Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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The Cultural Commons: An Interview with Michael Denning / Victor Cohen
Introduction
Michael Denning is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His first two books, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (Routledge, 1987) and Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture (Verso, 1987), examined the politics of popular fiction. He followed them up with The Cultural Front: Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1998), which has become the encyclopedic study of the culture of the American Popular Front. Denning's most recent work, Culture in an Age of Three Worlds (Verso, 2004), analyses the rise and fall of American and Cultural Studies, providing a coda to his earlier work.
This interview was conducted 28 April 2007 in Michael Denning's office at Yale by Victor Cohen. A shorter verison of this conversation will be published in the Spring 2009 issue of the minnesota review, alongside an interview with Denning's longtime partner Hazel Carby, the Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies at Yale.
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Victor Cohen: How do you feel today, 20 years from your first book, Cover Stories, and what are you up to now?
Michael Denning: It feels odd to think of it as 20 years since the first book, because I think of it as 30 years since the 1977 summer session of the Marxist Literary Group (MLG), which got me to the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the fall of 1978. My first two books, Cover Stories and Mechanic Accents, both of which came out in 1987, were the product of those ten years of thinking about popular fiction, thinking that had begun as a project in marxist literary criticism. That was my initial interest, to follow the models that Fred Jameson and Terry Eagleton developed in the 1970s: could one take that kind of marxist literary criticism and bring it to the analysis of popular literature? So I was involved in the MLG's first summer institute in St. Cloud, MN, in the summer of 1977, which was taught by Fred Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Aronowitz; various other people would give presentations in the afternoons. I think I was the most junior person there, the only person who wasn't a graduate student or a faculty member.
VC: How did you end up there, if you weren't a part of an academic program of some kind?
MD: I had been working in Boston, as a museum guard and package wrapper for the Museum of Fine Arts. I was right out of college trying to make it as a freelance writer, and trying to get a job of some sort in what was called "the movement," but the movement was disappearing. There were no funds or anything, so I was doing volunteer work for DSOC [the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee] and the War Resister's League. I was trying to see whether there was some way of hanging on to the edges of one or another of those organizations, while at the same time trying to make it as a freelance writer, sending out reviews and stuff to the alternative weeklies that had emerged at the time, like The Boston Phoenix and The Real Paper.
I was entirely unsuccessful at all of that. I discovered that everything I wrote was too long and involved for weekly journalism. But I saw a little advertisement for the Marxist Literary Group in the back of The New Republic, which was strangely enough not a neo-conservative journal back then. So I sent in for its newsletter, and the newsletter said there was going to be a summer institute, so I took what I thought of as my Michael Dukakis fellowship - unemployment insurance (Dukakis was the governor of Massachusetts at the time), and went out to Minnesota for this three week session. It was just amazing.
It was there that I heard about the Birmingham Centre from Eagleton. So I was in Birmingham in 1978-1979, and then came back to graduate school at Yale to work with Jameson. I was first in English and then in American Studies, and it was in those years that I was trying to put together a marxist approach to popular literature. In some ways, the Birmingham half of that project ended up as the book on British spy novels, Cover Stories, and the New Haven half ended up in the book on dime novels, Mechanic Accents. Even though they were written together, Cover Stories was conceived first and was imagined as a genre study; Mechanic Accents came out of what I felt were the limits to genre criticism. By that point I was getting more interested in thinking about labor history and the place of popular fiction in working class culture. So by 1987, when those two books came out, it felt like a decade of thinking about popular fiction was over, and I'd had my say about it, for better or worse.
VC: So what drew you to popular fiction in the first place? Were you always interested in the field, and the tradition of marxian genre studies seemed a good way to think this through?
MD: No, I was not always interested in popular fiction. On the contrary - like a lot of a New Lefties (and I always felt like a young member of the New Left - I was fourteen in 1968, part of the ‘kid' generation of the New Left), I was entirely taken by the avant-garde and by experimental sorts of things, though it was always a pressing question, whether or not a political art, a cutting-edge avant-garde art, could also be a mass art. You could feel this in some ways through the whole controversy over Dylan going electric, for example. But no, as an undergraduate in college, I was reading Joyce, the classic modernists, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the novelists of the Latin American boom. I did my senior essay on Blake's Prophetic Books, particularly Jerusalem, a project which I always thought of as a way of trying to put E.P. Thompson together with Fredric Jameson.
