Interview with George Lipsitz

I want to begin with asking to you to reflect on your initial intellectual work and as we proceed, to help us position how it has unfolded over time. It is valuable to ask that you back up and share such thoughts; but we will move forward, to come to the present juncture where so many things have changed – and profoundly. As recently as 2007 you wrote some remarkable things that were beginning to bust open critical discourses that greatly deepened the connections between critical cultural studies and American studies. You were trained in history at Wisconsin, and in your writing of ‘American studies in a moment of danger’ you narrated your kind of coming to intellectual age with regard to history, but you noted how the importance of that project and your projects within history, in many ways kind of shoehorned you rather quickly into problems of culture. Early on, you were engaged in American historical studies and from the outset you were taking up the problem of culture more generally and it seeped rapidly, fully, quickly, into your studies. Can you backtrack a bit and think about what was at stake when you were beginning your earliest work, in this case on labour, the workers’ movements, American history and the problem of culture.

I think the point of entry here is the egalitarian and democratic movements of the 1960s, their successes and their failures. C.L.R James taught Walter Rodney that often we investigate intellectual expressions outside of the context of the time in which they were uttered and the experiences that shaped them, and they take on a kind of universal law-like dimension when they’re in print. Yet often, they are a response to a particular set of experiences. If you use them right, then you can gain tremendously from the unevenness. Somebody who is formed in the 1960s might see culture differently than somebody who’s formed in the 1980s, and somebody in Britain is going to see it differently than in the US. We want to use these things, understanding that we don’t want a parochial particularism that freezes things in their time and place of origin; nor do we want to jump quickly to a disembodied universalism that assumes ideas are floating freely outside of history and outside of social structures.

So my situation was that I was pulled into the Black freedom struggle when I was in high school. In my freshman year in college, I was working with a group of activists in St Louis in the black community. I was on the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, and this set an agenda and raised hopes for democratic social change. I think so much of what came after that, for me and for my whole generation, comes in the chasm between the hopes that were provoked and the bitterness of the defeat that followed. I was drawn to social history because it opened up a place to write about people in the past who were like the people I knew in the present: rank-and-file Teamsters in St Louis, Ivory Perry and Percy Green and the Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes, Pearlie Evans and teachers that I knew in the St Louis school system. Part of what I was trying to deal with in my doctoral project, which was my first book, Rainbow at Midnight, was trying to see why the labour insurgency that I was a part of, as part of a group called ‘On the Line’ in St Louis – a democratic caucus within Local 688 of the Teamsters Union – had been defeated not by the businesses, not by the police, but actually by the labour movement itself. The labour movement was part of the corporate system rather than an enemy of it. I felt that in some ways the origins of that were in the postwar bargain, the response to the big strike waves of 1946 – the largest strike wave in American history – and I got this from Teamsters. I got this from people who said, ‘You know, the union wasn’t always like this’. They would tell you things about shop-floor organizing, and how it had been gradually bureaucratized and taken away from the workers. So I was trying to write about that and write about it from the perspective of the rank-and-file strikers, not the union leaders, not the government.

Well, history is dependent on archives. You control the archive, you control the story. The historical archives had no room for people who don’t leave papers, who don’t write documents, who don’t have public relations papers, who never appear in them. They might appear as objects, you know, and you can do creative things with that. Ramón Gutiérrez wrote an amazing book about the Laguna Pueblo resistance based solely on the Inquisition records. He saw that what their enemies said about them showed an enormous amount of agency. But I was looking for strategies of independence, strategies of rejection, of rebellion. I wanted to figure out how this enormous refusal, to have provoked those 1946 strikes, came about – and I realized that culture was an archive of this. That there were things in the music of Hank Williams, the music of Charlie Parker, things in film noir, things in early television, even roller derby and wrestling, if you know how to read them right, that were in some ways an alternative archive, an occluded archive of working-class self-activity. Being on that trail I quickly discovered C.L.R. James and George Rawick and Marty Glaberman, and through them other traditions that helped to explain these things.

So the historian in me needed an archive and culture was the archive, but also the political analyst in me recognized that part of our defeat in the 1960s was cultural. That not only were we confronting superior power, we were confronting a kind of ideological hegemony and we were not yet the people capable of critiquing, much less changing, the society we were in. I encountered this through the late speeches of Dr Martin Luther King, the ‘Why I am Against the Vietnam War’, ‘The Drum Major Instinct’, ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ and his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, which is filled with arguments that the United States not only needs a political and economic revolution, but really a cultural and moral revolution as well: that we have to become different kinds of people. That had been an insight that, I think, was forced on Dr King from the bottom up. It was because of participatory democracy, the Beloved Community, the organizing of Ella Baker and others, the solidarity of everybody from the Montgomery bus boycott through the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, that showed that this was a movement that was not only subversive, it was also therapeutic and generative of new archives and imaginaries, epistemologies, ontologies, new kinds of people. Even when that movement was defeated, that project didn’t die. I think then, increasingly as doors closed politically and financially with the recessions of the 1970s – capital flight, automation, outsourcing, deindustrialization, privatization, neoliberalism – all of those left us few openings for political struggle. The cities, the unions, the universities, the places that had been sites of struggle, were being systematically defunded and marginalized by the kind of corporate culture that Democrats and Republicans supported in the US.

