Interview with Lawrence Grossberg

To begin with, Larry, you’ve been one of the earliest American intellectuals who have consistently emphasized the importance of cultural studies. Also, I gather from various writings, you spent some time in your formative years at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. It appears that that was a rather important turning point for you. I would like to ask if you could reflect a little bit on what it is about that experience that helped to shape your interest in cultural studies.

Right. Well, I guess to answer that I need to start a little earlier. I was an undergraduate in university in the middle of the 1960s: I graduated in 1968. So these were, shall we say, turbulent times in which I was a participant in a variety of ways, and part of that entailed thinking about politics, about popular culture and about the politics of intellectual life and the forms of intellectual work, and thinking about the relations amongst those three in various forms of movement, countercultural politics. I was very fortunate, because I had a series of professors as an undergraduate, including Hayden White, Loren Baritz, Richard Taylor, Jarold Ramsey, Jim Kaufmann and others, all of whom were willing participants in these discussions: they used to go out for coffee or beers with us, with undergraduates and graduate students alike, and talk about these issues and talk about the relations between intellectual and academic work and politics, of the politics of academic work and the relations of popular culture. So these were on my mind. I had started my academic career in the sciences and had become very disillusioned with the kind of practice, the intellectual practice of science at the time, in that place. I subsequently realized that, had I gone to a different place and worked with different people, I might have had a different impression of science – but those are the accidents that shape our lives.

…and you might not have taken up cultural studies.

Exactly. Had it not been for the Vietnam War and the draft and the pressures on me, I might not have gone to Birmingham, but I did. What I found at Birmingham, what left a lasting impression on me, I guess more than anything, was a sense that on the one hand, those three axes – intellectual work, politics and popular culture – were in play. Those were the axes that were being shifted around, examined, reconstructed, reconfigured, as was the space in which they were operating; and they were doing it in ways that were not predefined. They were doing it in ways that said, ‘Well, we don’t know what the answers are. We don’t even know where to go to look for the answers’ – and that was exciting for me. But it wasn’t only that we don’t know where to go to look for the answers; the problem is that we don’t know where to go to look for the questions. They understood that people like Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart had laid out, opened up a field, and they understood that the questions were not so stable, universal and unproblematic as some people reading Williams or Hoggart might have assumed.

So I came away with, on the one hand, a sense of an open field of enquiry that addressed precisely my interests, and that addressed what I took to be the, or at least my, crucial interests in the Western world at the time: politics, culture and knowledge, as it were. On the other hand, I took from it a sense of a kind of rejection of any kind of universalism, any kind of transcontextuality or transcendentalism, in the sense that the questions we ask as well as the answers we give, and the tools we have available to us, have to be located within the specific context that we are working in. Now we would talk about it, and I do, as a rejection of claims of universalism, in favour of radical contextuality. I doubt that people there thought of it yet in those terms, but these were the impulses I felt. Finally, the most refreshing thing I found at Birmingham was that they took ideas seriously, they took academic work seriously; but they believed deep down that that was not what the academy was doing. It was more like, if you take ideas and knowledge really seriously, then you have to take it more seriously than the academy did. The result was that their (our) discussions were passionate: they were filled with joy and anger, pain and despair – and it was fun. So many of the things that had frustrated me as an undergraduate or as a young pseudo-intellectual in the 1960s about the ways in which the academy worked, it seemed to me that they were saying, ‘Yes, those are the things precisely that are often preventing us from producing the kinds of conversations, the kinds of collaborative work, the kinds of interdisciplinary work, the kinds of more modest work that our questions seem to demand’.

So I came away with, as I’ve written about it subsequently, a kind of optimism about what you can actually do as an intellectual. I had it before (and again later) in the form of great teachers who did great work and who opened up new fields of enquiry and imagination. Brilliant. But the Centre was unique: here, what I found was people trying to struggle to create, as it were, a conversation, a field or mode of enquiry that wasn’t dependent on these unique individuals, but was more a kind of conversation in which anyone committed to the relations of ideas, culture and knowledge could participate. But it was all of course in the margins, in every sense, of the academy, yet still in the academy. I know I am not supposed to romanticize it, still . . .

Let me follow up on that, because you raise an interesting historically specific reflection on the periodization that led you and others to explore this kind of paradigmatic breakdown of the academy, and this new rupture that allowed for some kind of new ability to put in play intellectual challenges, politics and popular culture. Do you think you would have been able to find some kind of intellectual milieu, or was there such a thing, in the United States? Was that available to you at that point in time? Do you think it was there in any way resembling the kind of intensity that, say, the Birmingham school was generating at that point?

I think that some of the early work in American studies that was taking place, that I was vaguely aware of … I was reading early Alan Trachtenberg, those kinds of things, it seems to me that that was moving, that was trying to do some of the kind of work, it had connections. Certainly I was unaware of it at the time, but Jim Carey was trying to do that. You could look back to some of the New York intellectuals from the 1940s and 1950s. What Birmingham gave me that perhaps was not this particular intellectual tradition – Mike Denning has written some of this history and he points to some of those and he’s right – but what Birmingham had was a sense of, I don’t want to say ‘community’ because that has too many connotations, but a sense of a collaborative project. A sense really that we didn’t really know what we were doing. We didn’t know together what we were doing, and we knew together that we were trying to do something. Maybe some of that was in the counterculture, but it was too sure of itself and not so committed to the value of ideas and research and knowledge. There certainly were other academic places moving in the same or parallel directions – some interdisciplinary spaces, like History of Consciousness at Santa Cruz, but I cannot help but feel that CCCS was a rather unique intellectual space, at least in the English-speaking North Atlantic; it had a sense of urgency about its work and, how deeply political its project was.

A sense of needing to invent.

It was. Institutions have histories and it was a particular moment. I was fortunate enough to be there for a little while in that moment and to benefit from that excitement. If I had gone to work with Jim Carey immediately, I don’t know – although I loved Jim and his work has deeply influenced me, I don’t know that I would’ve come out of it with the same intellectual and political excitement.

It does strike me that what you’re describing and that what has been written up, is that there was a genuine kind of ferment, an openness, a kind of willingness to suspend the established historical categories and this was very, very important.

