Can Cultural Studies Find True

Happiness in Communication?

by Lawrence Grossberg, LJniversity of Illinois at Urhana-Champaign

When the history of cultural studies in the United States is written, I hope
the authors will acknowledge the importance of the discipline o f commu-
nication. As much as (the project if not the reality of) American studies,
communication studies has provided key resources for the construction
of an American cultural studies. Equally important, along with the field of
education, communication studies was one of the first disciplines to take
up and provide a space in the U.S. academy for the developing work of
British cultural studies. And it has, over the decades, continued to provide
a place-albeit not without re tance and, initially, often a minoritarian
and marginal place-for emergent trends within the expanding field of
cultural studies (e.g., popular culture, global culture, postmodernism).
Cultural studies encompasses a set of approaches that attempt to under-
stand and intervene into the relations of culture and power. Without
equating cultural studies with the diverse body of work that is often re-
ferred to as British cultural studies, it is still the case that as cultural stud-
ies has become more successful, as it has appeared in different national
and disciplinary sites, and as alternative traditions have emerged, British
cultural studies has provided a common vocabulary and iconography
through which these diverse voices have been able to come together
(Grossberg, Nelson, bli Treichler, 1992).
In part, what British cultural studies has provided is an exemplar of a
particular vision of critical practice, a particular operational assumption
about the relationship between theory and context. Cultural studies re-
jects the application of a theory known in advance as much as it rejects
the possibility of an empiricism without theory. It is committed to the
necessary “detour through theory” while at the same time refusing to be
driven by its theoretical commitments. It is driven instead by its own
sense of history and politics (Hall, 1991).
There are three consequences of this particular practice worth identify-
ing. First, cultural studies is committed to the fact that reality is continual-

Lawrence Grossberg is a professor in the I k p a r t m e n t o f Speech Communication, the Insti-

tute o f Communications Research, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the
University of Illinois in Llrbana-Champaign. An early version of this paper was presented
at the Speech Communication Association meeting, Chicago. October 1992.
Copyright 0 199.3Journal ofComrnunicatioiz 43(4),Autumn. 0021-9916/93/$5.00

89
Journal (IJCornrnunzcatzon Autumn 1093

ly being made through human action and that, therefore, there are no
guarantees in history. As a result, contestation-both as a fact of reality
(although not necessarily in every instance) and as a strategic critical
practice-is a basic category. Second, cultural studies is continuously
drawn to the “popular,”not as a sociological category purporting to dif-
ferentiate among cultural practices but as the terrain on which people live
and political struggle must be carried out in the contemporary world.
Finally, cultural studies is committed to a radical contextualism, a con-
textualism that precludes defining culture, or the relations between cul-
ture and power, outside of the particular context into which cultural stud-
ies imagines itself to intervene. Consequently, cultural practices cannot
be treated as simply texts, as microcosmic representations (through the
mediating structures of meaning) of some social other (whether a totality
o r a specific set of relations). Cultural practices are places where a multi-
plicity of forces (determinations and effects) are articulated, where differ-
ent things can and do happen, where different possibilities of deploy-
ment and effects intersect. A cultural practice is a complex and conflictual
place that cannot be separated from the context of its articulation since it
has n o existence outside of that context. And if this is the case, then the
study of culture can be n o less complex, conflictual, and contextual
(Frow 6i Morris, 1993).
The practice of cultural studies then is an attempt to map out the partic-
ular relations, the context, within which both the identity and the effects
of any particular practice are determined. This is the import of the con-
cept of articulation, which describes both the practice by which human
reality is made and the practice of cultural studies. Articulation implies
that effects (including identities) are the product of contextually defined
relations. The question of the politics of culture then involves the work of
placing particular practices into particular relations or contexts, and of
transforming one set of relations, one context, into another. The identity
and effects of a practice are not given in advance; they are not deter-
mined by its origin or by some intrinsic feature of the practice itself.
Hence, no theory defined independently of the context of its intervention
can predefine the relations surrounding a practice, o r its specific concrete
effects. Articulation guarantees that such relations and effects are real, but
also that they are not guaranteed in advance. Some may find it ironic that
cultural studies, which has always criticized the tradition of effects re-
search in communications, takes up the language of effects. But the no-
tion of effects here is significantly different-both broader and less deter-
mined, and more contextual (Grossberg, 1992).
At the present moment, there seems to be a feeling, among both the
general community of (mass) communications scholars and among those
committed to cultural studies within that community, that a rapproche-
ment o f sorts has been reached. After all, the field has made a space for,
and granted the legitimacy of, cultural studies. There may still be some
hostility between some individuals or paradigms, but that is relatively in-