So culture became what our colleague Verta Taylor calls an ‘abeyance mechanism’. In many ways it was culture that held the collective memory, the moral instruction, the ways of calling communities into being, that social movements had previously held. So the emergence of hip-hop and graffiti and breakdancing was evidence of the rise of what Immanuel Wallerstein and others call the ‘forgotten peoples of modernity’: the queer feminists, the anti-racist challenges to authority. Here the link between culture and politics seem alive and vibrant and worth writing about and maybe, you know, a guide to kinds of organizing that were not yet possible, but could be rehearsed in culture and prophesied in culture – just as the use of the Bible prefigured emancipation, and just as generations of healers and conjurers prefigured the self-activity of the black working class.

Let me respond to that by pushing a little bit on the notion that in context, movements can suffer serious setbacks. Part of what you seem to be pinpointing here is that the problem of culture becomes, then, an important crucial repository. It becomes something like a floating, convenient, strategically important way of holding onto sentiments and sensibilities that don’t necessarily – or that didn’t necessarily – find their fulfilment, or that they can lose their traction momentarily. Culture operates something like a placeholder, a holding of place in assessing struggles of success and failure. So it struck me in your remarks that it was, for you, a kind of discovery of linking history with culture: as the relationship that’s vital, given the process of social movements that either ebb and flow, the problem of culture then becomes this arena that we have to grasp somehow, because it seems to be a key to sustaining what we can know and also what and how we can critique.

The one addition I would make to that – I think this is true in general in any relationship of asymmetrical power – is that part of what happened was that, already within the 1960s, feminists and anti-racists and then later, particularly in the 1980s, queers connected to post-structuralist analysis, saw in fact that the emancipatory imagination of the mid-century was already limited. It was still grounded in longstanding notions of agency and subjectivity that had raced and gendered and sexualized undercurrents in them. It’s part of why they were so deep. It’s part of why they were so hard to dislodge. It’s part of why there was persecution in the mouths of the persecuted. Too often our failures did not happen because we were too different from our society, but rather that we were just like it; that the social movements had the same kind of masculine militarism that our opponents had; that they had the same confusion between righteousness and self-righteousness that our opponents had.

So in a way, the desire for new ways of knowing and being is what you see in Malcolm X’s transformation from civil rights to human rights, the idea of going to the UN rather than to the US Congress, in Huey P. Newton’s notion of intercommunalism. These were messages that the America that we were attempting to change was not simply a nation to be redeemed, but also an empire that needed to be opposed. That, in a way, is an example that we saw in other places. That if in fact you replaced the people in power in 1965 with the people who were contesting them, too much would have stayed the same. We saw we needed a larger change. I think the people who saw that first were blacks, women and queers in the US context, and I think it’s part of why they resonated with the European folks who were coming out of the defeats of 1968: both those who went in a post-structuralist direction, but also those who turned to Althusser and Gramsci, like Stuart Hall, because this helped to explain that power wasn’t something to be overthrown and seized, it was also something widely dispersed throughout society and that culture is one of the mechanisms of instantiating that power.

Your first book appears as primarily a labour study, but in it there is already the tension with older and newer critical orientations: the earlier legacy of labour as the crucial, even ontological, hinge in Marxism – or what C. Wright Mills would call the ‘labour metaphysic’ and the emergent and nagging problems of the cultural sphere with its potentially constituent importance. The tensions, I suppose, that came in the confrontation with an older kind of political economy of reductionism, the troubling and troubled forms of Marxism that were emerging after the Cold War era. Your study is already negotiating those tensions, and it seems to me that one could read your early work as an early engagement with those discourses, with that unravelling of an older epistemology that did not really address the issues. So I want to ask you a very particular question, and I think you just said something to that effect. It strikes me that the critique was facilitated, at least in the United States, by the recuperation, the fathoming and the sensitivity about how ‘race’ could not be adjudicated analytically, fully, by the older political economy model.