And equally important: the Centre drew all sorts of odd, unexpected, not your typical students – and young faculty, I should add. Stuart, Alan Shuttleworth, Mike Greene, they were all young, and the graduate students were people who were not your typical academics. A lot of them worked part-time, a lot of them travelled. These were not necessarily what one imagined at the time as your archetypal, stereotypical graduate student, and that to me was also exciting because I, of course, didn’t want to imagine myself in the model of a disciplined and disciplinized graduate student. These were a whole bunch of people who said, you know, ‘The world is exciting and interesting and problematic, and we’re a part of that, and we want to understand what’s going on as we are participants – we think that that’s going to demand new ways of doing intellectual work.’ It was an exciting moment. I don’t want to romanticize it – it had many problems and failures, and was often more difficult and painful than it should have been, but personally for me it was exciting. I left, as I said, feeling kind of optimistic about the possibilities of doing intellectual work.

What is quite remarkable is that the process and what you experienced there carried over and seemed to foster creativity. In many ways it culminated, if I may put it this way, in that remarkable conference that you and others put together that, in part, got publically registered as Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. What led up to that moment in which you and your colleagues were able to think through and actually invite a substantial number of intellectuals from around the world? A lot of people came. I was there as a beginning graduate student. It was an eye-opening, startling experience for me, hearing all these remarkable intellectuals struggle with the older history of Marxism and critical theory, and vetting the newer theoretical strands coming from poststructuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism – all these new impulses coming out in the context of the conference. What led up to the conference? How did it manage to get pulled off?

Well, Cary Nelson and I – Cary was a young literature professor when I arrived at Illinois as a graduate student, and he was very interested at the time primarily in poststructuralist literary theory, which then was very new and didn’t have the kind of stature and presence that it took on eventually in the 1980s. I worked with Cary. We became close friends. When I came back to Illinois as a professor we continued our friendship, working together. We started teaching classes together, and we decided that there had to be some institutional form which could encourage both a kind of critical theoretical work that was beginning to emerge as a serious discourse in the humanities and social sciences, but also encourage interdisciplinary thinking, since so much of this discourse was kind of transdisciplinary – I think perhaps the Unit for Criticism was more committed to a transdisciplinary discourse than it was really to serious interdisciplinary work. At the time, that was important and crucial; it was perhaps as much as one could do. So we started by organizing a series of reading groups: every semester we would find a topic of what was then kind of new, current theoretical work, whether it was Derrida, or at one point for a year we did new Marxist theories, we did Foucault – we did anything that appeared interesting.

Were these organized around graduate seminars or other faculty?

They were faculty reading groups. In conjunction with them, sometimes at the same time, sometimes afterwards, we were organizing a series of graduate seminars. Cary Nelson and I taught some, and we started to teach a graduate seminar that involved other faculty as well, on a range of theories. Partly it was a kind of a self-promotion in order to convince the university that what we were doing was significant, they should support us with resources, but also to get ourselves on the map, as it were, because Illinois wasn’t exactly a major and visible centre for such intellectual work at the time. We decided that we needed to organize some public events, and partly because of our politics and my background, and partly because of our reading of what had and had not been taken seriously in the 1960s, and in the emerging discussions of various kinds of cultural theory, we just said, ‘Look, there is an enormous amount of interesting work around Marxism that would bring together the variety of interests represented by key faculty at Illinois in the Unit for Criticism’. It enabled me to bring cultural studies in; it enabled Cary to bring in certain kinds of Marxist literary theory like Jameson and Spivak; and it enabled other people to bring in more of the historical sense – so it seemed like this was the right time. You know, there are lots of great conferences all the time, and they all take enormous labour – but once in a while, a conference (and the book it leads to) takes on a life of its own because it catches the right topic at the right moment – and I think that is what we did (as did the famous Johns Hopkins conference on poststructuralism), twice. We were fortunate in both conferences to catch the right moment. This was a moment in which Marxism was emerging as a viable and important intellectual discourse in the realm of transdisciplinary theory, and a realm in which the debates in Marxism, between a variety of readings of Marxism, were just beginning to come up. You could say to people who were reading one position in Marxism, ‘Well, but don’t you want to take into account the variety of positions? Shouldn’t we be encouraging a kind of open debate and discussion of these?’ So we did, and we convinced the university that this was a significant event, that it would help give the university a kind of visibility that it wanted. Cary was very good at mobilizing resources from the university, and even the National Endowment for the Humanities, by convincing them that since it was going to happen, it might as well be really good. What we did was, I suppose, what anyone does to organize a conference. You go out and get three or four key people to agree to come, and then quite literally it becomes a point where people we would invite would say, ‘Is this a conference we need to come to?’, and we could say, ‘Yes it is – because we’ve already got A, B, C and D coming, and don’t you want to be part of that conversation?’ So before we knew it, lots of people that we hadn’t really thought would come did come, because who the hell would want to come to Champaign-Urbana?

A lot of graduate students did.

We were quite surprised by the response. We did not expect so many people would want to come, and then as it became clear that this conference was going to be a significant event, we began to think bigger. So we put in the courses at the beginning and the Marxist literary group meeting for a few days before that, so it became a much larger event.

Could you reflect on what you think the impact was of that conference and the edited volume, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture?

Well, I think we did two things: they’re interrelated because it was so large in terms of simply the numbers it created. I think it was unintentionally a key event in a generational history of a certain segment of the academy. Lots of people – I still meet people like you – who come and say to me, ‘I was at that conference, and it was a transformative moment for me.’ Partly I think it was transformative because for the first time people could see the full range of positions, people, arguments, discourses, etc. in a way that was simply not available. There was Henri Lefebvre, and there was Fredric Jameson, and there was Stuart Hall and there was Gayatri Spivak. A whole range of people, that was extraordinary. In retrospect, there’s always people whom we should’ve invited but didn’t, or those whom we did invite but didn’t come. But it was an extraordinary group of people, and I think for many it created a kind of wave effect for the people that were there, for whom it was transformative and who then went out and continued the wave that carried this. So I think it was a key moment, along with Johns Hopkins conference on poststructuralism.

