Lawrence Grossberg

Lawrence Grossberg is an American scholar of cultural studies and theories of culture. He helped introduce and define cultural studies—an interdisciplinary intellectual study of the intersections of culture and power through practices of contextuality, complexity, and contingency—into the United States. His theoretical works attempt to bring together the constructionists of Stuart Hall, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

He was among the first academic intellectuals to take seriously the challenges of understanding the relations of popular music and post-war youth cultures. His argument that popular music worked through uniquely “affective” forms of communication—and his attempts to theorize affect—helped open the concept to broader and more rigorous study and debate.

In cultural studies, his work focuses on the relations of popular and political cultures. He has produced a series of studies that attempt to offer what he calls "better stories" about the changing political culture and conjunctural struggles of the U.S. since the 1960s. These studies follow the contests among various conservative, reactionary, and progressive political movements—and the affective logics driving them—to construct livable stories around crises of modernity. He argues that the contemporary post-war American conjuncture, especially its (increasingly affective) political culture, has been shaped by two distinct organic crises. Grossberg argues that both these crises problematize liberalism and modernity in the face of their presumed failures. The first seeks what Grossberg calls "better ways of being modern"; the second seeks ways of being something other than modern. The first accepts the modern project; the second rejects it. Provided by Wikipedia