It was really when I was working in New York and Boston for a couple of years that I got into popular fiction, because like everyone else that works for a living, I was reading all these popular novels on the subway going to work. I began to get interested in the ways they were so much a part of relaxation, narratives that just accompanied the commute to work, books that were passed around the office. So, when I got to the Birmingham Centre, where there was a real interest in popular fiction, the English Studies group decided to do its collective project on popular fiction. We were sitting around the table dividing up popular fiction: someone said I'll do romance fiction, someone else said I want to do detective fiction, and I, not knowing much else, thought I'm kind of interested in the spy novel so I'll do that. Eventually that group project resulted in the volume Rereading English, though I was no longer at the Centre when it was completed. My part grew into Cover Stories, as I left Birmingham and continued to work on that project.
VC: So then, before you went to Birmingham, where did you go to school?
MD: As an undergraduate, I was an English major at Dartmouth. But that was probably because I thought it was the easiest major to complete. I interested in the French Revolution and British Romanticism, so I put together what they called a modified major. It was a mix of the history of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the poetry of the English Romantics, a little Hegelian philosophy, and so on, which was how I ended up doing the thesis on William Blake. It was a weirdly interdisciplinary major at that point, because it was the issues, not the field, that drew me in.
Then, I spent a couple of years, working and trying to do the freelance thing in New York and Boston. When I got the one-year fellowship to study in Birmingham, it was a revolutionary, mind-altering year, both in doing the collaborative work and being a part of this socialist-feminist research institute. So then I went to Yale to do the doctorate. Jameson, whom I had met earlier at the MLG summer institute, was at Yale, and even though he wasn't in either English or American Studies, he was willing to work with me. Intellectually, it was a exciting time to be at Yale, less because of the actual curriculum, than for what was happening on the fringes. Because Fred was at Yale, there was a chapter of the Marxist Literary Group, and one of the key parts of my graduate education was being in that group and, a little later, the New York Social Text collective. The other part was the New Haven MARHO collective (MARHO which was the radical historians' organization), which met and edited some of the issues of Radical History Review. I was in both collectives, and my first New Haven years - when I was here as a graduate student before leaving to work at Columbia - were really shaped by the dialectic between the two; that's when I began to think of myself less as a marxist literary critic than as some kind of cultural studies person, which for me meant doing a mixture of Birmingham Centre work, the MLG literary criticism, and radical history.
I also can't underestimate the impact that labor historian David Montgomery had on me (he arrived at Yale from Pittsburgh during this time). Even though he was probably not particularly interested in the kind of literary and theoretical things that the others were doing, for me, his approach and focus were the elements that were necessary to a marxist literary and cultural analysis.
VC: So, given that you were a member of DSOC and the North American New Left more generally, what was it like going to the Birmingham Centre, which was very much a part of the British New Left?
MD: Well, I have two things to say about that. One is that DSOC, with all its strengths, had absolutely no cultural politics whatsoever. It wasn't the least bit interested in this, and I always felt like there was this absolute gap between my political activity and my cultural interests. I was active in DSOC, particularly during the years I was in Boston and New York, because those were active chapters, and I did all sorts of things, but no one was interested in the politics of culture, either avant-garde or popular. I remember meeting a DSOC member who was an English professor someplace, and I went up to him and said I was really into marxist literary criticism and Jameson, and he was like, "Oh, that stuff is worthless!" He was an amazingly active socialist, and the most conservative literary scholar you could imagine. That split was there, and it wasn't that surprising. He was an absolute comrade you could count on for doing all kinds of political things, but when it came to thinking about Dickens or whatever his scholarship was, he was just an ordinary literary critic. And he was the only person I ever met in DSOC who had any interest in literature, except for Michael Harrington himself. Harrington was very interested in culture, theory, and in European marxism, and it came through in his writings and in informal conversation. He had that wide-ranging interest, but frankly that was not true for most of the DSOC membership.
In fact, one of the political strengths of DSOC was that it was a socialist organization without being marxist. People in it were Christian socialists, labourist social democrats, anarchists, various forms of populist socialists, and politically that was great. I never thought that a political organization should depend on everybody being a "Marxist" in some kind of philosophical way. But it did mean that marxism was rarely part of the dialogues or discussions inside the organization.
Going to Birmingham was really a radically different kind of thing. The American New Left had certain deep anti-intellectualist tendencies in it, which I shared in my early days. I remember taking part in a debate where I took the anti-marxist side on the grounds that there was an American radical tradition that we could build on, that we didn't need any of this marxist stuff. I was probably seventeen at the time. So Birmingham had a much deeper sense of the connections to those longer left-wing traditions.