I think that those were two key moments that in a way propelled this kind of transdisciplinary theorizing into the American academy, and I think the book had a profound impact because it was really one of a few key texts, along with works like Perry Anderson’s early surveys of Marx, which made available to people a vision of the state of Marxist theory. It was interesting and it was good, and it wasn’t the Marxism that you had been taught. It made visible all sorts of wonderful work in one place, and now you could say, ‘Well, this Lefevbre is really good and I’ve got to go read more of him.’ There were other people, many of whom were at best names, whose works were not widely distributed, like Stuart. So I think that’s one thing.

The second thing that it did – and for me it was as profoundly important, was that it really brought British cultural studies to America. Stuart Hall gave a series of eight lectures in that pre-conference course. Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson and Julia Lesage gave a series of lectures; but it was also the first major introduction of Stuart Hall into the United States. He had been here before, some of his works had been visible in some fields – in education and communication, for example – but I think this was the first time that 800 people got to see Stuart Hall in action, and then the conference brought in other people from the British cultural studies tradition. So it was the opening to say, ‘Here’s a whole body of work, paradigm of thought, practice of intellectual work that’s going on’ that in many ways contrasted sharply, both stylistically and intellectually, with some of the other paradigms and figures that were at the conference.

Let me follow up with that moment that you described. It does strike me as being something of a generationally important intellectual ‘CT scan’, so to speak, of the moment, involving a great variety and plurality of Marxist thought and criticism, insofar as it presented a rethinking of a tremendous numbers of paradigms that had collapsed, were collapsing, along with the new modalities of criticism that were emerging. It does make sense to see how British cultural studies, which had gathered some good headwind behind it, got introduced to the United States in a very critical moment and took hold. That leads me to think about the 10-year span between Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture and the follow-up conference that came out in the published form of Cultural Studies, because in that latter text, as you well know, there is a kind of dead reckoning, or taking stock, of what had happened or what was in the process of happening, what had transpired with regard to the American assimilation of cultural studies.

It opened a series of debates about what cultural studies is and isn’t, or what it was and wasn’t, regarding a number of concerns about how one can or can’t transplant one set and sense of intellectual ideas into another culture and another context. Could you comment on that? Because it seemed to me that the introduction that you and your fellow editors, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, wrote was an attempt to deal with that sense of tension regarding the transition from an earlier moment of rupture within which cultural studies was in process of forming as an intellectual milieu, and then as it became more debatable with regard to its translocation or transposition into another cultural context. What was that all about in your sense of reflecting on that period?

In the first place, I have to say that both the conference and the book were structured to some extent by a series of compromises. In that, I was not always happy. There were people at the conference, invited, for whom I was less sanguine about the claim to cultural studies – but you know, as in any collaborative effort you find middle ground. You make a compromise. I think you correctly read the introduction in a way as negotiating not only the tension within the field, but also a tension amongst the three of us about the question of what constitutes cultural studies and the logic of cultural studies, and how it is embodied, engaged and institutionalized in the context of the United States.

Cultural studies was, in the first instance, my project; Paula Treichler increasingly was committed to it, and her stuff on AIDS is a brilliant example of what one can do with the kind of cultural studies practice for looking at contemporary cultural politics. Cary was less intellectually intrigued by the project, but he had his own deeply intellectual and political project, which was ambivalently and ambiguously placed in relation to cultural studies. I don’t want to write him out and I don’t want to write him in. I want to say that these were the tensions that were operating and, in one sense, I think they’re good. I think those are the tensions that cultural studies constantly needs in a debate. So in that volume, when Stuart Hall says it does matter what cultural studies is, in a particular time and place – that demands a kind of constant self-reflection about the conjuncture in which you’re operating. In a sense, that was what the introduction was trying to state: that sense of what that would that mean, what Stuart Hall’s call was really a call about.

Well, I’m curious if you could reflect on that, because it did strike me that a number of things come out in Stuart Hall’s piece: one is that it does matter how one thinks about cultural studies. It matters significantly; and on the other hand, he said: ‘I’m not sure what to make of cultural studies in the United States.’ Do you have any thoughts on that disjunction, the observation that it does matter what one thinks, and on the other hand, the question of just what should be thought? It seems to be also about what kind of formation was or wasn’t taking hold?

I think you have to read that statement as many statements, as typically Stuart Hall, that points to complexity, contradiction and possibility. On the one hand, I think that Stuart is saying ‘Look, I don’t know what to make of it because in part I don’t really understand the conjuncture.’ I don’t think you could say Stuart didn’t understand something about the American conjuncture in political terms; but still, understanding a conjuncture is more than simply reading the newspaper or watching movies or reading political analyses, however intelligent you are. It entails work, and that was not Stuart’s project. Certainly the American academy was a kind of strange thing to Stuart – as it is to many of us, and continues to be. So I think, on the one hand, Stuart was saying, ‘I don’t understand cultural studies here because it’s not my place to tell you what the conjuncture is and how cultural studies should look.’ On the other hand, I think he was saying, as he does say explicitly at some point in the questioning, ‘What I see is a lot of high theory passing itself off as cultural studies’.

He would sometimes use the term ‘theoreticisms’.

Well, the American academy is very good at doing high theory and while Stuart (and I, and anyone in cultural studies for that matter) would always argue that cultural studies involves a necessary ‘detour through theory’, it isn’t about an engagement with theory per se. It is partly the problem that continues to haunt what passes for American cultural studies. I think the other thing I would read into it is that the American academy is institutionalized in very powerful ways and in very disciplinary ways. So that, as Raymond Williams once said, you end up being more worried about creating the appearance of legitimate institutional disciplines or sub-disciplines then you do about the project of cultural studies. I think it’s the nervousness with which I, Stuart perhaps and others looked at that time and continue to look and say: ‘Now wait a minute, it’s not as if cultural studies is the study of media or of popular culture, or of identities or audience studies or whatever sub-disciplinary formation you want. It’s about figuring out questions and analyses within a particular conjuncture and finding the tools within that conjuncture.’ At the same time – and the final thing I think I hear in Stuart’s statement is, I think, a certain reluctance, which Stuart is much more public about, and I’m at the opposite end – Stuart has always been very nervous about saying ‘This is what cultural studies is – and that isn’t it’, whereas I have been much more willing to say, ‘This is what I think the project of cultural studies is, but I cannot define or prescribe its formations’. While I don’t want to get involved in saying ‘I don’t think that’s cultural studies or not,’ I want to constantly remind people of what I take to be the project of cultural studies (because I think there is value in naming the specificity of its project and practice).