I think that the emphasis on class is of course tremendously important, and the ‘race’ problem is a class problem, among other things that it is, and so I always say that Marxism, like blackness, is necessary but it is not sufficient. What Marxism gave us was not only a way to see the antagonisms between capital and labour, but also a way to theorize partiality and totality. Even if the labour–capital equation changed, that way of thinking about totality and partiality was still tremendously important; but it was in some ways easier for us to rethink Marxism. You know, we’re in the US, we don’t have a Labour Party. We don’t have signs in a working-class neighbourhood that say ‘Vote Socialist’. It would be impossible to think of that actually happening, at least after World War II in the United States. If we’re looking to where class consciousness in the way that Marx talked about it – not just self-interest, but a belief that the whole society had to change – if we’re looking for those sites, it was in the black working class. So to be attracted to working-class struggle in the insurgencies that I was a part of, especially, you saw quickly that the black workers were, as Robert Warshow says, ‘a day older in history than everybody else’. This is what the League of Revolutionary Black workers did in Detroit, and this is why Mrs Hamer started the Mississippi Freedom Labour Union. The blend of work on ‘race’ and class was there in the black movement in a way that it wasn’t there in the labour movement, which tended to see ‘race’ as something that to be ignored and forgotten.

I have to emphasize though that I didn’t see this fully when I wrote the first version of Rainbow at Midnight, which came out in 1981. It was only after Robin Kelley had published Hammer and Hoe and Vicki Ruiz had published Cannery Women that I rethought what I had. I had glimmers of it in my last chapter in dealing with A. Philip Randolph, the March on Washington, the draft refusal movement, the rise of black criticisms and caucuses within the labour movement. I had glimmers of it, but I didn’t really understand the historical dimensions of it until I read what a new generation of scholars of colour said from the vantage point of people who come from the people and sing for them. I wouldn’t have been able to see that, and of course they probably wouldn’t have been in the university in the first place if it hadn’t been for some of the successes of the emancipatory movements of the late 1960s.

Yes, you tap into the constant learning and relearning, reflecting on how we come to know. I want to return to this problem of how and in what ways culture gets teased out in your work, and as it points forward at the same time in ways that anticipate your being receptive to that sort of reading and rereading of your past, and of these other later writers. It seems to me that in your first book, your reflections are taken to heart, but even in that study there is gnawing problem of the sonic. That gnawing, nibbling, unsettled problem of the culture that becomes in many ways almost like a third ear to the larger problems that you were at that point working with; and it seems to me that that kernel of receptivity to culture is taking place, where the culture becomes in many ways a mode of production and not simply an ancillary, secondary, leftover thought or reactionary formation to something else. It becomes a driving wedge of entry into rethinking this historicity that has its legacy, but also its blind spots. It struck me that you or your work in particular negotiates that tension, and you can be apologetic for that in that regard, but in looking forward you have recapitulated those nascent discoveries in interesting ways?

Again, sometimes you feel before you know. You have a sense that there’s something that strikes you. Something hits home to you and you can’t quite explain fully why it’s important. Looking back, I see in Sterling Stuckey’s book, Slave Culture, he talks about the importance of music and the civil rights movement, not as a way of cheering people up, not as a way of commenting on things that already happened, but actually music as the people’s cultural force. The people who went to Reverend James Cleveland’s Gospel Music Workshop Association were invited to come to a place that Cleveland advertised as ‘the place where everybody is somebody’. Well, that’s not only a political statement, it’s a musical statement: gospel singing. I might not be very good with just my solitary voice, but you blend me with three other people and we can sound good – and that’s a form of political organization. In music you learn improvisation and social movements are all about listening and improvisation. The movements that I was a part of – I’m coming as the son of people who were teachers and went to college and I go to Washington University in St Louis – the student body was 90 percent white when I was there, and the faculty were almost 100 percent white, and I come into the city of St Louis to talk to white working-class or black working-class people: the one point of entry for me is music. That was the way for me to find common ground, to connect with people that this society has segregated me from. But it’s more than common ground: as I said earlier, it’s a repository of collective memory. It’s a site of moral instruction. It’s a way of calling communities into being through performance. It’s a way also of enacting the utopian political hopes that you might envision in other ways. You know, you’re scared to death on the streets of Montgomery, but you sing and all of a sudden you feel bolder and braver. You also know what collectivity is in a way that you don’t know from sitting in the library and reading a book. The black freedom struggle has always understood this. This, again, is something I might have had an intuition about, but could only see for myself later on.