90
Czrltuml Sttidies

significant in light o f the history o f the discipline. Of course, part o f this

new tolerance has resulted from transformations within communications
research as it has moved lxyond positivism and taken u p issues of mean-
ing. cognition, affect, etc.

Communicational Cultural Studies-Not

I want t o contest this illusory harmony, not s o much on the hasis of the
failures of communication studies from a cultural studies perspective, hut
on the basis o f the failures of cultural studies within a ~oinmuriication
perspective. In :I sense, I want to challenge the increasingly comfortable
relationship between cultural studies and communication, a relationship
in which cultural studies has too readily compromised itself by remaking
itself within the image o f communication studies. Hert. it may be worth-
while to quote from Raymond Williams’s discussion of the history o f cul-
tural studies and the pressures tow:ird disciplinization.

I n its most general bearings, this work remained a kind qf intellectual

analysis which wanted to charige the actual developments qf society,
hut then locally, within the institution, there were all the time those
pressures that had changed so much i n carlierphasts:,from other disci-
plines, f r o m other cornpetitiue departments, the need to dq5neyour dis-
cipline, justily its importance, demonstrate its rigour: and thesepres-
s w e s were precisely the opposite qfthoscJ qf the originalprqject. . . . As
you separate these disciplines out, und su-y “Well,it s: a vague and bugguy
monster, Cultural Studies, hut uw can dejine it more c l o s e l p a s media
studies, c o m m u n i p sociology, popular,fiction orpopular music; so y o u
create defensihle disciplines, and there are people i n other departments
ujho can see that these are defensible disciplines, that here isproperly
rqferenced andpresented work. But the question qf what is then hap-
pening to theproject remains. (1989, p. 158)

Cultural studies practitioners have too often agreed to reduce cultural

studies to a theory o f cotnmunication hy too quickly equating culture and
c o m m u n i c a t i o ~They
. have constructed cultural studies itself as cornmid-
nicational culturulstudies. This reduction can, in part, t x laid at the feet
of a certain misreading, followed by a rather uncritical adoption, of Kay-
mond Williams’s (1% 1) and James Carey’s (1983) identifying o f communi-
cation with culture. ’I‘he result has l x e n that the project o f cultural studies
has heen submerged under a model of communication, rendering it an al-
ternative paradigm of, rather than ;I serious challenge to, the existing
forms o f communication studies. And equally important, political strug-
gles have been increasingly reduced t o struggles over communication
and culture, which can he magically solved b y the proliferation of corm
municative and cultural practices.

91
Journal of Communication, Autumn 1993

There is a certain historical rationale to this identification. Writing about

the reception of Richard Hoggart’s (1957) foundational book, The Uses of
Literacy, Stuart Hall (1970) acknowledged that it was read “-such were
the imperatives of the moment-essentially as a text about the mass
media” (p. 2 ) . Consequently, cultural studies was framed, both within and
outside of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, as a literary-
based alternative to the existing work o n mass communication. Hall con-
tinued:

The notion that the Centre, i n directing its attention to the critical study
of “contemporary culture” was, essentially, to be a centre f o r the study
of television, the mass media andpopular arts . . , though never meeting
our sense of the situation . . . nevertheless came by default, to define us
and our work. (1970, p. 2 )

