Page 102 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

GROSSBERG, LAWRENCE (1947– )

application of Marxism to modern Western societies. In particular, he developed
and deployed the concepts of ideology and hegemony in ways that gained
considerable currency within cultural studies during its formative years in the
1970s. Gramsci was influential in developing a non-reductionist Marxism that 79
explored meaning and ideas as developmental forces that were not explicable in
economic terms alone, hence his significance to Western Marxists such as Stuart
Hall who were interested in culture.
• Associated concepts Base and superstructure, civil society, class, common sense,
hegemony, ideology.
• Tradition(s) Marxism.
• Reading Gramsci, A. (1968) Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Grand narrative This is a term used for an overarching story or metanarrative that
claims universal validity as a foundational scheme that justifies and explains all
facets of the human project. Thus grand narratives are totalizing schemes that seek
to explain every aspect of life under their rubric. Examples would be Marxism,
Christianity and science.
The power of modern grand narrative has been the subject of a critique by
poststructuralist and postmodern writers, most notably Lyotard. For Lyotard
modern knowledge rests on its appeal to grand narratives, whereas the postmodern,
in arguing that knowledge is specific to language-games, embraces local, plural and
heterogeneous knowledges. Here the postmodern condition involves a loss of faith
in the foundational schemes that have justified the rational, scientific,
technological and political projects of the modern world.
For example, whereas science might once have been relied upon to generate
universal and certain truths, it is now better understood as generating domain-
specific truths that have a certain utility in relation to specific purposes. Further,
while science has brought us medicine, increased food production and global
communications, it has also generated pollution and sophisticated weapons systems
of mass destruction. The questioning of the certainties of modern science is a part
of what Lyotard describes as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’. By this he means
that there remain no viable grand narratives, or elevated standpoints, from which
to pronounce universal truth. For Lyotard, we should resist the totalizing terror of
such dogmas in favour of the celebration of difference and understandings located
within particular knowledge regimes.
Links Marxism, modernity, postmodernism, poststructuralism, pragmatism, truth

Grossberg, Lawrence (1947– ) Having once been a student at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) Birmingham (UK), Grossberg is now one of
the leading exponents of cultural studies in the United States. He is currently Morris
Davis Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Grossberg has written extensively on cultural theory, including its
relationship to Marxism, the philosophical/psychoanalytic work of Deleuze and
Guattari, along with the modern roots of cultural studies and its continuing