The second difference in Birmingham was in the theoretical landscape. I remember the first day I arrived, I was told, "well, if you read [Antonio] Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, [Louis] Althusser's Reading Capital, and [Harry] Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, you'll be right up to speed immediately," because those were the three books which were the basis for the debates and arguments at the Centre. I arrived full of Frankfurt school theory. The first piece I wrote that was published was a review of Herbert Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension. Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Bemjamin: those were the figures who seemed essential to marxist literary criticism, and the Birmingham people were not interested in any of that. The Frankfurt school was considered surpassed, old hat, passe, and they were on to other things.
VC: Is that because the Centre was more activist in its approach to doing academic work?
MD: No, I'm very reluctant to see choices of theoretical models as political progressions or regressions. I think that the Frankfurt school theory had meant something to the Birmingham people at an earlier moment, and it was just that they had felt like they had settled their accounts with it. When I arrived there, there was a sense that they wanted to move away from high theory and re-engage in the concrete analysis of concrete situations. One reason Gramsci's work was beginning to displace that of Althusser was that his "Notes on Italian History" looked like what they wanted to do. They wanted to do "Notes on British History." In fact, that year Stuart Hall was writing his influential essay on Thatcherism, "The Great Moving Right Show." The books that came out of that - The Empire Strikes Back, Unpopular Education, Remaking Histories, Rereading English - were an attempt to make that move. It was also the moment of E.P. Thompson's attack on Althusserian theory in The Poverty of Theory; the Birmingham Centre was trying to make a synthesis of Althusserian theory and Thompsonian history writing, a combination that didn't please either side. I remember Thompson coming to the Centre and giving a version of The Poverty of Theory, and it was very controversial. He was in a take-no-prisoners phase; if you were even interested in reading Althusser, you were suspect.
VC: There's a collection of essays from a symposium of that moment that documents exactly this kind of exchange, between Thompson and others, and the editor in a short preface makes the comment that "there was a smell of cordite in the air."
MD. There definitely was. It was certainly very exciting intellectually, and I remember that when I came to New Haven, there were similar debates in the MLG and MARHO. The U.S. radical historians had come out of the Thompsonian model of social history, and so they too were going through a debate over the place of theory, a debate that can be seen in Joan Scott's Gender and the Making of the History and Brian Palmer's Descent into Discourse. That was the context out of which my first intellectual and political project emerged.
VC: And that was largely through the English Studies Group?
MD: No, all the Centre groups were involved with that. When you got to the Centre, you normally joined one group, sometimes two - I only had money for the one year, so I did the master's courses in theory and history, and joined the one group. Hazel [Carby] was in three groups, if I remember correctly, while she was there: the English Studies Group, the Media Group (which never did publish its work), and the Race and Politics group, which put out The Empire Strikes Back. But she was there for the whole doctoral program. So people who were there for a number of years would end up joining a number of groups.
VC: What was it like going to Yale from that environment?
MD: Well, two things. On the one hand, Yale seemed, academically, the most conservative place in the world. At Birmingham, where we had no resources, the very first day we arrived, they taught us all how to use the mimeograph machine, because they said "everything you write, everyone else is going to want to read, so you have to type it on a stencil and mimeograph it off." So every morning you got there, and in your pigeonhole would be these one- or two- or three-page manifestos that people had written. I remember someone read The History of Sexuality in French when it was first published, and immediately wrote up a four-page single-spaced precis of the book for those who didn't read French. And I remember coming to Yale and suggesting to other graduate students that we start circulating each other's papers and reading each other's stuff. Well, that was just not what was done at Yale at the time. On the other hand, because there were these genuine voluntary collectives of radical historians and marxist literary critics on the side, I did find people to read stuff with and talk to.
VC: Would you consider the MLG and the radical historians group the academic version of what the New Left became?
MD: Yes, it was the craft unionism of the New Left academy. And you can see it in the book Bertell Ollman put together at the time, The Left Academy, which was organized by disciplines - marxist sociology, marxist anthropology, and so on. The reason I say it was a craft unionism is because each of the disciplines imagined itself as a craft - we were historians, we were anthropologists, we were literary critics - and one had a kind of radical alternative inside that discipline. It was quite different than the industrial unionism of the graduate students a decade later who began to think across the disciplines; we're not first and foremost historians or anthropologists, we're teaching in the neo-liberal university. But the earlier moment was a kind of radical, artisanal moment. We were historians who wanted to be radical historians, literary critics who wanted to be marxist literary critics. And there was a whole infrastructure of little journals like Radical History Review and New Political Science that nurtured the left wings of the disciplines.
