Stephen B. Crofts Wiley

Spatial materialism: Grossberg's Deleuzean cultural studies

In a series of essays published in the 1990s, Lawrence Grossberg proposed a spatial-materialist cultural studies, arguing that our key metatheoretical assumptions about reality, agency, ethics and politics needed to be reconceptualized on amodern philosophical terrain – not within, or even against, the philosophical frameworks of modernism and postmodernism but outside them. To develop this alternative terrain, Grossberg has drawn on the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose work was based on a Spinozist ontology, a ‘monism of multiplicities’. Grossberg argues that Deleuzean philosophy provides cultural studies with a way out of the epistemological problematic that has dominated critical theory. He has used on Deleuzean ontology to argue against modernist, postmodernist and post-structuralist conceptualizations of identity and subjectivity and proposes, instead, that cultural studies develop a machinic theory of agency. Grossberg has also used Deleuzean philosophy to reconsider the ethics a...In a series of essays published in the 1990s, Lawrence Grossberg proposed a spatial-materialist cultural studies, arguing that our key metatheoretical assumptions about reality, agency, ethics and politics needed to be reconceptualized on amodern philosophical terrain – not within, or even against, the philosophical frameworks of modernism and postmodernism but outside them. To develop this alternative terrain, Grossberg has drawn on the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose work was based on a Spinozist ontology, a ‘monism of multiplicities’. Grossberg argues that Deleuzean philosophy provides cultural studies with a way out of the epistemological problematic that has dominated critical theory. He has used on Deleuzean ontology to argue against modernist, postmodernist and post-structuralist conceptualizations of identity and subjectivity and proposes, instead, that cultural studies develop a machinic theory of agency. Grossberg has also used Deleuzean philosophy to reconsider the ethics and politics of cultural studies, proposing a politics of ‘spatial becoming’. This essay seeks to highlight the productive conceptual moves that Grossberg makes, to clarify some concepts that remain ambiguous in his approach, and to identify certain claims that merit further critical consideration. Grossbergs work repositions cultural studies in relation to the discursive terrain of modern philosophy and theory, opening up new routes for thought and action. In doing so, it clarifies, rearticulates and, in many ways, radicalizes the critical interventions that reshaped cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. But Grossbergs most important contribution to cultural studies has remained implicit: by following Deleuze and Guattari, we are drawn into an affective state of theoretical affirmation and practical composition – a stance that is quite different from both modernist and postmodernist postures of critique.

Strategies for Materializing Communication

More recently, in their introduction to the edited volume New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost echoed this sentiment, suggesting that the turn to materiality is largely a reaction to the exhaustion of a text-centered, social-constructionist paradigm. In fall 2009, we hosted a symposium at North Carolina State University, the goal of which was to assemble scholars from the fields of communication and cultural studies to engage with what is now being called a materialist turn in social theory. Subsequently, these presentations were compiled into Communication Matters: A Materialist Approach to Media, Mobility, and Networks. In the process of engaging with the scholars who contributed to the symposium and the book, we identified five distinct yet overlapping strategies for thinking about the materiality of communication. While these strategies focus specifically on communication, media, and culture, they are informed by the broader conceptual shift toward materiality occurring in philosophy and social theory.

Transnation: Globalization and the Reorganization of Chilean Television in the Early 1990s

During the early 1990s, Chilean television was transformed radically by processes of deregulation, privatization, transnational investment, technological change, and ideological liberalization. Chilean media were integrated into global structures of ownership, infrastructure expanded dramatically, and Chileans gained access to a broad range of international programming. However, a substantial national televisual space persisted and thrived. National programming expanded and commanded the highest ratings among Chilean audiences despite the growing availability of imported fare. The Chilean case illustrates how national media culture is neither obliterated by globalization nor simply resistant to it. Instead, national media spaces are reorganized by transnational structures and processes.

Assembled agency: media and hegemony in the Chilean transition to civilian rule

Through a close analysis of the media campaign to oust Chilean General Augusto Pinochet from power in 1988, this article explores the construction of national hegemony in transnational context. The Chilean oppositions success in constituting a political and cultural alternative to military rule illustrates the process by which hegemony is constructed, but at the same time it allows us to reconsider this classic sociological concept in several important ways. While hegemony is constructed at the national level, it is composed out of transnational flows. Hegemony has also been understood primarily as a form of ideological domination. This analysis, by contrast, demonstrates the importance of going beyond culture as meaning to take into account the material, technological and affective dimensions of hegemony.

Assembling Social Space

Theories of social space and place have become problematic in light of the imbrication of places within regional and global networks; the disembedding, distantiation, and technological mediation of social relations; the expansion of global media and information networks; and the mobility of people, things and resources. This article draws on assemblage theory to develop a non-Euclidean model of the production of social space and applies the model in an analysis of three case studies from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in Concepción, Chile. Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publishers online edition of The Communication Review for the following free supplemental resource: A Conceptual Model of Social Space. Source: Wiley, S., Sutko, M., Moreno Becerra, T. (2010).

Guattari, Deleuze, and Cultural Studies

ABSTRACT This essay maps the changing ways that the concepts and writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have been mobilized in the journal Cultural Studies over the past three decades, reflects on roads not taken, and invites readers into a new conversation about the implications of the work of Deleuze and Guattari for cultural studies.