Architects of Communication Scholarship - Lawrence Grossberg

4:32AM Mar 11, 2022

Speakers:

Larry Grossberg

Ellen Wartella

Carolyn Hardin

Keywords:

cultural studies

communication

intellectual

people

carey

stuart hall

university

friends

institutional

world

lectures

teach

hear

fled

larry

hayden

space

academic

popular

study

ICA Presents .

Hello, I’m Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, we are going to hear about Larry Grossberg. Larry Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He’s been since 1994 where he's retiring this spring. He has held additional appointments in American Studies, Anthropology and Geography. He studied at the University of Rochester with Hayden White and Richard Taylor, at The Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Bermingham, England with Stuart Hall and Richard Hogert and he completed his PhD at the University of Illinois with James Carey in 1976. Larry was the editor of the Journal of Cultural Studies from 1990 through 2018. He has published ten books and edited another eleven as well as over 250 essays and dozens of interviews in English. His work has been translated into twenty languages and additionally, he has published numerous original books and essays in other languages as well as lecturing all over the world. He has advised over 50 doctoral students and been honored for his scholarship, teaching and mentorship by the International Communication Association, The National Communication Association, The Association for Cultural Studies, and The University of North Carolina. Our interviewer today is Carolyn Hardin. She is currently an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Miami University & Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cultural Economy. She holds a PhD in Communication and Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here's Carolyn.

Hello and welcome to the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast brought to you by the International Communication Association. My name is Carey Hardin. I am Assistant Professor of Media and Communication & American Studies at Miami University. I am honored to have been invited to engage in a conversation with Dr. Larry Grossberg, Co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies and Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was lucky enough to study with Larry at Carolina and earned my PhD in communication. Today we have a conversation about his background, education, the way that he’s navigated the relationship between the field of Communication and Cultural Studies, and his impact as an Architect of Communication. Hi, Larry. So could you share a bit of your personal history, early personal history?

I was born in New York City and grew up in Brooklyn on the southern shore. I'll say two things about growing up. One was as my ex-friend Simon Frith used to say, my whole life can be explained by the two jobs my father had. My father when I was very young was a captain in the New York City police force. He got injured on the job and retired and became the general manager for the world's largest Halloween costume manufacturing company. So you know, the popular and the police. And I went to public schools in Brooklyn until high school when I went to Stuyvesant High School. It was all boys when I went there, and it had extraordinary teachers and extraordinary students and I had a great time. And then I applied to university to go to study biochemistry and genetics. I had to choose between Yale and the University of Rochester, Yale, at the time was also all men and the thought of another four years in an all male environment. No, I wasn’t going to deal with that. I went to the University of Rochester where there was one of the leading figures in the newly emerging field of biochemical genetics, Wolf Vishniac. And got there in 1964, And lo and behold, I hated my professors. And so I lucked into meeting two wonderful professors in philosophy, Richard Taylor, and I also met Hayden White, who was in the history department, and the two of them became my advisors. I studied intellectual history and philosophy and graduated in 1968. I had been involved in various, what shall we say, cultural and political activities of the second half of the 60s, and they caught up with me, and I got my draft notice. So I fled the country. And on the advice of Hayden and some other historians, I went to the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. So I went to Birmingham. And then of course, I discovered Cultural Studies and Stuart Hall.

This question I think you may take issue with but you're known to many as the founder of American Cultural Studies. How did you come to have that moniker from the time that you arrived at Birmingham till you had your major influence in the United States?

I'm pretty sure it's not a moniker I deserve. I think what I did was to bring British cultural studies to America, an Anti-Cultural Studies person once described me as the CEO of Cultural Studies, it's probably more accurate insofar as, in part, a lot of what I did was institutional work, organizing the conferences, publishing two books. And then early on taking over the editorship of the Journal of Cultural Studies, a lot of people in the United States, when they hear my name, they think of those institutional accomplishments. So if I am one of the founders of American Cultural Studies, it’s probably how they think of me outside the United States.

Yes. And you've spoken before about the relationship between Cultural Studies specifically in the US and Communication Studies. I wonder how you see yourself fitting into the ladder.