What is at least hinted at here is that cultural studies is a radically alter-

native practice to the very practice of constituting the mass media and
popular culture as objects of study that can be analyzed in isolation from
their place within the material contexts of social reality. I want to begin to
explore that alternativeness, to suggest a different view of the relation-
ship of cultural studies and communication, by looking at the conse-
quences of this too narrow vision of cultural studies, a vision that aban-
dons the radical contextualism of cultural studies.
First, by identifying communication and culture, communicational cul-
tural studies legitimates its reification of Stuart Hall’s (1980) encoding/de-
coding model. What was originally offered as a theoretical semiotic solu-
tion to a particular contextually defined set o f empirical problems has
become instead the general model of cultural studies, an analogy trans-
formed into an identity. In fact, this model has become little more than a
recycling of the old, theoretically discredited, linear model of communi-
cation: sender-message-receiver. This is justified by presenting the
model in the more critical terms of production-practice-consumption.
But in fact, by reinterpreting the latter relationship in terms of the linear
model of communication, the power and originality of Hall’s argument-
as well as of Marx’s analysis of the relations among these three moments
of the cycle of production (see Hall, 1974)-are seriously distorted. The
equation of culture, communication, and production/consumption (al-
though usually in communicational cultural studies, it is only consump-
tion that appears relevant) not only effaces the specificity and complexity
of culture, but of communication and consumption as well. Consequent-
ly, discussions of consumption in communications tend to conflate a
number of issues: consumption as a necessary and productive practice,
the nature of the commodity in the contemporary world, the nature of
and alternatives to a consumer economy, the means by which a consumer
culture enables people to construct identities through the market, and the
various ideologies of the consumer (late capitalist?) society.

92
Cultuml Studies

The encoding/decoding model is generally used to frame a tripartite

approach to the study of media: The researcher is compelled to study the
institutions and practices by which a particular text is produced, followed
by a literary-critical analysis of the “encoded meaning” of the text (which
is presumably the meaning that the producers “intended”),completed by
an “ethnographic”study (usually in the form of interviews, question-
naires, or selected observational studies) of the uses to which different
audiences put the text and/or the different ways in which they interpret
it. In some cases, by selectively deploying the notion of articulation, par-
ticular studies may argue against the need for a consideration of the con-
text of production since origins d o not guarantee effects. And in other
cases, even the analysis of the text itself may be considered unnecessary
since the intrinsic properties of the text d o not guarantee effects. Instead,
specific audiences are granted the full weight and power of determining
the actual effects (meanings) of cultural practices.

Contexts and Complexities

But the same reasoning that has enabled some analysts to jettison the mo-
ment of production and textuality also justifies jettisoning any ethnogra-
phy of the audience’s uses or self-conscious interpretations. The point is
not which of the three moments is actually determining of the effects of
communication. Rather, the point is that in understanding culture as com-
munication, as divisible into three separable moments, communicational
cultural studies fails to locate specific cultural practices within their com-
plexly determined and determining contexts. It is not that such ques-
tions-of production, textuality and consumption-are irrelevant. O n the
contrary, they may well be crucial parts of the context within which cul-
tural studies must locate specific cultural practices. But their identity and
power cannot be identified apart from that context.
In that sense, the study of producers, texts, and audiences merely pro-
vides some of the material with which cultural studies must grapple in its
attempt to understand specific contextual relations of culture and power.
And since such material does not directly reveal how it is located within
the context, we cannot know in advance what knowledge it will provide,
what we might learn as a result of such studies. At the same time, it may
well be the case that such material does not provide the most important
determinations. It follows then that cultural studies is not to be modeled
on the linear notion of communication, that cultural studies cannot ap-
proach communication as the discrete existence of three moments. But
even more to the point, theory in cultural studies cannot be identified
with-and cultural studies does not need-theories of authors, texts, o r
audiences. Cultural studies needs theories of contexts and of the com-
plexity of cultural effects and relations of power.
Second, communicational cultural studies has confused a particular

