Unknown outcomes,no guarantees: Lawrence Grossberg and experimentation

This article explores notions of experimentation embedded in Lawrence Grossberg’s writings. It begins by proposing that experimentation is a particularly relevant expression of the stakes of Grossberg’s research, and also one that embodies the ‘unknownness’ characteristic of rigorous intellectual work more broadly. By embracing unknownness in its contextual specificity (the shorthand for which is the phrase ‘without guarantees’), one seeks to open the present to a range of potential futures – a process requiring interdisciplinary collaboration and institutional risk-taking. This article then moves on to consider how Grossberg’s work brings to light the relationship between popular imagination and experimentation; that is, he understands the popular as a territory where people can be won for experimentation in paradoxically unknown but knowable futures. Finally, the piece heeds Grossberg’s warning against the fetishization of experimentation in certain political and theoretical formations, notably his repeated cautions against experimentation divorced from the specificity and requirements of the conjuncture. The article concludes by calling for a rigorous mapping of the terrain of Cultural Studies in order to foster and sustain the interdisciplinary, well-grounded experimentation to which its future must be bound.