Lawrence Grossberg and Cultural Studies Today Adriana Braga
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www.e-compos.org.br | E-ISSN 1808-2599 | Lawrence Grossberg and Cultural Studies Today Adriana Braga 1/13 Adriana Braga: Professor Grossberg, could Abstract you tell us a bit about your early steps on the Lawrence Grossberg is a scholar at the University of academic career? How did you decide being North Carolina (USA) and one of the most prominent exponents of American Cultural Studies, having a scholar, where did you study and who were worked with Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart and James your major influences? W. Carey. Author of Mediamaking: mass media and popular culture (with Charles Whitney and Ellen Wartella, Sage Publishers, 1998) and Caught Lawrence Grossberg: I started by intellectual in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s development – in high school – as a science jock. Future (Paradigm Publishers, 2005), in June, 2013, professor Grossberg has been the Keynote Speaker I loved all things mathematical and scientific. I of the 22nd Annual Meeting of Compós, in Salvador, wanted to be a biochemist, and work in the Brazil. In this interview, Lawrence Grossberg speaks of his influences and of contemporary challenges for rapidly emerging field of genetics. I even a cultural studies perspective. participated in some research, albeit as the lowest person on the totem pole as it were, on Key words Cultural Studies. Communication Theory. messenger RNA. So I went off to the University of Rochester to follow that trajectory. Whether by necessity or the accident of the particular professors I studied with, I discovered two things. First you had to memorize a lot of stuff – chemical formulas for example, and I could never understand why, since it was there in the textbooks, and I could look them Adriana Braga | [email protected] up whenever I needed to (this was long before Professor at the Social Communications Department of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), researcher of the PCs). And second, scientists were supposed National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and Editor of E-Compós Journal to read science and little else. But I hated 2013. maio./ago. n.2, v.16, Brasília, em Comunicação | E-compós, Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação Revista da www.e-compos.org.br | E-ISSN 1808-2599 | memorization, and I had broader aspirations. It the music was so important and what sort was the mid-1960s, and I there was a lot going of politics this was. At the Centre, I worked on, and a lot I wanted to read. As fate would with Richard Hoggart and most closely with have it, I discovered some wonderful professors Stuart Hall – who had and continues to have in literature, philosophy (Richard Taylor, Lewis a profound influence on my work, my ideas, Beck, and history (Hayden White, Loren Baritz), my ways of thinking, and my understanding comparative literature (Norman O. Brown) and of politics. Stuart – along with the collective, religion (William Hamilton). To my mind, their because the effort to invent cultural studies was work all seemed to fit together like the pieces a collaborative one – taught me to think of a puzzle. It was here that my two major complexity, taught me that ideas matter, and 2/13 interests – philosophy and the relation of culture he taught me what it means to be a political (whether philosophy or popular culture) took intellectual. At the Centre, I began to sense the shape. I wrote a senior honors thesis on music radical nature of the project of cultural studies and the counterculture – the beginning of my as a different way of bringing ideas, research academic career as it were. and politics together. It is a project I have been committed to for over forty years now. By the time I graduated, it was the late 1960s and choices were becoming more constrained To make a long story short, I did not keep a low because of the Vietnam war and the draft. With profile and got involved in anti-war/university the help of a Wilson Fellowship, my professors protests. Subsequently, I left England with sent me off to work – and keep a low profile – a French-speaking, Swiss based, anarchist, at a newly formed Centre for Contemporary itinerant theater commune called Les Treteaux Cultural Studies at Birmingham University Libres. When I was able to return to the US, I UK. I had no idea what cultural studies was, had various jobs in New York city, until I decided and I am not sure my professors had either, to go back to do my doctorate because it was but Richard Hoggart had spent some time at clear that (1) the revolution was not imminent, Rochester and become friends with some of and (2) all of my passions – music, politics, my professors, so they were among the only reading, talking – came together only in the people in the US who even knew of the Centre’s subject-position of the professor. So I asked existence. So there I was at the Centre. Each Stuart where I could go to continue the sort student had to have a thesis project – and so I of work of the Centre – and he told me that he decided to continue my investigations – rather knew of only person who was moving along the ill-formed I must admit – into music and the same paths – James W. Carey at the University counterculture. I was trying to figure out why of Illinois. So I corresponded with Jim, and I 2013. maio./ago. n.2, v.16, Brasília, em Comunicação | E-compós, Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação Revista da www.e-compos.org.br | E-ISSN 1808-2599 | finagled my way into the program he directed, of compassion and justice – and political hope which I subsequently discovered was called – that I have always tried to sustain. And both the Institute for Communications Research, loved and were absolutely committed to teaching which was among the very first academic and their students. Jim died some years ago, but institutions of communications as a field, and Stuart still remains my mentor, and my friend. at Illinois, was radically interdisciplinary (and therefore messy, which was great). Jim Adriana Braga: Cultural Studies’ ‘classical’ was my other great mentor and exemplar of a theoretical formulations were developed from political intellectual. From him, I learned what the late 1960’s to mid 1980’s, in a political it actually meant to do interdisciplinary work, context of Cold War, civil rights, anti-racist 3/13 and how to measure the value of ideas in their and feminist movements, and this connection encounter with the empirical world. His work to the zeitgeist were a defining feature was rooted in pragmatism (the Chicago School), of its approach. However, since then, the cultural anthropology, American Studies, and world has changed a lot, with globalization political economy (not Marxist but Canadian, as of the economy and culture, and the in the work of Harold Innis), and he fought for advance of technologies of information and the space of what he called cultural studies and communication that changed social practices a cultural approach to communication within and the way we live. How can a Cultural the American academy. Studies perspective help us to understand the contemporary communicational scenario? Both Stuart and Jim were extraordinary teachers, talkers – and it cannot be coincidental, Lawrence Grossberg: This is just the right for both, their chosen medium was the essay! question we should all be asking. Cultural I am sure that has shaped me as well. Both studies emerged at a particular moment, were committed to the effort to think about although that moment was materially and the real world, using sophisticated theoretical experientially distinct in different locations. tools without being driven by them, in all its Still there were certain crucial constitutive specificity and complexity. Both believed that features characterizing the formations and academic work mattered (and they believed processes of social change following the Second that passionately, as if it were the core of their World War – and the various crises that emerged being) even as they both understood that it following, culminating in economic, political cannot operate at the same pace of social-political and cultural struggles of the 1960s. There struggle, but maybe they wrote essays precisely was, in my terms, a struggle over the emergent because of that gap. Both were driven by a sense possibilities of modernity. But there were, and 2013. maio./ago. n.2, v.16, Brasília, em Comunicação | E-compós, Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação Revista da www.e-compos.org.br | E-ISSN 1808-2599 | are, two dimensions to cultural studies as it demands. Methodologically, how to cope with emerged: Williams refers to them as the project the bias from personal positions, how to avoid and the formations. I think that the heart composing a pamphlet instead of a research? of cultural studies is a project – a radically contextual, anti-universalizing intellectual Lawrence Grossberg: Again, a very good – and practice that is committed to complexity, important – question, especially since, in my opposed to any and all forms of reductionism, opinion, too many progressive intellectuals etc. This project remains constant across various have succumbed to the temptation of producing “conjunctural” or contextual moments. But the pamphlets and political screeds as if they were particular formation – the political struggles and scholarly works. This is not to say that such 4/13 possibilities at stake, the questions that need to work cannot be intellectual or insightful, but for be asked, the theoretical and empirical resources me the true mark of the scholar-intellectual is that are available to begin to construct answers – that he or she is always open to the possibility all these things have to be continuously challenged that he or she is wrong.