I also think that part of what your questions are revolving around, what I was trying to work through in that first book that eventually led me, not only, importantly to contemporary thinkers like Stuart Hall, but also backward to Américo Paredes, to C.L.R. James, to people who were profound, to the sociolinguist Basil Bernstein, people who were theorists of culture in ways that most scholars did not think were about culture. I think over the course of my writing there have been core questions. Some key questions are: what falls to culture? What happens in that realm, what goes on there, what does it mean? Part of what it means to ask that question is to reject the post-Renaissance binary, that there is something called culture, an art that is separate from the other things – but that too falls to culture in the society, that’s where you learn it. You don’t learn in the disciplines. You don’t learn it at work. You read an interview with jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who used to be known as Dollar Brand, and the interviewer says to him: ‘But when did you get started in music?’, and he says, ‘Music was always around, and really, you are asking me as a musician, but in my culture a musician is really more like a physician, like a doctor’. This is what falls to culture, but also the historian in me always asks, ‘Why that form at that time?’ This is where the chapters in Rainbow at Midnight about film noir, about public spectacles, about television, about music that I later developed in Time Passages – especially about rhythm and blues and country music – were not just about creating a chronicle of things that were happening. In figuring out why those forms emerged at those times, you’re asking questions that are not confined to being about music. They’re about social relations, social power and social identities.

I think that hits upon a really interesting problem. On the one hand, there is a kind of structuralist approach to culture that suggests we read off the cultural surfaces as the residues of organizations that have sort of floated to the top of the social, and presumably they have won, by dint of efficacy, some kind of historical supremacy in being able to articulate and hence categorize and arrange what then becomes culture. On the other hand, there is another frame of analytics and interpretation. In that spirit, I want to frame a question, as your work has always struck me as a kind of critical restoration of issues that the previous approach tends to eclipse.

So I’ll put it to you this way: If you take the first book that you wrote, Rainbow at Midnight, you’re dealing with musical forms that are really quite emergent and are just beginning to get caught up in the whole formalist recording process that has been several decades in the making. There are those new voices that are getting picked up. If you trace out the recording industry in its increased synergy with the phonograph, radio broadcasting and ultimately other forms, you see one trajectory that produces a set of templates that are called genres that ebb and flow, groomed by the market, that push yet reflect the Top 40, etc. You begin to get a corporate form of genre-making; but your work has always asked about vernacular. Not genres as they trickle down, but vernaculars as they are lived outward and, in some remarkable cases, that trickle outward and upward. That tension between corporatism and popular vernacular seems to me to be very important and in play in your work. I wonder if you could say more about that?

When you asked me about my work, it often comes back to me as a kind of mystery that I have to unravel, but this is a case where I think I know where the things you are interested in came from. I saw that the so-called ‘civil rights movement’ was really a people’s movement. That I wasn’t in something called the labour movement, I was in the workers’ movement. I didn’t write music history in Rainbow at Midnight, I actually wrote workers’ history that took musical forms. Even about the music industry where I write music history, I’m not writing about the music industry; I’m talking about music as a site that temporarily got seized by desires for emancipation and dignity and people who wanted to say: ‘These lives have meaning. These people are loved – and look at me, I’m pretty too.’ They seized that space in the same way that workers might take over a factory. Of course, the next day somebody else still owns the factory and the victory is gone, and people say, ‘Oh, but the music industry is still there’. Well of course – but obviously something flowed through it, some current flowed through it at a certain time, in the way that Marx writes about the Paris commune: not because it lasted and was institutionalized, but because what was done and projected at that time was a vision of democracy and freedom that remains important, even when the commune is no longer there.

I think it was amazing to me that there again, because these things are uneven, we didn’t have a good tradition in the US labour movement or US labour history to understand these things. E. P. Thompson had a glimmer of it in The Making of English Working Class. The Italians in a journal called I Giorni Cantati or Primo Maggio had amazing things to say not only about Italian music, but about Appalachian music and blues. They saw it in a way before we did. So Bruno Cartosio, Ferruccio Gambino and especially Alessandro Portelli, they came from something called the circle of Gianni Bosio, and their whole project was to replace labour history in Italy with workers’ history. Workers’ history was workers’ culture. I encountered this through George Rawick, who really was a student of C.L.R. James who got it from Caribbean and British circuits, and there were things outside the US that influenced it. I also recognized it immediately as what Paredes was saying in 1958 in With His Pistol in His Hand, that we already had a tradition of this: it was just kept from us. Paredes was never assigned to me in any course I ever had. I stumbled on him because I had a friend who was a filmmaker who knew folklorists in Texas, and I read it and I said, ‘Yes’. I read it with an eye that Paredes might not have intended at all, but what I saw in his discussions of south Texas was what I knew about south St Louis. I recognized it immediately: if you change the names, it is the same struggle. This is what I sometimes call ‘families of resemblance’. It’s not your story but it’s like your story, and so you see it more clearly. It’s exactly the unevenness of domination, that Althusserian insight, that these things are overdetermined which makes them hard to displace, but it also means there are all kinds of openings and contradictions that reveal things.

Interesting. You just alluded to a set of leaps that involve a critical recognition of why cross-reading needs to occur across these forms. Now, moving from your Rainbow at Midnight book, I follow your work and I’m imagining you sitting at the mixer board … and your slowly starting to push up the faders, the needles are jumping, increasing the microphone reception….