After I spent a little over a year at Birmingham, I had to leave the country again for political reasons. And when I could finally return to the United States I asked Stuart where to go and he sent me to Jim Carey, and I wrote to Jim Carey, I just said “I want to come work with you”. And he wrote back and he said, “Well, you know, we do have application procedures and deadlines”. I wrote him back and said, “Yes, but Stuart Hall said you're the person I should work with”. A week later, I got a letter admitting me to the Institute of Communication Research and offering me a fellowship, I had never heard of a discipline called Communication, Illinois had this proseminar every first year had to take in a consistent of lectures by all the faculty affiliated with the Institute for Communications Research, and they would come in and tell you about Psycho Linguistics or Cybernetics, or Chomsky Linguistics or Anthropological Linguistics or, you know, Mass Media Theory or Marxist Film Theory. And I went up to Jim Carey, halfway through the course. And I said, “I have no idea what communication is based on these lectures”. And he said, “Good, now you understand it”. There were two places in America where people were talking, however vaguely, and minutely about Cultural Studies, one was amongst progressive education faculty, so called critical pedagogy, and the other was in a few Communication Departments in which Jim Carey was the leading figure. So it became a home, I was able to do it because well, I could claim that some of the objects that I was studying popular music for the first 10 years of my career, although no one in the discipline was studying popular music, I could at least make the argument that popular music belonged in a Communication department. But the first job I got, the job was advertised as a job to teach Mass Communication, Quantitative Research. You know, I'd heard two lectures on it. And then after the first quarter of the course, I turned it into a Cultural Studies course.

Speaking of that fit, then you've mentioned James Carey as a mentor. Are there other mentors in communication in particular?

I cared about being an intellectual, but you soon discover that you have to do institutional work if you want to make a space for yourself and for others, and I found people in the discipline who mentored me about that, gave me advice, who explained to me how ICA works in ways that are different from NCA and things have didn't make sense to me. At first, the most significant have been, or were Stuart Hall and James Carey, and then I would add Hayden white, and Richard Taylor. Hayden White was the best lecturer I had ever heard. And people tell me he was amongst the greatest. Jim Carey was an extraordinary teacher, and a brilliant mind. And Stuart Hall is incomparable. Stuart was as close as I can imagine getting to perfection as one could. Stuart taught me what it meant to be an intellectual as opposed to an academic. Stuart taught me and Jim reinforced it, how to think, how to lecture, how to teach, how to have the courage to stand up as a political intellectual, what the function of a political intellectual was. The four of them shaped entirely who I am.

Will you define that distance between an intellectual and an academic a little bit more precisely?

Being an intellectual is a passion and the drive to understand the world. Being an academic is a career. There are no rules for being intellectual, except that I think you have to strive to figure out a way to bring together your passion and your rigor. You know, I had lots of trouble when I started to teach popular music and rock and roll, first because they didn't think it was a serious enough subject. And then when I finally convinced them it was, they told me I couldn't teach you because I was too passionate about it. And I said, Okay, I'll agree to that as long as you say that no one can teach Shakespeare who is passionate about Shakespeare, so they backed off. There are rules of academics, you know exactly what you have to do to keep your job, you know, what you have to do to get promoted. I love teaching, as well as thinking, but it's a job. I can't say certain kinds of things when I'm teaching. But I don't think there are limits on what an intellectual can say. For the latter half of the 20th century, the most obvious place to be an intellectual was in the university to become an academic, I'm not sure that's true anymore. I think universities have made it harder and harder for us to be intellectuals because the rules have become more and more constraining. Today, in the academy, people are basically told that they have to sell themselves. People assert themselves with a sense of certainty. And I think those are beliefs, but that's not the function of an intellectual to tell you what he or she believes, the function of an intellectual to help you call your beliefs into question by thinking with you, I don't see how you can do cultural studies without that openness. And it was important for me to do the larger institutional work of creating spaces for other people. I'm privileged to have been one of the people who succeeded in making a career, although I think cultural studies in communication has had to fight the same battles over and over again, I'm not convinced we've actually ever won.

Can you identify any particular moment though where you think you either as founder of Cultural Studies or as an intellectual on your own has had an impact on the direction of communication as a discipline?

I think across most of the other sub disciplines, whether it's rhetoric or even in interpersonal, or organizational, I think the existence of Critical Organizational Studies, while not necessarily Cultural Studies, is influenced by Cultural Studies. And it was partly in response to Cultural Studies that people like Dietz and others took this forward, Dennis Mumby in rhetoric. You know, I think there's a profound impact. I think it helped along with work by Feminists, Critical Race theorists and etcetera, Multiculturalists. I think it helped open the field.

What are the greatest challenges ahead for communication?