All of that is further complicated by the fact that, partly because of the breadth of people invited – as I said, not all of whom I initially or even after the fact thought of as being implicated in, and committed to, the project of cultural studies – the tendency to make ‘cultural studies’ sometimes into an umbrella term in the United States in the way that ‘critical theory’ had been in the decade before, gets even stronger. Critical theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s became a term for everyone trying to deal with politics and culture. I felt sorry for the poor Frankfurt school people who kept saying, ‘But critical theory is a particular project that came out of the Frankfurt school. You know, it had that ambiguity, and in a way, after the conference or maybe before that too – but the conference in a way contributed to it – cultural studies has this dual meaning. On the other hand, it seems that lots of people use it as an umbrella term for writing about the politics of culture. On the other hand, it is a more specific term, not uniquely located in the Birmingham project, but located in a variety of places, that was more specific in the contours of its practice. I think all of those issues, ambiguities, struggles and uncertainties are there in the book; in a way that’s productive because, to be honest, while I’m happy to say, I’ve made a career in part by saying it, ‘This is what cultural studies is,’ I also can’t ever say ‘This is what shape it should take in any particular conjuncture’, and even conjunctures within the United States. If you’re working on questions of immigration in the south-west or issues of securitization in global travel, etc., I don’t know what the cultural studies formation will look like that will enable you to give an analysis of it. I don’t know how it will look if you try to understand the national conjuncture at the site of kids, or at the site of ‘race’ and urban decay, or of food politics. In other words, I don’t want to prejudge what cultural studies looks like. This is what the introduction in the book tries to say: ‘We don’t know what cultural studies will look like in any instance, but we do think there is a project here that is worth defending in its specificity.’ You don’t get to identify it with a particular set of content issues or questions or methods or theories. You get to identify it with a particular way of doing intellectual work.

That’s what really struck me in the introduction that you wrote: the challenge to try to get people to back off any frantic moment of reifying it as a particular noun, as opposed to actually trying to ground it historically in a more supple way, as a realm of intellectual action that had to be configured based on the historical specificity that one was confronting. I appreciated that because it does bring to the forefront the process of engagement, as opposed to just resorting to a particular kind of paradigmatic set of practices – which leads me to a question about your work. You said earlier something that struck me, and I want to come back to it.

Cultural studies wasn’t just about topics but was about asking questions, then knitted together into some sort of understanding of a conjuncture, questions that tended to get at a conjuncture. Initially, when you began as a young scholar at Birmingham, you were very strongly interested in popular music and politics, and it’s a concern and interest that I think has stayed with you over the years, expanding into problems of kids and increasingly into theories of affect. That conjuncture, and those questions that knit together your interest in those areas, popular music, politics, audiences, communications, etc. – could you say a bit more about those kinds of interests, and what it was about the mix of questions that allowed you to focus on those aspects of your work in relation to cultural studies?

Good question. I’m actually coming back to it, because I’m now writing a book about counterculture, both going back to the 1960s but also writing about the present, today. I started by saying that I was shaped to a large extent by my existence in university in the second half of the 1960s, and my intellectual interest, what I wanted to work on, was divided really. I had a great interest in Hayden White’s intellectual history and philosophy. I worked with Hayden White and Richard Taylor in philosophy, so one of my interests was in what was then called philosophy, but now would be called theory.

The other interest – and the two were related, but I didn’t quite know at the time how they were related – was in understanding what was going on, what the counterculture or the movement, or whatever you want to call it, was doing or how it was working, and what it was about. Like many of the people that I then met at Birmingham and subsequently in cultural studies, I was a participant who was trying to understand both using my own participation, but also being self-reflective about it: what this was, what its significance was. How it was working, what it was doing, why it was or was not succeeding, etc. I wanted to understand what was going on in the United States at the time, and I wanted to understand it through the lens of the counterculture. The counterculture was my way into the context. I didn’t have the term then, but I wanted to get into the conjuncture. My hypothesis was that there was something unique and important about this development, this kind of countercultural politics –I still believe that, and that’s why I’m coming back to it. I would now say it depended neither on hierarchical organization nor hegemonic organization nor an alliance politics – those are the three models we have, it seems to me, of political opposition organizational. Nor was it – and this is one of the debates I’m going to get into – simply, as I think in contemporary discourse, a kind of assemblage of autonomous entities, each group doing their own thing. It was a kind of what Stuart would call a unity in difference, with what Althusser describes as a ‘teeth-gritting harmony’. I didn’t have the vocabulary in 1968 to begin to talk about it, that there was something going on here that was worth figuring out politically. My hypothesis was that it had something to do with the music. It had something to do with the role of the music in the counterculture, and through that the role of popular culture more broadly. But in the movement the music, I thought, was the centre to which other forms of popular culture, or through which other forms of popular culture, were articulated. So that meant I needed to figure out how to talk about music. I used to have this debate in my early career with lots of friends of mine. I was never really all that committed to popular music studies per se, although I was happy to support it and did, and probably to a small extent helped legitimate it; but what I was interested in wasn’t the music, but in understanding it, because I was trying to understand something else. I was trying to understand how the music worked to accomplish something that I couldn’t yet specify, that was crucial to this kind of political formation that we called the movement or the counterculture. So that meant I took a 10-year detour, as it were, into the study of popular music, reading everything I could find in musicology and ethnomusicology and sociology of music, trying to find a way, and eventually entered into Deleuzian philosophy and theories of affect and psychoanalysis, to try to find a way to talk about popular music. From that, I developed a kind of theory of how popular music worked in the conjuncture from the 1950s through the 1970s. I wanted to try to figure out how that would enable us to talk about the counterculture as a political cultural formation and, from that, how that would then enable me to say something about the broader conjuncture within which a countercultural struggle both made sense and produced some profound changes, but also in other ways failed.