I got a lot to redeem. I’m working ‘in the red’ here…

…So, there’s creative amplification occurring here. The sonic starts to really become important in your work. Very important. You begin to run the gamut, it seems to me, from the very particular moments of individual phenomenological life – and we’ve talked about very specific subjects – to middle terrain where one in cultural studies would recognize as moments of amplified subcultural reflection, to a reaching outward toward a kind of need for suturing these multiple moments. Cross-reading, the combinatorial reflexivity that’s needed to bring these different moments and domains of life into a larger vocabulary that does justice to the moment, but at the same time elevates and amplifies them to a larger mix. So I wonder if you could comment on that trajectory, because it strikes me as important with regard to what one does with music studies: it’s not just ethnography, it’s not just the idiosyncracy of the self, but it has something to do with the juncture of intellectual currents that strike me as maybe problematic within American studies itself.

Well, in my own trajectory, nearly every book I write tries to correct what I think are misreadings of the previous book. I’m seeking absolution for the wrong ideas that I unwittingly promoted, so Rainbow at Midnight, even though I thought it had important racial consciousness, was read by some as a romance of the white working class. So my next book is about Ivory Perry, who was a Black worker written out of history: Ivory and I worked together to try to write him back in. Then in Time Passages we tried to come to grips with the limits of history and the archive, the idea of what Dominic LaCapra calls the ‘documentary retrieval’ method of history. You throw your net out and whatever comes back you note, and then you have a book about this. Of course it doesn’t look at all at what’s left out of the archive. However, the way in which counter-memory is also tremendously important. Benjaminian genealogies are as important as chronological history. Not more important, but as important. In Time Passages I really thought I would turn to culture again: not to write about cultural arguments, but to talk about the relationship between the past and the present and to see the constant tacking back and forth, to explore what Willa Cather called the ‘precious but incommunicable past’. It was to trying to see, on the one hand, how culture mediates our pasts and presents, and it was only after that that I discovered Bakhtin and this rich language that nothing from the past ever goes away. Everything’s going to have its own homecoming day, but the past also never remains the same. It’s a constantly reworked terrain based on contemporary exigency. But then, Time Passages was so much about the United States that the next book, Dangerous Crossroads, was trying to put it in a global perspective – and we could go on down the line.

A part of this I think stems from my experiences as an organizer, even of disastrously defeated movements, that encouraged me to have a notion of scholarship that thinks of itself as a kind of intervention. I think the cultural capital and the ideology of the academy encourages you to think about mastery, about difficulty and about individuals changing the conversation. So, you’re writing to the top three people in your profession and you’re trying to show you’re more complex. My impulse has always been instead to do what Lisa Duggan calls ‘intervention’. That is, this conversation was here before we got here, it’ll be here after we’re gone. How can I throw something out like a soloist in a jazz ensemble that will change the future trajectory in a positive way? I never say, ‘I’m right’. I never say ‘I’m finished’. I never say, ‘This is the once and for all thing’. I’m saying, ‘This is the way I’m trying to be right and this is the way it looks to me now’. I’m inviting people to respond to that, and this is what the musicians I respect most do well, what Bakhtin says literature and the novel especially does, and I think it guides this trajectory in my work. So a lot of these interviews, you know, they’re supposed to reveal how an author turned from being a stupid person into a more complex one. I often say that success in scholarship means being told you’re stupid by an ever-more impressive list of reviewers. When you start out, it’s only your fellow graduate students who tell you you’re stupid, but then if you really succeed, Hayden White will say you’re stupid and then you’ve really gotten somewhere. However, you really haven’t gotten anywhere because you’re still in this dialogue – and that’s fine, because that’s exactly where we ought to be. It’s what we produce together in a conversation. This is why I’m uneasy even about this conversation we’re having, because there’s nothing I did that covers adequately what Jan Radway or Andrew Ross were doing, what George Rawick and many people whose names nobody would recognize were doing. All this, my work came out of that conversation and that’s all I wanted, to be a conversation that pushes our ideas forward by inviting more people to be part of the conversation.

This is a good moment then to ask you to step back and to think a bit about the paradigms of our academy and American studies again. It strikes me that part of what you and many others were inheriting and encountering in this period of the 1980s and forward was that at one level, there was a lot of concern over the fundamental meaning of terms – like ‘American studies’. So here we have a history of people emerging from a whole variety of critical studies, with the notion of ‘American’ as an object or idea in need of unpacking and/or reframing; and ‘America’ as an object that had become even more deeply troubled, for seemingly lots of reasons, some of which you’ve mentioned. There’s a proliferation of really quite remarkable subjectivities, centred or marginalized, that have been written in or written out, that were always, already there. So, what to make of an American studies taking on a kind of reflexive anxiety in this particular period? What impulses did you think were key in these shifting knowledge struggles?