One is institutional, and I think the universities aren’t necessarily going to change in the next decades. You know, one of the great challenges we face is, are we going to be able to keep the university open as an intellectual space? Or do we have to hitch our star to those alternative spaces, whether art spaces or social movement spaces, or other spaces that are trying to do intellectual work, but in my opinion, often don't quite know how to do it, because they put politics first. And I think politics is at the end, when you think you know something, then you figure out what to do politically. And then if we talk about cultural studies, I suppose there are lots of challenges. One is why has it largely disappeared? Maybe it's partly because people don't want to hear its analysis, and they don't want to hear it's more complicated than your theory is allowing it to be you know, or there are more contradictions. I think the biggest challenge to Cultural Studies at the moment is how to take two things into account that one has remained on the outskirts, and that is the economy, how to take the economy seriously. I mean, and not just to let the economy in. But to question how we let it in. Stuart Hall, once said when challenged that he was doing Sociology and he wasn't allowed to because he wasn't trained as a Sociologist. His answer was, “well, we're not trying to do Sociology, as you understand it. We're trying to do Sociology as it should have been done from the very beginning”. So what would economics look like if it started out as an interdisciplinary, contextual, theoretically saturated way of thinking about the world? And the other thing is the environmental crises. Climate change is neither simply the long term what we call organic force, like capitalism is, but it's not the conjunctural force, either. It's a unique challenge to humanity, and certainly to intellectuals. There is DNA and it has a code, whether or not we had discovered, I believe, you know, there is climate change. I don't think you can quantify these and offer objective descriptions of these but I think you have to figure out how to have the dialectic between the contingent and the non-contingent, the discursive and the non-discursive.

I think there's an issue here with, you know, just the New York Times published an opinion piece a couple days ago, if everything is trauma is anything trauma? How do we locate a source of knowledge in subjective experience, or in relative experience that we can all agree on?

I think there is a tendency now to go back to a kind of experiential basis of knowledge. We've been there before, in the 70s, there was a strong term, that kind of phenomenology and existentialism with that kind of basis, but there were serious problems. And for many of us, we moved on, not left them behind. I suppose I should say, I was deeply influenced by my work on Heidegger, I still think of myself as partly a Heideggerian. So there are elements that have to be included. But you have to figure what, what does one do with this? You know, my friend, John Clark always used to say, but you have to ask yourself is “what do I know when I know x? What do I know when I know that you feel this way? Or that you experienced that? What is it that I can claim as a scholar or an intellectual on that basis?”. And I would say not very much, and certainly not very much that's useful and interesting. Megan Morris used to say that identity was the primary export of the United States. Where did it come from? It's not to say that people didn't have identities before but how did identity become the definition of who I am? And just because my family's fled from Iberia north to Poland and Russia and Caucasus and places, doesn't mean they’re white any more than someone who flees from Africa to Northern Europe is no longer black. And that's the job of intellectuals is to question everything to say “why do you believe that way? Why are you so certain?”.

This series is called Architects of Communication Scholarship. So I just wanted to ask you, what did you build?

I think I built lots of things from the deeply personal network of friends, both in Cultural Studies, which has internationalized my world completely, has deep parochialized me as an American as much as one can I think, to network, not quite so international, of Communication Scholars who, as I said before, unpredictably have become my friends. And even when I was young and upcoming, I think people were surprised that I was friends with Ellen Wartella, and Chuck Whitney, and Peter Monge. And all sorts of other people who they assumed would be opposed to me. I helped to build a space for lots of what I'd like to think of as innovations. I think I helped establish popular music as a legitimate area of study, when I started teaching and writing about it, there were probably two or three other people in the states, academics, who were taking seriously, but it helped to create a space for the Philosophy of Communication, as it's now called, but I wouldn't call it that I’d just say a space for Philosophy and High Theory, I think I made a space for Cultural Studies. I am, I am most proud of the 50 or so PhD students that I have mentored, I think they have spread out across the country and the globe, and our teaching Cultural Studies. And I think that's great. And I think I've influenced other people along the way to do that. And I've created institutional spaces along the way to help with that. I think, most importantly, for me, I've taught my students and others that being an intellectual is what's important, and being an intellectual means taking risks. You don’t make interesting inroads into the intellectual universe without risks. And yes, you might not get a job and yes, you might not get tenure, good intellectual work is important, and that takes risks. As Stuart used to say ideas matter. I think the academy's forgotten, or is largely forgetting that ideas matter. Ideas are not necessarily abstraction, they can be empirical as well as Deleuze teaches us. Ideas matter, thinking matters.

Thank you, Larry, for taking the time to do this interview. And for allowing me to be a part of it. Your scholarship has been so influential on my own way of thinking and on so many other people. And you've always been an incredibly gracious and committed mentor. And so for all the people who you've touched personally and through your work, thank you, and we wish you well.

This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association and is sponsored by the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Troy Cruz, our Executive Producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero, our Senior Production Coordinator is Nick Song. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.