Now I’m coming back to it and to give you a little hint, the book I’m now writing is called Without a Song. It’s about the counterculture today, and part of my argument is that while there are many important things going on, in a way it is precisely the absence of a sense of unity that, I think, the music created in the 1960s that constitutes part of the dilemma of oppositional politics today. That it does not have a popular. It is not about hegemony, as Stuart Hall would say, but it is about speaking through the popular. In the 1960s, its ability to speak the popular and through the popular was crucially dependent on its relationship to music. It’s not that there isn’t great music today, it’s that that music is not any longer centrally articulated into the unity and difference of the counterculture.

Perhaps it is an odd way to put it, but is there a sense of this being a case where popular music has lost its populism?

No, I wouldn’t want to say either that in the 1960s it was populism, or that it was lost. I don’t know the answer to that, because I’m just beginning to research and figure this out. It’s predicated in part on two interesting observations for me. One is something I’ve written about; in the early 1990s I wrote a piece – not very widely distributed and that’s perhaps a good thing – called something like ‘Reflections of a Disappointed Rock Scholar’, in which I say why I am, in a way, giving up writing about popular music. I should say, when I finally got around to writing a book about popular music, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, it ended up not being a book about popular music. It ended up being a book that starts with popular music, and then turns more toward the rise of the Right in American politics: the transfiguration and the ways in which the kind of affective politics of the counterculture and its popular music, in a way, were articulated into the hegemonic struggles between the liberal Centre and the rising New Right. But in this article I argued a number of things, one of which was that I had become convinced that the theoretical apparatus that had emerged out of my studies of popular music, centred on the 1960s, an apparatus that I thought at least provided an analytic vocabulary for trying to talk about how popular music worked – to now I thought large parts of that vocabulary no longer were conjuncturally appropriate in the 1990s. The ways in which popular culture and popular music mattered, and the ways in which they operated and functioned, were changing significantly because the context in which they operated had changed in significant ways. Out of that observation I ended up writing Caught in the Crossfire.

Yes. I was just thinking about that as you speak, because it seems that there is an extension here with regard to the analytic you suggest. Popular music was a way of refracting larger social, political and cultural movements that were antithetical to, as I used the term earlier, a kind of populism of struggle or resistant culture, and this gets picked up even more so in your more recent Caught in the Crossfire book.

Yes, exactly. That book came about because I was trying to reassess. I made the silly mistake of assuming that the theoretical apparatus which had been developed within a particular context to talk about rock culture would continue to work, and as I investigated, started to do research in the 1990s, I found that it didn’t work. One of the reasons I found it didn’t work was because kids were telling me that the experience of being young in America had changed significantly. A lot of my argument was about the context of rock (understood as broadly as you can) and how it all worked, which depended in part on a certain social position and political importance assigned to and taken up by youth – and if that had changed, then the equation starts changing. Then, there are all the other vectors and determinations of the conjuncture, and one had to map out how they have changed as well over the course of 50 years: so Caught in the Crossfire comes out.

The difficulty is I do think that there’s lots of great music today, and I do think that, for various groups various forms of music have a political purchase. But what I don’t think – and I don’t want to say that the problem is simply that the music has been fragmented, which is a very common argument – that somehow the music was all unified in the 1960s and now it’s so fragmented that no one listens to the same music, since I don’t think that’s true empirically. If you go back and listen to the soundtrack of the 1960s, I mean, the range of sounds is enormous. I think I have evidence that lots of people didn’t listen to lots of sounds. People didn’t like this or that kind of sound. It wasn’t that the music was all unified and now it’s all fragmented. There is something different, which I can’t quite explain yet because I’m still doing the research, I’m still trying to think about it. But I think something has changed, and the result is that the music’s ability to create what I would call an affective unity of the counterculture of the 1960s is no longer there. It doesn’t mean the music doesn’t matter to kids, it doesn’t mean the music isn’t political in various ways for various audiences; but it means that the way in which it functions suggests that its ability to articulate in this particular way within the counterculture no longer seems to be a viable possibility, and no other popular formation has been able to take its place. I said I had two sorts of exemplars. The other one that back after look caught my eye is that if you look at the alter-globalization movement or now, at Occupy, the interesting thing about it is has no soundtrack, no way of moving into and through the popular.

Yes – so-called ‘world music’ just doesn’t do it.

No! I suppose some people would say it’s because it’s not generational, whereas the 1960s was generational. I don’t think the 1960s was so completely generational as people assume, and I don’t think those easy explanations work. So I’m trying to figure out why and what the implications of that are.

I would like to actually take what you just said with regard to using your discussion of popular music anecdotally, or as a kind of analogy to the problem of cultural studies. If I could ratchet that outward again, it seems to me that the concern for thinking about the vibrancy of popular music as having the historical capacity to generate affective unities and bind people together in certain kinds of collective struggles is also a similar problem that one could raise with regard to cultural studies as a political project, as an intellectual project.

I’m coming back to this business here that you’ve mentioned in numerous parts of your own writing, of how important cultural studies is, not just in the academy but outside the academy. I was struck in recently reading a piece that you did a while back, writing about Richard Hoggart and the lessons that you learned from him, precisely with regard to the inside versus the outside of the academy and always, this concern that the academy itself could be in trouble. You wrote about that in rather striking terms, about how important it was to grasp the academy’s trouble, and it strikes me today that everything that was said in your earlier piece, reflecting on Hoggart’s lessons: all those issues have just become more deeply intense.

I would like to ask you to shift and consider how we might think about cultural studies as it’s faced with the challenge to respond to new problematics – those are terms that you raised in your earlier piece. What are the new problematics that you think are most pressing now? Can you take a stab at or take some risks in thinking about what is to be done in the present? What is to be asked? What are the new problematics now facing cultural studies, given the fact that the university is in far greater trouble today? There are arguments – we read them in the New York Times and other national newspapers – posed in the question: is college necessary? People ask these inane questions, it seems, about whether or not we should value liberal arts education to begin with, let alone cultural studies. So it strikes me as a very urgent moment within which the new problematics need to be thought. I guess what I’m asking you is: how do we talk about cultural studies now with regard to ‘new problematics’?