93
[ournal of Communlcalzon, Autumn 1993

contextual struggle to put questions of ideology (signification, represen-

tation, and identity) on the agenda of critical studies with the project of
cultural studies itself. As a result, it has reduced the politics of culture to
questions of meaning and identity (with an occasional nod to pleasure
and desire). It has assumed that power (domination and subordination) is
always hierarchical, understood on the model of either the oppressor and
the oppressed or oppression and transgression. And following the idealist
tradition of modern philosophy and social thought, it has erased “the
real”-the material conditions of possibility and of effectivity, the material
organization and consequences of life-from its agenda, reducing social
life to the experience of everyday life.
Consequently, it is often assumed that research in cultural studies in-
volves a hermeneutical project of uncovering a relationship, a structure of
meaning, that already and necessarily exists. Whether embodied within
the text or within the lives of same fraction o f the audience, whether car-
ried out through some form o f textual interpretation or ethnographic
practice, communicational cultural studies attempts to open for critical
scrutiny a dimension o f human existence-meaning-that cannot be re-
duced to materiality. Communicational cultural studies is about the ways
people make sense o f the world and their lives. Moreover, this dimension
must be relatively independent o f the real material and economic condi-
tions of the world and people’s lives. Consequently, communicational
cultural studies can never actually confront the question of effects, be-
cause it cannot theorize the relationship of meaning to anything else. It
cannot even decide when meaning (signification) becomes representa-
tion (ideology), for that involves its articulation to material practices and
social relationships.
Third, communicational cultural studies has followed the practice of
the field of conimunication in isolating and disciplining cultural practices
according to some predefined internal schema of domains (e.g., interper-
sonal, organizational, mass), o f media ( e . g . ,television, film, music), o r of
genres ( e . g . , romance, comedy, melodrama). Of course, as any scholar of
communication knows, this has little to d o with either the context of pro-
duction or of consumption. How can effects he mapped if we begin by
artificially circumscribing the context o f cultural practices according to
the predefined schema o f our own critical positions?
Finally, communicational cultural studies has become too comfortable
with the disciplinary boundaries of the field, and has too often aban-
doned the interdisciplinarity that is at the heart of cultural studies. For
cultural studies, unlike communicational cultural studies, starts with the
assumption that an account of culture will always require an appeal to
things and domains other than the cultural. It emphatically refuses the
claim that everything, including culture, can he explained in cultural
terms. Consequently, cultural studies is always stepping on the toes of
other disciplines, not merely because its questions overlap, but because it
attempts to find its own answers as well as its own questions. The inter-

74
Cultural Studies

disciplinarity of cultural studies, then, is never merely a matter of refer-

ences and footnotes. It is of the very essence o f the work of cultural stud-
ies. But communicational cultural studies, o n the contrary, is usually quite
content to remain within the discipline; its questions as well as its an-
swers remain firmly entrenched within the boundaries of culture. Its in-
terdisciplinarity is confined to theoretical borrowings and the occasional
reference to other sources, which are given responsibility for describing
the context within which its communicative practices are assumed to be
located.
Communicational cultural studies, in the end, reduces culture to the
symbolic representation of power and grants it a certain apparent autono-
my. As a result, communicational cultural studies finds itself constantly
rediscovering what it already knew: Regarding domination, that particular
cultural practices reproduce the structures o f domination and subordina-
tion, and that they reinscribe relations o f identity, difference, and inequal-
ity; and regarding subordination, comniunicational cultural studies seems
satisfied with finding the cracks in the processes of the reproduction and
reinscription. The assumption that people are active and capable of strug-
gle and resistance becomes an apparent discovery, and the important em-
pirical questions, of the concrete contextual effects o f such practices, are
left unanswered.
But without a theory of contexts, communicational cultural studies can-
not begin to answer these questions of cultural studies. Questions about
the specific forms in which domination and subordination are organized,
about the ways they operate, about how they are lived, mobilized, and
empowered-that is, questions about the actual ways in which cultural
practices are deployed in relations of power and how they themselves de-
ploy power, questions about the actual effects of culture within specific
contexts, questions about the relations of culture to practices of gover-
nance-remain largely unasked and unanswered. Domination and resis-
tance are assumed to be understood in advance, to operate always and
everywhere in the same ways. By identifying culture with conimunica-
tion, and identifying cultural studies with a taken-for-granted model o f
communication, communicational cultural studies has not only limited
what it can say about specific cultural practices and about the place of
culture in relations of power, it has also closed off the possibility of a
more radical critique of the concept of communication and the discipline
of communication studies.