Well, of course there are enormous institutional pressures for a field to define itself, to explain its boundaries, to get its jurisdiction, you know, the way a hod carrier or a carpenter has the jurisdiction to say: ‘This is the job we do and only we do it, and you’ve got to listen to us and we’ll create and credential the new people who do the job.’ That’s what the disciplines do. That’s the way things are structured – but that impulse is a deadly one intellectually and morally because, as Toni Cade Bambara warns, you shouldn’t confuse the vehicle with the objective. You need to distinguish the organization from the action. All cocoons that we might inhabit are temporary. So American studies was a cocoon in which certain fragments of previous struggles could work themselves out: it was an institutional site where cultural studies could happen in the US, where queer studies, feminist studies and ethnic studies could happen. Precisely because of its marginality, it was a place where a lot of good work could be done. But then, when it started to be stronger and tried to define itself as a field, Janice Radway’s 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association flagged a problem. She warned us not to buy into this site too much, because there’s an ‘America’ in American studies that has a deadly meaning to the rest of the world that we need to think about. In American Studies in a Moment of Danger, I tried in a way to undo some of the readings I thought had been made of Possessive Investment in Whiteness, Dangerous Crossroads and Time Passages. I thought people were investing too much in an academic American studies and separating it from the traditions of social movements and social activisms that, in reality, explained nearly everything about why American studies was important. I tried to say that the presence or absence of social movements establishes the paradigms in American studies, and the thing to do is, then, is not to try to find the new paradigm that’s going to do everything, but instead to listen and find what the social movements are doing and attach ourselves to them. Ella Baker advised us to find somebody who’s doing something and help them. My friend Rob Walser, the great musicologist says: ‘Academics always think they need a microphone when what we really need is a hearing aid.’

So again, I’m talking here in this interview to the author of Culture on the Margins who knows a lot about different ways of listening. I wrote an article, ‘Listening to learn, learning to listen’, because what I wanted to say was ‘People get ready, there’s a train coming here’. What happens to social movements is going to determine everything about the meaning of this field, and if the field is to do its work properly, it has to breathe with the vernacular cultures of ordinary people and not be afraid of them, not try to move up to a kind of global universal or a kind of theoretical elabouration that is embarrassed to be seen among the vernacular. We shouldn’t be satisfied to think globally but do nothing. We shouldn’t simply produce ever-more eloquent chronicles of other people’s suffering. Now, that doesn’t mean you wallow only in the vernacular and help everybody find their own ‘designer’ identity, but it means that in tacking back and forth between the local and the global, the best theorizing of the universal will come out of the struggles of the particular. You can’t just observe them – you have to be part of them to understand what they’re saying and doing.

If I could ask you to recuperate some points that you’re making here: these vernaculars that are so important to human struggles, in periods in which they start to become potentially combinatorial – they get combined in interesting ways, link to relationships with social movements in ways that, I think, in many contexts give the academy a place where we can spill over into them and them in to us. I can think of many moments and intellectuals and traditions that are able to have a voice precisely because of the movements have created a space – as space that comes with anxieties and crises that the academy would rather broker rather than take the risks of ignoring, because it would be too expensive to ignore.

Absolutely. If we say nothing else in this interview, let’s say that. That’s big.

So, it seems to me that part of what is at stake here, in constantly rethinking about the critical impulse of cultural studies and American studies, is how they weave back and forth, and they so much inform one another as kindred sort of intellectual souls moving in deep tension with the juggernaut of a corporate culture?

But they’re also both disguises for something more primal. They’re also vehicles, they’re horses that are ridden for a while for particular purposes because they’re great for that purpose – but in the final analysis, they’re really about the people’s right to be ‘other’. The fact is that people don’t have freedom and they resent it. Culture is about the imaginations that are constrained in the everyday lives of people, but these imaginations are the vehicles, they’re not the objective.

Yes. I was thinking of Max Weber who talked about what happens when we can’t distinguish means from ends, when they collapse into one another. You alluded to that kind of problem in a different voice that I think was really powerful and very important. Means and ends, analysis, cultural studies, American studies. Here we have moved into an era, it seems, that is fraught with tremendous danger: a word you’ve used with most helpful precision. Perhaps we need to put that in boldface now, even more so, as we drift into larger crisis that is qualitatively different. We have a historically unprecedented juncture that is extremely difficult to grasp because we’ve never ever seen a situation like the one we now enter. There has been the recent crash of Wall Street, and this time it came in a moment in which there is no industrial base to fall back on – much of it has been transferred and outsourced. The US labour context, which fuelled much of your earlier work, has long been on the trajectory of basically giving away its skills simply because of the ‘fast buck’ of the immediate profit, and so we’re scratching our heads and wondering where the jobs are when we’ve outsourced everything. We have a black president who, immediately on his charisma, once that got settled, is struggling to turn things around. So there’s tremendous amount of tension out there.

