Lawrence Grossberg,549 in his 2010 book entitled Cultural Studies in the Future Sense, argued that the concept of ‘culture, media and the popular […] have to be rethought in response to the historical specificities and changing empirical realities of the context.’550 In chapter
542 Mersch, 2013: p. 215
543 Ibid
544 Ibid, p. 216
545 Ibid
546 Ibib, p. 216
547 Grossberg, 2010: p. 580
548 Grossberg (2010) believed that ‘The logic of negativity is a theory of sets in which a set cannot be a member of itself. The result of this act of exclusion is the construction of a boundary that marks the necessary existence of a constitutive negation, although different versions of this logic may understand constitution differently (as simple negation, dialectical negation, productive negation, etc.). The result is always the space of a set which is unable to define itself.’ (p. 580).
549 Lawrence Grossberg is a cultural theorist. His mentors are Jim Carey and Stuart Hall.
550 Grossberg, 2010: p. 19
four of his book, ‘contextualizing culture: Mediation signification and significance,’
Grossberg interrogated the conceptual relationship between ‘mediation, affect and the cultural.’551 He positioned the real concern of cultural studies as ‘contexts’ and
‘conjunctures’ by studying ‘relations,’ ‘contextual’ and ‘historical specificity.’552 He held that, cultural studies are ‘understanding the present in the service of the future’ and are contextual and conjunctural practices.553 In his cultural studies approach, informed by critical paradigm, Grossberg criticised attempts ‘to find the universal in the concrete,’
since he believed ‘the concrete is not an occasion for philosophizing’ and the cultural theory must be ‘in the service of the concrete, enabling one to produce the concrete in more productive ways.’554
Grossberg defined the ‘cultural’ as ‘discursive expression and affective mediation’
and used two central concepts of ‘the media’ and ‘the popular’ in order to organise the
‘cultural field’ and ‘work of culture.’555 He primarily criticised the lack of contextualisation in definition of media and conceptualised mediation in relation to the cultural, affective logics and discursive formations.556 Grossberg examined the ‘new urgency’ of culture as ‘a new field of investigation’ in post-World War II.557 He believed that the culture became ‘the most important domain shaping people’s lives and their understandings of the worlds’ during the Cold War.558 In a way culture turned out to be an alternative to the alienated field of philosophy, which primarily questioned the meaning of the world. He argued that culture ‘as material practice’ is displaced into
‘culture as meaning, aesthetics, and textuality’ that produces ‘the ideology of ideology.’559
Grossberg highlighted the ‘extraordinary growth’ of media and culture during the Cold War decades and argued for the centrality and omnipresence of the culture, the
‘mediated nature’ and the ‘representational aspect of power,’ the ‘cultural construction of all of human reality.’560 He believe that culture has been reshaped in favour of
551 Grossberg, 2010: p. 531-571
552 Ibid, p. 486-487
553 Grossberg believed that the ‘contextualization’ involves the ‘forms of embeddedness and disembeddedness’ which are ‘not only articulatory – constituted through networks of relations and affiliation – but also machinic – produced through the agencies and apparatuses of the world-creation’ (p. 488).
554 Grossberg, 2010: p. 16
555 Grossberg (2010) identified ‘the cultural as apparatuses of mapping that depend upon the construction of others’ (p. 489). He put that the cultural is not ‘distinct and separable from some notion of a social or material reality but as an organization and distribution of affects (intensities) within and across the social formation’ (p. 490).
556 Grossberg (2010) believed that the central ‘disability to recognize the changes in the operation of culture and the popular is due, in part, to the decontextualised ways in which the concepts of the popular and the media have been used’ (p. 490).
557 Grossberg, 2010: p. 490-491.
558 Ibid, p. 504
559 Ibid
560 Ibid, p. 504-507
‘economic liberalism,’ through which ‘people construct themselves as responsible (economic) individuals.’561 The people of the twenty first century, in his view, see themselves ‘reflected’ in the discourses of economics, rather than the ‘domain of culture.’562 In other words, the economic is becoming the ‘ground’ of the ‘lived experience of the world.’563 The central concepts, which shaped the contemporary culture, in his view, are the popular and the media. He re-examined the relationship between the popular culture and the expansion of mass media and the development of media studies alongside the cultural studies. He raised the criticism against these two formations as they are ‘commonly equated’ and argued for the unique identity of each field. 564
Besides that, Grossberg posed critique on the evolution of media studies. He argued that, firstly, the media studies ‘misread the cultural studies as a theory of media’
since it failed to recognise the ‘contextual nature’ of the cultural studies.565 He believed that the media studies failed to contextualise the object of its study (limited to text/content and audience/user, production and reception, ‘textuality and sociality’) and relied on ‘universal definitions,’ methods and ‘decontextualized set of concern.’566 Secondly, media studies less concerned with the ‘general problematic of mediation,’ but emphasised the ‘unity and specificity of diverse media of communication,’ by having in mind the ‘mass communication’ and ignoring ‘pre-electronic’ and ‘non-mass distributed forms of communication.’567 Accordingly, the media played the role of means of communication and sensorium technological entity. Thirdly, media studies often assume
‘the media’ as stable and static concept, as if the content is the only change, rather than a dynamic and fluid notion.568 This idea will support the negative concept of media proposed by Mersch. Furthermore, media theories and the categories of media remained
561 Grossberg, 2010: p. p. 514
562 Ibid, p. 643. Grossberg stated that if ‘in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to be human was to be cultural (as in post-Kantian philosophy), or, in a different tradition, political – and in the postwar era, to be human was to be communicative – in the contemporary conjuncture, to be human is to be economic’ (p. 522).