VC: Where did cultural studies fit, given its inter-disciplinary status?
MD: Well, at that point, cultural studies was not visible in the U.S. It's not until much later that it begins to emerge here, and when it does, it begins by taking a disciplinary route, through communications departments where New Left communications scholars want to create something that's not the study of the effects of television violence on children, who want a new critical mass communications project. One thinks of the journal Critical Studies in Mass Communication which was one of the first places where Birmingham Cultural Studies was picked up in the U.S. So it was imagined as a radical communications or media studies, which was important and powerful, but in some ways was a narrowing of the Birmingham cultural studies work, which was not just a radical version of the disciplines. There were people with literary training, sociologists, Thompsonian historians. Without being overly romantic about it, I think cultural studies in Birmingham did imagine itself as this interdisciplinary socialist-feminist whole, rather than as a kind of radical craft unionism. And it may have been that way because the disciplines didn't have the same kind of overwhelming professional structures in British higher education that they did in the U.S.
VC: Is it fair to say, then, that in the Birmingham Centre environment there was a sense that the forms of study were a part of the production of a socialist culture?
MD: Oh yes; absolutely. There was no question, though it would be a socialist-feminist culture. It was often said that cultural studies was the name created in order for the university to allow it to exist, that if they had named themselves, they wouldn't have named it the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, but the Centre for Socialist-Feminist Research. That's why the question of what an organic intellectual might look like and the whole set of issues about the relation of intellectuals to movements were constantly debated.
And there was no unified position - it was true that virtually everyone at the Centre had some relationship to the British left, but some of them came out of Trotskyist traditions, others out of Communist traditions, some from feminist activist traditions, other people came out of the extra-parliamentary left, there were people who were really interested in the Italian CP and what they were doing, and others who followed the Italian extra-parliamentary left. One of the best early books on Antonio Negri and the Italian New Left was Bob Lumley's Cultures of Revolt, a book that came out of the Birmingham Centre. So there was a tremendous variety of positions of what the relationship of intellectuals to the movements might be.
VC: That must have been a fairly dramatic shift, coming from Birmingham to New Haven. You started not in American Studies, then, but English? Why?
MD: Well, I started in English because I still imagined that I was a marxist literary critic. Once I arrived at Yale I discovered there was this space called American Studies, which I'd never heard of and which seemed weirdly parallel to what cultural studies was doing. It even had a certain New Left politics, though a much quieter one because American Studies had been developed by left wing scholars in the 1950s who tended to downplay, given the Cold War context, their politics. So a year after I arrived at Yale, I transferred to American Studies, and have been more or less in that intellectual space ever since. However, I never really thought of myself as an American Studies person, first and foremost, but rather as a cultural studies person after I made that switch from being a marxist literary critic. For me, American Studies was a terrain in which one could practice cultural studies.
VC: Is that when you began taking up the project and ideas that later became The Cultural Front?
MD: Yes, The Cultural Front really comes out of the next ten years, the decade between 1987 and 1997. I'd always wanted to do a book on the 1930s and the Old Left. The very notion of a New Left involved a settling of accounts with the Old Left; at the simplest level, it was figured in the relationship between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. That symbolic genealogy had attracted me since I was about eleven years old, when I started listening to Guthrie and Dylan. I was fascinated with the 1930s, sensing both a kinship with and a distance from the Old Left world. In addition, when I finished the books on popular fiction, I felt that one had to place fiction in a much wider field if one was looking at popular culture in the 20th century. So The Cultural Front was really an attempt to mix what I had learned about working-class history and culture, about movement cultures of one sort or another, with forms other than fiction: theatre, film, music. It began as a small project - I thought I was writing a little book on Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater. Welles was a fascinating figure because he didn't find the standard notion of the political artist. He wasn't a political person who became an artist, but was an artist who was drawn into the gravitational force of this social movement, a movement that enabled him to do this extraordinary work in several mediums - theater, radio and film. But halfway through, I decided I had more to say about the social and cultural movement than just Welles, and so Welles shrunk into just one chapter of a larger book. It took longer to do, but I'm much happier with the result.
