Customer Reviews

We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture

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This is an important book, which is not to say it's a great book. When intellectual historians look back to that strange time when cultural studies was trendy in the late 80s and early 90s, this might be the one book they cite as evidence that cultural studies raised very important questions but gave us intellectually obtuse answers. The questions that Grossberg poses are definitely significant, and more so today--the rise of the right-wing as "popular conservatism," the condition of postmodernity and its simulated depthlessness, the death of rock music, the waning of affect and ironic cynicism among young people,, etc. But his prose is notorious for its obfuscations, its fetishism of French theory (especially the dadaist Marxism of Henri Lefebvre and the incomprehensible Deleuze and Guattari), and the fact that Grossberg built his career writing about music and youth culture but never quoted a lyric or talked at length about a particular band. It's still a worthwhile read for lefty intellectuals and if anything I think too many have dismissed Grossberg's work on the basis of its cult stud/pomo pretensions. But beware the lines of flight and deterretorialization.