What do we make of where we are – in the academy, where we have some kind of licence to think critically? What do you think are some of the major issues that our analytic virtues point us toward with regard to cultural studies, American studies or other forms or of recuperating the past forms or crafting new forms? What do you think is at stake here intellectually?

It’s always interesting and challenging to try to read and understand your own historical moment. There are dangers from under-reading and from over-reading. What is it Debussy says, ‘Wagner’s music was a sunset that thought it was a sunrise’? But they look the same, that’s why you could make that mistake, and this is in some ways always our problem. For me, Rainbow at Midnight was going to be the start of a new democratic workers’ movement. I didn’t know it was the beginning of the end of the American industrial worker and of capital flight and outsourcing. I lived in a city that lost 50,000 industrial jobs in three years and it scarred the neighbourhoods that I used to walk in and live in: they became abandoned and boarded up, and it happened seemingly overnight. After it happened, you could see long-term causes of it, but at the time it seemed to come out of nowhere. I think our circumstance now is that it’s more clear than ever that the people in power cannot fix the things that they’ve broken. Therefore they need to ‘fix’ any oppositional site in which alternative explanations might be created. The university, intellectual work in general and certain forms of critical culture are being defunded and destroyed, in the same way that the welfare state and the institutions of Keynesianism were previously destroyed. So this gives us two problems. One is that there aren’t going to be concessions that allow melioristic reform movements to eventually blossom into broader agents for social change. What we’re going to have is an endless series of totalitarianism, totalitarian state actions, like the official embrace of torture. Obama has incarcerated and deported more undocumented workers than Bush did. There is no change in those regards. Neoliberal reconstruction of social relations can only be legitimated by a politics of affect, a politics of hate, hurt and fear; of contempt grounded in hostile privatism and defensive localism, like you hear on right-wing talk radio. This is an economy and a politics which both political parties embrace, and for them it necessitates the organized abandonment of entire populations, of people of colour, working and poor people. It requires overt efforts at making defence of empire the last refuge of a declining American capitalism. Under those conditions, the things that somebody like me has been developing over 60 years may be obsolete. How can we strategize about a public sphere that may no longer exist? How do we operate in universities which are increasingly becoming vocationalized, virtualized and fiscalized?

This means that we have to redevelop the social in a creative way. To me, this means more involvement than ever in both vernacular culture: that is, let’s listen to anybody who wants to talk to us and see what they’re saying and help them, but also let’s connect with the social movements which, I think, are more important than ever. I don’t consider this different from my cultural work. I just did a book on Johnny Otis and one on the racialization of space which devotes a lot of attention to Horace Tapscott, Lorraine Hansberry, John Biggers and Paule Marshall – people who are cultural creators who I think have a lot to say about space. So, I’m not at all moving away from culture, but I’m also concerned with culture with a small ‘c’, with the work of the development of grass roots leaders by the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates in Oakland, with the attempts to create new understandings of intersectionality and racial justice by the African American Policy Forum. I work with the National Fair Housing Alliance. These may seem to be all about politics and economics, but the work of organizing, educating, agitating, legislating, litigating and all the things you have to do in activism involve cultural creation and struggle. I saw this early on. I was writing my book on Ivory Perry the same time I was writing Time Passages, and I saw that what a street activist has to do is dramatize, to frame, to create narratives, to get people interested in them, to give them a reason to go out and maybe get their heads busted by cops. That’s a cultural project, and it’s a question of moral reform as well as a rearrangement of power.

So I think in this current moment, there’s of course great work being done on culture itself. Tricia Rose’s book, The Hip Hop Wars, is absolutely essential reading to understand how commercial culture frames and misframes the world in which we live. It’s a brilliant and wonderful book. I also think that we need to see the concept of culture that is prefigured in Nayan Shah’s Stranger Intimacy, where he talks about South Asian immigrants in the West in the early 1900s, what kind of sexuality among them was legal and what was illegal, how the regulation of sexuality was an attempt to keep intimacy in families and in the home and to prevent what he calls ‘stranger intimacy’, which we might call social solidarity. These spheres may appear to be disconnected, but they are in fact connected. We can only see that now in retrospect because today we have a new language around sexuality and social identities and power. So I think that these directions are very, very valuable, and in no way should we ever get away from all the things that cultural studies has done: Stuart Hall’s writing on encoding and decoding, his great essay on ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’. These things we’ve got to carry with us, but we’re also in a different era where the idea of a subculture is, I think, no longer viable because subculture is often just a new market niche, and subcultures actually won’t be left alone. I think it’s our colleague Avery Gordon who says that when the state abandons you, it never leaves you alone. The brilliant and noble work that our late colleague Clyde Woods did with grass roots community groups in New Orleans, which is both cultural and political organizing: this is what has the most meaning to me, and that points to the future of what we should be doing.