Let me divide that question into two parts. The first part is about the university – at least in the US, for that is what I know best; and then the second part is more about the larger conjuncture. Maybe it would be easier to start the other way, but let me try this – with the university – because I’m not usually the kind of person that sees crisis as opportunity. We tend to forget, I think, that the university is an historical invention, and that what many of us have taken for granted as the normative structure of the university, and of higher education and of the expectations of university life, is a series of constructions. I suppose you could begin at the late 19th century, with Johns Hopkins’ importation of a kind of misreading of the Germanic university and the creation of what we came to call the research university, that gets embedded in Chicago and becomes a normative model in which research and teaching are identified and aligned, and then located within departments that are identified with professional disciplines. Then that gets transformed after the Second World War by the enormous expansion of public education and to some extent the democratization of higher education; and that gets transformed again to some extent in the post-1960s years, by the resonances of the university as the central site of 1960s counterculture,which develops its own transformative impact on universities and professors and student expectations, etc.

What is ironic about much of what is being said at universities now is not unlike the larger political struggles. We find ourselves under attack, and what we end up defending is a model that I’m not sure should be defended, and a set of expectations I’m not sure should be defended. So instead of thinking forward and saying well, ‘Now, what is the university that the present world demands? How can we mobilize support from other groups, even some that, to some extent, are seen as our antagonists? How can we mobilize them in our defence?’ (after all, for example, interdisciplinarity is on everyone’s map!); we often conflate the Left’s distrust of organization with the critique of a particular institutionalization of certain values, conflated into the corporate model. Knowledge has always been materialized into not only practices but also institutional forms. I would argue that we’re not going to win a battle fighting corporatization, but we could win a battle fighting for better forms of corporatization than the Ford Motor Company. My problem with universities isn’t that they’re becoming corporate, it’s that they’re becoming Ford Motor Company: hierarchical, centralized, inflexible, etc. It should be exactly the opposite; flexibility, interdisciplinary, quality control, etc., and finding ways to work with that. I am not suggesting that we accept a profit or monetary definition of our goals and even of our measures of effectiveness, but I do think we need to address the question of our value to society conjuncturally. I think the question of the aim of liberal arts education is more about how we could be losing the battle only because we’re not answering the question. We think we know what the value of liberal education is, but what’s amazing is that you don’t see very many people engaging in the public debate over what is it we are trying to do. There is a war against knowledge and education in general, and if our answer is that we’re trying to make revolutionary subjects, we’re not going to win. If our answer is that we’re trying to make students into more moral people, we’re not going to win the battle. But there are battles that we can win. There are visions of liberal arts education that need to be articulated, and they would likely transform the nature of education and transform the nature of intellectual work. More collaborative work, more interdisciplinary work, certainly. We need to fight against a model of the isolated, heroic intellectual who produces the book that somehow has to sew up all the questions and answers, it’s got to claim a kind of completeness, has to appear finished – instead of embracing the kind of pragmatist notion that we’re part of an ongoing conversation. We just need to do more work about the possibilities of the university model. Not to make it into an institution of cultural studies, but to learn lessons not just from cultural studies, but from other intellectual and political formations, about how to respond to the fact that we are going to be pared down. After all, we’re not going to recover from these budget cuts, at least in the foreseeable future.

So how do we function? What is our function in this modern world? How do we create more collaborative work, and how do we create more interdisciplinary, inter-institutional approaches? How do we do better work? Universities are saying we have to be engaged with communities – at least my university is. We can take advantage of that. We can talk about, I think, being involved and engaged with the community and the forms of social movements where there is important, creative and intellectual work being done: not as advisers, but as interlocutors with these groups. At the same time, we need to hold onto our responsibilities as academics as well: to seek the best answers to the most necessary questions, and not to let our politics overwhelm our ability to be wrong. We need to be exploring that. So that’s one side. The other side of this is (though it’s not exactly the other side), David Scott, a Jamaican anthropologist who teaches at Columbia University, has a wonderful argument of what he calls ‘problem spaces’ that I’ve used in my work. He argues that conjunctures offer up, conjunctures can be read, can be analysed, can be listened to as their own problem spaces. So that for him, what radical contextuality means is not that the answers vary from one context to the other, or from one conjuncture to another, but that the very questions vary. I don’t think he would suggest – and I certainly wouldn’t suggest – that there is only one problem space per conjuncture, because there are different places to stand and different angles, etc.; but if you don’t get the problem space right, then in fact your analysis will not open up political possibilities. It will end up reproducing political failures.

So how do we address questions that matter not only to us, because it is only in this way that we can contribute to social change. I think we too often make the mistake of assuming that we know the problem space well in advance, and this is always a problem in the American academy for people like me who have a certain vision of cultural studies, because I think we too quickly assume either that we know what theory works – so Marxist theory is going to analyse for us the present financial crisis, or we think we know what the problem is, as a political problematic – as we hear, its all about neoliberalism. I think we should throw out those assumptions and ask ourselves and not in isolation, but have a discussion, have conversations about exactly how do we begin to understand the questions that are being posed.

Now, my last book tries to do this: it makes a proposal which says that you can understand the United States and its turbulent political history since the 1950s as a kind of ongoing struggle over what it means to be modern, and of the possibility of what I call ‘multiple modernities’, that there are different ways of being modern. I don’t want that to be understood as simply saying that there are alternative articulations of European modernity; I want to say that there are radically other ways of being modern besides the European way. Then the question becomes, to use Audre Lorde’s question, ‘To what extent can you use the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house?’ So I think one of the questions we need to ask is how to re-examine, in a conjunctural way, some of the categories that we have inherited, like the notion of culture. Raymond Williams wrote a theory of culture which was brilliant in the 1950s and early 1960s. Why would we assume that that’s an adequate theory of culture now? There are people out there, Bruno Latour and others, who want to get rid of the concept of culture. I want to say: let’s be self-reflective and conjunctural about it, and offer a different conjunctural theory of culture, of politics and economics, which take complexities seriously. We need to question these categories. We need to question as well our own ability to engage with them. So one of the big arguments in this book involves economics; it’s become necessary (for a variety of reasons and not always good) that people who write about culture are taking questions of economies seriously. I think that’s good, it’s important. I don’t want to suggest that some people in cultural studies or other cultural critics have not been doing it for a long time, but there’s more of it. The problem is, as Nigel Thrift points out, a lot of it is just shit, and it’s partly shit because we don’t actually do any work. We don’t do the work of taking what’s been written about economics seriously within the discipline – and that includes neoclassical, but it also includes a wide range of heterodox forms of economies. It means that it also entails doing empirical work. You don’t just get to read David Harvey or Rick Wolfe or Paul Krugman and assume that you understand the economy and then write about it, any more than you would allow an economist to write about popular culture by just reading one book. You would say, ‘These are fields of debate and contestation and there are empirical issues and theoretical issues, these are complex matters, and you ought to know where you’re positioning yourself within the field of debate and contestation when you take a position.’ We don’t do the work that I think is entailed in interdisciplinary research. You can’t just find or go to the good economists. I have friends who are economists; I don’t get to trust their work either. I do use my friends who are economists to read my work, and they criticize it and say, ‘Well, you can’t say this unless you’ve also read X, Y and Z,’ so I’ve got to go read X, Y and Z. But I’m amazed by how easy people think it is to do interdisciplinary work. I’m talking about economics, but I think it’s also true about politics.