In a sense, it was my Americanist book, because for me the great problem with the writings about the 1930s left is that it was always seen, in the crudest sense, as puppets of Soviet Communism, but even in a less-crude sense, as fundamentally a reaction to European politics. The history of the US left was a series of echoes of the splits among the Bolsheviks, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi-Soviet pact - not that those foreign policy issues weren't important, but it struck me that most of the books on ‘writers on the left' paid little or no attention to the central story in the U.S., which was this amazing emergence of working-class militancy which gave rise to the C.I.O. It was quite evident that the tensions which were thrown up between black and white workers, between men and women workers, as a result of the transformations in the workforce in the 1930s and1940s: that was at the heart of these stories. The Citizen Kanes and "Strange Fruit"s were not being made about the Hitler-Stalin pact. Sure, they were a few movies like Mission to Moscow, but they were minor; the great movies and songs were dealing with central issues of North American society, so I wanted to bend the stick the other way, so to speak, and Americanize the way we saw the Popular Front of the 1930s.
In some ways I might have gone a little overboard in that way, and part of my post-Cultural Front work has been to try and correct this over-emphasis. The chapter on "The Novelists' International" in Culture in an Age of Three Worlds, is an attempt to argue that Popular Front culture was not simply an American culture, that you can see versions of it around the world, a very powerful international culture. But really the purpose of The Cultural Front was to do justice to what was taking place in the U.S. in terms of the labor movements, the early movements for black liberation, the early movements for the organization of Chicano workers, and the ways those movements were coming together.
VC: You know, one of the great things about that book is its scope; even its critics admit that it provides a tremendous map to the cultural and political networks of that decade and beyond, one that moves far beyond the proletarian literary movement. As you were coming up in American Studies, were there people writing about this world whose work you gravitated towards, or who helped you put these various pieces together? Or had you always been reading Mike Gold and been curious about what lay beyond that?
MD: I think there are three different ways to answer that. Because I'd had this long interest in the culture of the 1930s, I'd been collecting 1930s material for decades, since my early interest in Woody Guthrie as a teenager. I probably wrote more papers on Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath for high school English classes than anything else. So there was a way in which I was powerfully captured by the mythologies of that moment, and one of the purposes of The Cultural Front was to try and break from those mythologies and recast them. That image of the romantic 1930s was always there, so I collected all kinds of 1930s stuff, anything that was available: old proletarian novels, old political pamphlets and journals. In the 1970s, I used to haunt this stretch of dusty used bookstores (which I think are now all gone) that lined lower Broadway where you could find the paper legacy of the 1930s left.
VC: But how did you know what to look for?
MD: I used things like Rideout's Radical Novel in America that had the lists of all of them in the back, and then there were guides through the New Left organizations, or semi-ones. Being a member of DSOC meant that one listened to the stories of the battles between the left sectarian movements of the 1930s from people who had been a part of them. In some sense there were no doubt drawbacks. The left-wing organizations that one ends up in are usually not really a product of one's ideological position, but are products of the accidents of one's own biography, which city you happen to be in, which people you happen to be around. So I ended up in not the New Left groups with people of the 1960s and 1970s generation, but one of the older formations, DSOC, which had many veterans of the Old Left: old, bitterly anti-Communist Trotskyists, old Social Democrats who remembered the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas. Its usefulness was not necessarily adopting their old battles as one's own - though sometimes there was a danger of that - but of learning this internal history in ways that can only be told - it doesn't turn up in books. When the merger between DSOC and the New American Movement took place, forming Democratic Socialists of America, some of the people from the Communist Party traditions who had been closer to NAM end up in that circle as well. So I absorbed much of this history in late-night conversations among different socialist activists of different generations. And then later, outside of that, there was the accident of meeting someone in a neighboring town who had been a long-time Communist and an organizer of the Screen Cartoonist's Guild. I think I mention this in the book, but I remember an evening when he and Perry Anderson got into a long argument over the nature of the American Labor Party in the 1930s, and it was absolutely fascinating to listen to. At the end of the evening, Bill was just furious and still going and he turned to me and he said of Perry's interpretation, "He's all wrong, but I can't imagine how that young British guy knows so much about my own history!" He was saying this as a compliment, because Perry really knew the details of it, though he was interpreting what Bill was actually involved in. That dynamic between old radicals who were interested in telling their story in their own kinds of ways, and the new generation who were trying to figure out that history was behind The Cultural Front.