The Place of Communication

I want then to advocate a different notion o f cultural studies, one that en-
ables a more radical critique o f the discipline of communication. Paradox-
ically, precisely by setting itself in opposition to notions of communica-
tion, a cultural studies built o n the concept of articulation has, I believe,

95
Journal of Communicatzon, Aulurnn 299.5

more to contribute to the study of contemporary communication and the

roles of communication in contemporary life. For such a cultural studies
would enable us to rearticulate communication as a practice and a con-
cept by questioning its complicity with specific institutions and technolo-
gies of power. What I mean by communication here is quite simple. As a
concept, it was the 19th-century invention of the semantic plane as the
site of the mediation between the individual and reality (resulting in ex-
perience as the basis of modern epistemologies) and of the mediation be-
tween the individual and society (resulting in communication as the site
o f the constitution of intersubjectivity).
Communication-as technology and concept-was a key figure in the
construction of modern thought and modern societies, and it is closely re-
lated to the celebration of history, temporality, consciousness, and expe-
rience as the constitutive features o f human life. It is a crucial link in the
conceptual chain, the intellectual and discursive structure, by which mod-
ern thought and society were constructed and have been kept in place.
Cultural studies can and must problematize the place of “communication”
(and culture, of course) within broader discursive spaces. It can and must
force communication scholars to recognize that the historical and intellec-
tual conditions that both enabled and demanded that we talk about com-
munication as a specific set of practices and within a specific set of dis-
courses also defined the limits of our ability to talk about these practices
and the silences that have too often linked communication, and the study
of communication, to particular forms, technologies, and practices of
power. Sometimes with the complicity of communication, but always in
its name, modern forms of global organization (e.g., nationhood, capital-
ism, colonialism, and imperialism), modern forms of alterity (in which the
other is reduced to the different-e.g., racisms and sexisms), and modern
forms of control (e.g., disciplinization and normalization) were put into
and maintained in place (Grossberg, 1993).
Such claims are not meant as an attack on those who work within the
discourses of communication, for in one way or another, in the contem-
porary world, we all do. Rather, it is meant as a call for a more reflective
and critical contextualization of the power of our own discourses as com-
munication scholars. My claim, o r at least my hope, is that a more radical
understanding of cultural studies, even as it is located within the disci-
pline of communication, can contribute to such a project, as well as to a
better understanding of the imbrication of cultural practices in the materi-
al organization and deployment of power in the contemporary world. Nor
is my argument meant as a call for cultural studies to abandon the disci-
pline of communication. In the first place, there is no more comfortable
home and, in the second place, cultural studies must often accommodate
itself to a disciplinary home. Rather, I want to suggest that if cultural stud-
ies is to work, it must always make such (albeit necessary) disciplinary re-
lations uncomfortable. It must always remind us that the boundaries of

96
Cultural Studies

our disciplines can never be allowed to define the boundaries of our

questions.

References
Carey, J. W. (1989). Communication as culture: 15ssa.y~on media and society. Boston:
Llnwin Hyman.
Frow, J., & Morris, M. (1993). Introduction. In M. Morris & J. Frow (Eds.), Australian cul-
tural studies: A reader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Grossberg, L. (1992). Wegotta get out ofthisplace: Popular conservatism andpostmodern
culture. New York: Routledge.
Grossberg, L. (1993). Cultural studies in/and new worlds. Critical Studies in Mass Commu-
nication, 10, 1-22.
Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., & Treichler, 1.' (Eds.). (1992). Cultural studies. New York: Rout-
ledge.
Hall, S. (1970). Introduction to The Annual Report qf the Centre f o r Contemporaty Cultural
Studies. Birmingham, England: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Hall, S. (1974). Marx's notes o n method. Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 6, 132-170.
Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall et al. (Eds.), Culture, media, language (pp.
128-1381, London: Hutchinson.
Hall, S . (1991). The local and the global, and Old and new identities. In A. D. King (Ed.),
Culture globalization and the world-system (pp. 19-68). London: Macmillan.
Hoggart, R. (1957). The uses of literacy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, R. (1961). The long revolution. London: Chatto 8r Windus.
Williams, R. (1989). Thepolitics of modernism. London: Verso.

97