The same is true of political theory and analyses. Some of my friends are into governmentality studies, which I can use. Yet I’m amazed at how people can talk about governmentality without actually reading anything in political theory and political science beyond governmentality. There are other theories of governance, and just because it’s from Foucault doesn’t mean it’s right! It doesn’t mean it’s the most useful theory. I don’t mean ‘right’ to be empirically true or viable, I mean, how do you know what is the best theory to make the argument you need to make? Or is it just that you want to argue that governmentality is everywhere? Or that it allows you to say what you already wanted to say before you ever started the work? It seems to me, I don’t want to say that isn’t viable academic work, but I certainly want to say it’s not what I think cultural studies is about. I was having a conversation with Wendy Brown and she was saying the same thing about the discipline of politics that I was saying about economics: that it is appalling how few people actually read other than a few selective works in political science, as if they can ignore all the empirical work. They can ignore all the theoretical arguments, disagreements and engagements. They just read the theorists that ‘fit’ into their political worldview.

Cultural studies is about learning things that you didn’t know. Being surprised about the world because the world is more complicated and contradictory than your theories allow for, because the world is changing. What Marx wrote in 1860 may have some useful insights, some of them foundational, but it may also have limitations because it, too, has to be understood conjuncturally, and such understanding means work.

I appreciated you flagging at the onset of this part of conversation that idea of ‘problem spaces’ that have to be read and listened to, and if I understand you right, one of the things you seem to be saying – perhaps more so in your new book – is that cultural studies has to inhabit the problem space of the present and retain some sort of engagement that allows this sort of enterprise to continue to ask those reflexive questions that do require the interdisciplinary work – and that’s going to change. I liked your idea of rethinking, at least the challenge of whether or not the concepts of culture that were forged in early modernity and up to the 19th and well into the 20th century, with the whole rise of the industrialization of culture, are still just as viable or demand new formations. Particularly after the digital turn, for example.

Yes, we have new theoretical resources and the politics of culture have changed and the terrain, the empirical terrain of culture has changed. The problem spaces have been articulated and rearticulated (these sorts of concerns are what lead me, by the way, to my researches on affect). These are, it seems to me, the kinds of issues we need to address. For example, while we might talk about the projects, discourses, ideologies, etc. of rearticulating the individual and the state through the mediation of the market (and perhaps money), I think the whole concept of neoliberalism – my friend John Clark has argued this as well – has served to diagnose the problem space too quickly. We should think about how we use it much more carefully. What would happen to contemporary critical work if you weren’t allowed to use the word ‘neoliberalism’ because it sews everything up together, because it confuses a project (or multiple projects) with success? If people actually had to do the work of spelling out what’s going on? They couldn’t just say, ‘neoliberalism is happening’. Neoliberalism of globalization, neoliberal subjectivity, neoliberal governmentality, neoliberal everything!

Without the careful unpacking, its almost a chant, a mantra – certainly a shortcut or short circuit.

As if it tells you anything. Instead of doing the work of analysing the complex struggles because of course one of the problems is – and this is a crucial assumption – the fact that certain projects may exist, projects to transform everything into monetary value, projects embodied in political and economic practices and struggles—does not mean that they will succeed. It does not mean they are uncontested. It does not mean that there aren’t counter-projects. There are no guarantees. That’s not what conjunctural analysis is: to just describe, even amongst the dominant, as if there were a unified and successful project called neoliberalism or securitization or any of these things that seem to me to avoid the work, the work of looking at the complexity of politics – and that takes us back to the work of interdisciplinarity. There has to be some more responsible, empirical, theoretical way of engaging across the disciplines. These are in part intellectual problems; they are in part political problems, and they are in part pedagogical problems.

So for me, what is my pedagogical task, as someone who believes in cultural studies? It is to teach students how to think contextually and conjuncturally. I don’t want to teach them politics, I don’t want to teach them morality, I don’t want to teach them any particular theoretical position. I want to teach them how to think contextually and conjuncturally. The other way of saying it is, I want to teach them how to think relationally, because that entails complexity, contestation and contradiction; it entails the relations between cultural politics, economics and social practices, etc. It entails a self-reflexively – and I don’t think we do that very well. I think we teach our students a certain body of theory, which they then can use without ever being able to argue well. What if someone just says to them, ‘But I don’t agree?’ I’m having a problem now: for example, I’m trying to participate in a conversation with a group of people committed to kind of active network theory, and what is increasingly called ‘ontological politics’, and it’s very interesting work. On the one hand, I want to support it, and I think what it does is very important. On the other hand, I want to say, ‘But I think your understanding of modernity is completely oversimplified’. How do you have that conversation across theoretical paradigms? It’s not a purely theoretical issue, nor a purely political one; the conversation can be productive if it is conjunctural, contextual, ‘Let’s look at the complexity of what’s going on in the world. Let’s look at the specific relationalities, specific struggles of power that are going on and let’s see whether that concept of modernity is adequate for describing this complexity.’

Let me ask you a broader question about that very notion of a conjunctural sensibility and how and why it is important, especially with regard to your diagnosis and the future of cultural studies. In the context of the United States in particular and the future of cultural studies, what is it about the present conjuncture that you think we should worry about, that is perhaps inimical to a continuation of a viable and critical cultural studies? To turn the question around: what is the opportunity structure that also can be exploited and taken advantage of to perhaps invigorate cultural studies? So there’s a double-edged question here. What is potentially detrimental in the conjuncture that could actually make cultural studies wither or go away? For there are some who are quick to say that it was a thing of the past, relevant to the 1980s and 1990s, or that cultural studies has been assimilated and turned into something else. On the other hand, what would be the critical response? I guess my question is really more about what kind of diagnosis we need with regard to rethinking, as well as retaining some kind of continued vital grasp of cultural studies in the academy.

