication studies, was largely hostility—hostility to the political and interdisciplinary project of cultural studies, hostility to theory per se, and, certainly, hostility to the idea of taking popular culture—and especially rock and roll—seriously. But I was fortunate to win a few allies—not always people who were doing or wanted to do anything similar, but who recognized that the very strength of communication studies was its openness to multiple questions and perspectives. Now, I think, all three of my foci have become legitimate and even powerful forces in the academy. Having said that, there has always been, and no doubt will continue to be, hostility to each of them—although I think that both theory and popular culture have established themselves, although I do not always like the ways they have done so. Cultural studies is a different story—it has become successful—in some places and some disciplines, but at the same time, there are always forces standing up against it, and I sometimes wonder what the price of success has been, since I simply do not recognize much of what passes for cultural studies in the United States. I often do not know what people mean when they say cultural studies, whether as its champions or its enemies. And today, there is certainly both a disciplinary backlash against the interdisciplinary project of cultural studies, and an administrative, ‘neo-liberal’ effort to reconstitute the university in ways that would leave little or no space for critical projects like cultural studies. You may know this, but when I was hired at North Carolina, it was partly to help create a formal program in cultural studies, which has been very successful for almost fifteen years, and had garnered a good reputation internationally, But now, that program has been closed down by an administrative who is opposed, in my opinion, not only to interdisciplinarity in general but to cultural studies in particular. And since the times are bad economically, he can use that as a cover from which there is no appeal. 6) Cultural Studies has always been recognized as a particularly diverse (and often highly contested) field of intellectual debate. Given how central your work has been to the establishment of Cultural studies in the States, could you tell us a little about your opinions and/or position respecting those, at times, disparaging accounts of the ‘Americanization’ of cultural studies? LG: Let me begin by saying something, which I have said many times, about the diverse nature of cultural studies.
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