563 Grossberg stated that if ‘in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to be human was to be cultural (as in post-Kantian philosophy), or, in a different tradition, political – and in the postwar era, to be human was to be communicative – in the contemporary conjuncture, to be human is to be economic’ (p. 522). Grossberg (2010) believed that ‘some economic apparatuses are functioning according to affective logics that enable them to be increasingly articulated to the popular, so that then the economic expands its ability to realize or articulate the virtual into the actual’ (p. 644).
564 See Grossberg, 2010: p. 589
565 Ibid, p. 591
566 See Ibid, p. 610
567 Ibid, p. 591
568 Grossberg (2010) criticised media researchers for taking for granted ‘the obviousness of the organization of media and popular formations, as well as how they are inserted into and operate within larger formations and contexts, enabling them to assume the nature of the object.’ In his view this resulted in considering ‘as if the object – media – has both not changed and has changed completely, enabling them to focus on the perpetually new – participatory culture, embodiment, virtual reality – even while the questions remain the same’ (p. 610).
largely unchanged, which cannot correspond to the contemporary practices.569 Fourthly, the temporality and changes are marginally conceptualised and the ‘either the old simply reproduce itself, or the new simply replace the old.’570
Grossberg, highlighted the fact that the notion of a medium is usually treated as
‘technology (or specific configuration of technologies),’ ‘a commodity or a cultural industry,’ ‘a format protocol, or logic of coding,’ ‘a thematic of content,’ ‘a sensorium or sensory economy (most commonly, oral, print, and electronic, or more recently, the distribution into visual culture and sound culture)’ or ‘infrastructure (e.g. commoditized, wired, broadcast, cable and wireless)’.571 He believed that the notion of media in each of these articulation is not fundamentally interrogated and conceptualised, and the frequent technological approaches raises the ‘controversial claim of determination’ and rejects the idea of ‘mediation’ and ‘intermediate agency.’572 He believed that the objects of media studies did not aim to study ‘the media qua media,’ rather ‘whatever can be brought under the sign of media’ (‘particular instances, episodes, icons, events, programs, genres, sites, forms, codes, etc.’).573
Grossberg believed that the concepts of media as technology or as content are
‘modalities of articulation creating environs or organizations that define the allowable logics of discourse and mediation.’574 He believed that the Canadian school of ‘medium studies’(e.g. works of Innis and McLuhan) truly reflected a holistic view about ‘the media’
and located them within a ‘broader cultural context, an environment within which life itself is organised.’575 Grossberg believed that media ‘set the shape, pace, rhythms, and topography of social life; they define space and time.’576 He believed that in the contemporary context we cannot articulate (and have no meaning) to ‘say that something is a medium.’577
Grossberg raised ontological question about the origin of media and their distinctive features which distinguish them as mediating and ‘affective apparatuses.’578 He concluded that
569 Grossberg (2010) highlighted that ‘the media are themselves constituted by and within changing contexts’ (p. 618). He believed that ‘the salience of the category of media as a central tool form making sense of what is happening cannot be taken for granted’ (ibid).
570 Grossberg, 2010: p. 610
571 Grossberg believed that ‘[r]arely are the possible or actual articulations among these different understandings of a medium interrogated, and even more rarely is that interrogation contextualized’ (Grossberg, 2010: p. 596).
572 Ibid, p. 595
573 Ibid, p. 596
574 Ibid
575 Ibid, p. 632
576 Ibid
577 Ibid, p. 631
578 For instance, Grossberg (2010) questioned ‘how the “media” themselves are produced, in the contemporary conjuncture?’ ‘how is the specificity of a medium constituted?’ and whether ‘is its
we will have to stop thinking about the media or about media worlds, and to interrogate worlds that are mediated in ways that we have yet to conceptualize. […] we bring “the media” back to the cultural, and ultimately to the question of mediation itself.
(Grossberg, 2010: p. 637)
There are various terminologies which are used by Grossberg to represent the contextuality of media, e.g. ‘field of media,’ ‘spaces’ of media, contemporary ‘media environment,’ and ‘media event.’ In his view, defining media in terms of mediation is the best solution to the contemporary deficit of a comprehensive theoretical and conceptual framework in media studies. He proposed that the mediation is significant in understanding the culture.579 Unlike the negative concept of media proposed by Mersch, Grossberg believed that the mediation affirms the ‘positivity,’ ‘reality’ and
‘multiplicity of mediation itself.’580 In his view the mediation cannot be simply reduced to the ‘signification and representation,’ since these are two ‘modes’ of discursive mediation.581
Grossberg defined mediation as ‘non-linear causality’ ‘movement of events or bodies from one set of relations to another as they are constantly becoming something other than what they are. It is the spaces between the virtual and the actual, of becoming actual.’582 In this sense, the mediation, is viewed as a positive dialectic of ‘becoming.’ He considered affect as the ‘energy of mediation.’583 Grossberg offered a theory of affect as
‘a complex set of mediations/effects’ that are ‘a-signifying,’ individual,’ ‘non-representational’ and ‘non-conscious,’ although they can produce ‘signification,’
‘individualities’ ‘representational forms,’ and ‘forms of consciousness.’584
It appears that his definition of mediation in relation to the cultural and affect can benefit a holistic theorisation of media. At this juncture, a review of post-medium theories is recapped briefly in the following and it is argued that Mersch and Grossberg critical approaches and cultural articulations of media can benefit theorisation of the contemporary mediation sphere.
distinctiveness technological, or as a system of representation, or as a system of consumption, or as a structure of experience?’ (p. 636).
579 Grossberg, 2010: p. 545
580 Ibid
581 Grossberg believed that the ‘discourse can produce many different kinds of mediations or effects, and these effects can then be articulated to many different uses’ (Grossberg, 2010: p. 551).
582 Ibid, p. 550
583 Ibid
584 Ibid, p. 556