The people who say it was a thing of the 1990s, I think they are confusing formations of cultural studies with the project. I think what they mean to say – I don’t know that I agree with them – is that there are issues of identity and politics, and issues of popular culture and politics that are not the issues of the contemporary moment any longer. They were the issues of the 1980s, maybe the 1990s. While I may not entirely agree with them, I would probably agree that the ways in which those issues were framed in the 1980s and 1990s are probably in need of serious revision today, and probably how they are articulated into the conjuncture needs to be rethought. Again, this is about contextualism and conjuncturalism. To go off on a slight tangent, there was a conference about John Fiske, where a number of people, including me, were vilified for our critiques of his work. I think people misread my argument: my critique of John wasn’t that what he did wasn’t important, it was that it was important in a particular conjuncture. One had to embrace studies that said people are resisting, active, contesting all of the time. That was a crucial intervention at a certain moment in a specific conjuncture. At a certain conjunctural moment it spoke to a problematic that was absolutely essential to open up. The non-dominant, the repressed, the oppressed, whatever you call them, are not passive. They’re not simply victims. They’re active. They’re engaged with power, etc. – that was absolutely crucial to note. But we now move to say, ‘Is that the problem space anymore? Is that the argument we need to make?’ Or do we have to ask about how, on top of that observation, forms of consent, apathy and even conservatism are being constructed? At the same time, how it has become so easy for people to assume, once again, that the majority of people are cultural dopes, duped by the media, caught in their own greed and selfishness?

So we come to your question. The great challenge to cultural studies in the conjuncture is, I think, the great challenge to the Left and to intellectual work more broadly. We should ask: ‘Why are we losing?’ For 50 years, why is the country and most of the world, especially the advanced industrial world, moving in ways that would seem to us to be counter-progressive, to the Right? Because whether you’re talking about the rise of conservatism in Europe or America, the success of capitalism renewing itself over and over again in more and more powerful ways, or the collapse – and new sort of rise – of Africa, the rise of a kind of authoritarian capitalism in places like China, we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is our work not offering possibilities for transformation and struggle in more progressive ways? Why is the discourse of politics in the United States more and more to the Right, so that what is the Centre is now what we used to call the conservative Right?’

The Left – the serious, progressive Left – is completely cut out of the debate. So what Obama calls the Left was really what we used to call the Centre. It’s easy to write it off and say, it’s capitalism, it’s the media, etc. (Then, on the side, we might actually acknowledge that there are enormous numbers of people and groups struggling, in the US and around the world, in the name of progressive changes and social justice.) But I think at some point we have to say, part of it has to be us. Part of it has to be our failure to tell adequate stories, our failure to communicate those stories. Our failure to connect, as Stuart would say, to the popular in ways that offer people possibilities. That seems to me our biggest problem, that the work we are producing is not adequate to the context we are living in, to the sense of actually offering viable political possibilities that connect to the present. I think a lot of the discourse of autonomous politics about creativity and experimentation is very important, but there also has to be a discourse that articulates it back to the struggle against the existing systems of domination, which can close off the spaces of experimentation. I think that’s the greatest problem facing the Left. And it is crucially connective to a very complex set of crises around knowledge itself.

So, the way in which you’ve summed up the questions of conjunctural, crises and challenges, which involve and invoke cultural studies, but which also hinge on a much broader set of problems – the problem of what kinds of politics are engaged, what culture means these days and what any kind of viable work that produces a reinvigorated populist discourse is all about – seems crucial.

I think the irony is, on the one hand, what we have been living through over the last 60 years or so is this extraordinarily turbulent series of complex political, cultural and economic struggles, and the more and more the struggles continue, it seems to me, the less and less relevant seems to be what we are producing in the Left. Again, I don’t think you can simply say the media doesn’t give us a voice, that identity politics made us irrelevant, or that we speak a language that is too theoretical. These are all true, they may be part of the struggle, but they are only a piece of the puzzle. Economists speak a language that is much more impenetrable than what we speak, and I think those all may contribute a bit to it, but I think we don’t turn the lens on ourselves enough.

I think cultural studies as a practice is one very viable way of dealing with the complexity of these struggles. Gramsci says that when you’re losing, it’s easy to come back to deterministic, economistic theories, and it’s surprising how quickly that is happening: after 50 years of people – not only in cultural studies but in other kinds of practices – arguing against always thinking, it’s ‘all about the economy, stupid’, what I find now more and more is that people are saying, ‘It’s all about capitalism. In the end, it’s about capitalism’. Cultural studies is precisely the view that says it’s never always about any thing. It is about the complex articulations of politics, culture and economics in a larger conjunctural set of struggles. Cultural studies is precisely, it seems to me, a practice which is made to analyse the kinds of conjunctural struggles we find ourselves in – and ironically, I think, the Right understands this. I think they understand the articulation of culture, politics and economics. I think they understand working through the popular, I think they are doing a kind of cultural studies in their analyses of what’s been going on. We do not need to emulate that, but we need to understand that this is going on and to understand the Right’s successes against our own. But the Right has and is producing better stories: better, not in the sense of politics, but better in the sense that they do seem to take into account the complexity and they do open up strategic possibilities for their own political project. (The Tea party is, hopefully, undoing some of this.)

Your observations suggest a need for new kinds of diagnosis and proposals, of new debates and even new projects.

There’s a moment when I was doing research for Caught in the Crossfire. I came across this quote from one of the people in a right-wing foundation, who said that his greatest worry was that the Left would realise that they already have the most profoundly rich think-tank at their beck and call. The Left, while it appears to be torn between various positions and practices, theorists, policy ‘wonks’, artists, social scientists, etc., has the university system, he said. While I do not think that the Left controls the university, the university is one site of intellectual-political work, and as an organization it has the possibility of mobilizing enormous resources for cooperation, collaboration and communication, to produce better knowledge about what’s going on.