It seems important to talk about terms and their opportunities and limits, and the contexts that shift beneath them and us. It seems that part of what’s at stake here is how do we make the transition from the vibrancy and vitality that subculture, for example, once gave us, to the problem of how to link up with the notion of transculture or a set of problems and discourses that spiral outward and upward, which don’t abandon the earlier particulars, but reknit them together. So the question I would want to ask here, and about our present context, is about what kinds of availabilites might we have to begin to transact those discussions. I’m curious about the internet and how well and vital that might be, in the context when corporatism is trying to reinstall dominance in what they might envision as a post-net neutrality world.

I was recently in England, and in my visit I stumbled right into the centre of a massive student protest, their second major protest against the privatization of their public sphere and the moves to turn education toward an increasingly vocational model at the expense of diminishing the whole legacy of liberal arts education: human sciences, social sciences, humanities no longer apply – what students need is a basic skill, so give them that! I think about how in the last couple of months there’s been more and more ‘op-ed’ pieces in major American media that raise the question: ‘Do we need college anymore?’ The ‘workforce’ may be getting educated, but they’re not really getting ‘trained’, and that is the problem and so on. So there’s a tremendous amount of openness about dumbing down the process of shutting down the sites of reflection, of memory, of imagination – all of which are consistent with defusing aspirations that have been long in developing.

Well, two things about this. One, the first thing you asked about were the openings and the second thing were the closures. In terms of the openings, it is true. Look at Dan Czitrom’s Media and the American Mind. One of the things it says is that there’s about a 20-year period with every new medium when it’s not quite fixed: young people especially with imagination flock to it and do extraordinary things with it, but after that period it gets co-opted. It gets routinized. It gets commercialized. You go through every new technology – the telegraph, nickelodeon, radio and television – so why wouldn’t this also be true of internet technologies? We have to applaud and encourage the genius, especially of young people armed with the erotic energy and the bratty insolence of youth, and what they’ve been able to do in creating new conversations and new communities – but we can’t expect those to last. Again, we don’t own the terrains in which those things are going on, even though a lot of important work has been done by them. That type of opening also is characteristic of historical periods. Homi Bhabha used to say ‘out of every emergency, there is an emergence’, and so one of the things that happens is that new possibilities are seen and people seize some before they get caught up with and co-opted. When they get caught, they’ve already moved on to something else; but the other side of it is also how we think about repression, oppression and suppression, and how could it be otherwise. What else would we expect? Do we think we’re going to be invited to dismantle the death regime of capitalism by capitalists? By the corporate media, or the corporate university or the corporate political system? Well, of course not. I was in Chicago a few weeks ago, and when you take the blue line elevated train, at every stop the conductor says: ‘Doors are closing.’ I took that as a statement on America. I thought it was like kind of a found poem: ‘Doors are closing.’ Maybe she only meant the doors of the train were closing and you shouldn’t get caught in them – but let’s not underestimate the poetic imagination of the working class.

You can relocate that statement!

Yes, clearly it’s fungible. It can be used in many other circumstances, and it’s clear that we’ve got our hands full with this. This is not a game. This is not something that we can play with: we’re not going to have peace and quiet. There will never be an end to this. No white knight or black knight is going to ride in and save us from this, but one thing we do know – and again, Stuart Hall taught us this – is that we shouldn’t confuse the most grandiose agenda of capital with the way things actually happen in history. In fact, hegemonizing is hard work. Domination is hard work. Domination always produces new forms of resistance, as everybody from Foucault to Marx to David Lee Roth has taught us. So our job is to have our eyes and ears open.

Earlier you said something interesting to me. You said that in Time Passages it was like I was listening with a third ear, and in the Afro-diasporic cultural organizations that have taught me so much there has often been great faith in what they call ‘the third eye’. This used to be connected by certain crank physiologists to the pineal gland. It was the idea that there was something that could be seen even though it was hidden, that there was a sharpened sense of seeing, a sharpened sense of hearing for things that are here that don’t announce themselves as being here. I think that you find them really through action. You commit yourself and then you see. It doesn’t come to you. It isn’t brought to you, and you don’t necessarily find it by reading. Our colleague Jim Lee said that we operate in the spaces that universities don’t endorse but nonetheless tolerate: these spaces provide us with good insight into what to read in our books, but they also tell us when it is time to put our books down and to engage in face-to-face talk, deliberative discussions and collective action. That has always been the best generator of new ideas. Robin Kelley says that social movements have a poetry of their own because they throw forth new ways of knowing and being, and that’s again where culture and the social movement comes together – but nobody will do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves.