Exploring the backstory of contemporary political polarization, What’s Going On? recognizes that simple stories of blame and uncontested stories of polarization prove themselves to be bad stories that produce bad politics.
This book argues that stories have increasingly become matters of affect rather than meaning – instead of asking what stories mean, we are likely to ask how they make people feel. These stories are cultural tendencies that define the possibilities and limits of political action and behavior, and the book tells its own story about how the stories of America’s crises have defined our political culture as they struggle over questions of ideology, identity, and social belonging. It lays out a theoretical position that recognizes the need for complicated stories and rigorous thought, pointing a way forward, out of the chaos, seeking to repair the world and offer better stories and more humane political possibilities.
This work is a vital resource for students and instructors in sociology, political science, cultural studies, media studies, and communication, in such courses as contemporary social theory, contemporary political theory, media, politics and society, social movements and resistance.
The book will be an important guide for activists, organizers, and community field workers, and for anyone else who wishes to have a better understanding of the contemporary political moment and how to mobilize towards building a better future.
Exploring the backstory of contemporary political polarization, What’s Going On? recognizes that simple stories of blame and uncontested stories of polarization prove themselves to be bad stories that produce bad politics.
Arvustused
Our public culture is composed of the stories we tell ourselves, individually and especially together. And it has become deranged. In Whats Going On?, Grossberg draws on his own life experience and engagements as a public intellectual to narrate Americas decades of growing confusion and self-delusion. He goes beyond complaining about media manipulation and promotion of false narratives to probe underlying problems like how we divide fact from value, affect from thought, music from politics, and academic from public life.
Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University, and author of Degenerations of Democracy
Grossberg is one of the greatest cultural critics in the English speaking world of the last half century. 55 years after Marvin Gaye shook up the world with Whats Going On, a pop album teeming with politics and prophecy, Grossberg offers his summum bonum, Whats Going On? a career defining volume that echoes Gayes classic grappling with a world in crisis. This is a tour de force that will leave us clearer about our ambitions and more determined to achieve a common good that seems fugitive and impossible to embrace in our deeply polarized world.
Michael Eric Dyson, University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and Centennial Chair in African American & Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University
1. Tilting at Windmills, Part I: Everybody knows,
2. A question of
affect,
3. A question of thinking,
4. On the way to thinking,
5. Contextual
thinking,
6. The discipline of the conjuncture, Part II: You want it darker,
7. The problem space of affect,
8. The problem space of being modern, Part
III: In the dreams that we dream, we ask what have we done?,
9. Tilting at
windmills (Prelude),
10. We stumble and fall: The liberal and hegemonic
tendencies,
11. We find were alone: Stories of polarization,
12. We beg
warmth from the sun: The speculative tendency,
13. We stand for whats right:
The pseudo-revolutionary tendency, Part IV: We would build a new world if we
only knew how,
14. There is a crack in everything: Politics,
15. Thats how
the light gets in: Stories,
16. I wish there was a treaty we could sign:
Difference and belonging,
17. Dance me to the end of love
Lawrence Grossberg is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author and editor of numerous books, including Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (2010), We All Want to Change the World (2015), Under the Cover of Chaos (2018), and On the Way to Theory (2024).