The second part that made the book possible - and I cannot underestimate this - were the great biographies that were being written at the time. As The Cultural Front was being researched, there were a number of rich and carefully researched biographies published: Martin Duberman's biography of Paul Robeson, Eric Gordon's biography of Mark Blitzstein, Arnold Rampersad's biography of Langston Hughes. In the biographies, you could see the day-day personal connections of the movement that gave texture to the texts and manifestos. In the density of individual lives, those biographers were able to show a person moving from one organization to another; they were not separate worlds but were interconnected around some key figures.
VC: In terms of the methodology that you used for The Cultural Front, then, how do you see your work in relation to other historians of this period and this subject. Alan Wald describes what he does, by focusing closely on the relation between biography and text as creating a "humanscape" that can illuminate the tensions that enabled and constrained radical cultural production from the 1930s through to the 1950s. Do you think of this project in the same way, or working towards the same ends?
MD: That's a good comparison, because Alan's work, which is wonderful work, has been very interested in recapturing the lives, the humanity, of the individual people that were part of this movement, and as a result, he did many interviews with people, and builds his work on those interviews. Though I did a few interviews, I never felt like that was my project. From the beginning, the theoretical model that really holds The Cultural Front together was Raymond Williams's notion of the "formation," and Williams's sense that cultural formations were a combination of a particular social location and a particular aesthetic form. For him, the project of cultural studies, the way one could move away from close readings of individual texts, or in Alan's case, close readings of individual lives, was to use the intellectual imagination to see how those texts, those lives, came together in specific formations. The first third of The Cultural Front was imagined as a kind of overview, but the second two-thirds are an examination of a number of those formations. And those formations are not just important as biographical ones, though the biographical and historical context is really crucial to understanding the work that comes out of them and the way they resonate over time. Rather, cultural formations - not individual texts - are what make up our cultural traditions.
Though I was shaped by the critique of received and unreflective canons (my books on popular fiction seek to upset the literary canon), it still seems to me that Williams's sense of the inevitability of a selective tradition is true: in the long run, there are selective traditions, we do hold on to valuable works of art, and that's an important thing. In some ways, The Cultural Front was intended as a canonical book, as a book that would say these works and formations are really important and valuable, and should continue to be so. Thus, I was as interested in figures like Carlos Bulosan, whose work may not have been as important as Waiting for Lefty at the time, but, in the long run, may end up being more important. As the cultures of North America continue to change, and as we reconceive the relation between the US and Asia, so the work of a figure like Bulosan becomes increasingly fundamental.
That's one reason why it always seemed to me that the practice of a cultural historian was slightly different than that of a social or political historian. A cultural historian is as interested in the long-term reverberations - great works of music or novels or whatever - as in the short-term causes and effects. You can't ignore the moment of production, but the historical meaning of cultural works is longer-term than that. Thus, even if the Popular Front was a failure politically, culturally, it's too early to tell its success or failure, or how long those works will continue to reverberate in American culture.
VC: You've said you've often thought of The Cultural Front as an "American Renaissance" book; by that you mean you're thinking of it as an intervention along similar lines as F.O. Matthiessen's project, which reconstituted 19th century America for a specific use in the 20th. However, American Renaissance became one of the key texts for American Studies because of the way it opened up a potential political U.S. history that could stand in symmetrical opposition to the politics and cultural vision of the Cold War; is that the kind of impact you wanted The Cultural Front to have?
MD: Well, remember, I was thinking about that book during that second decade, from 1987 to 1997, so I have a certain distance from that now. But at that moment, I was thinking very clearly about American Renaissance, and I still have the hard-cover copy of it I bought back when I was scuffling as a freelance writer during the 1970s. That book - just the heft of it, the kind of ambition of it, was a book I had in mind all the time. But it was a negative model as well - it seemed finally to me to be too formalist a book, it didn't situate those writers enough in that historical moment, and there were ways in which his own resistance to the marxist tradition, though being a socialist and an activist, meant that I was never interested in being a Matthessenian critic. But I did want to make a different claim that I had made in the dime novels book. In Mechanic Accents I wanted to capture something of what working-class culture was like in the late 19th century by going through this strange kind of evidence, which were the dime novels. But I never had a sense that people should be re-reading those dime novels, that they should be reissued in paperback or whatever. Whereas with Billie Holiday or Duke Ellington or Orson Welles or Carlos Bulosan or Woody Guthrie, I wanted to illuminate the power and meaning of works that should be re-issued and re-experienced.
The paradox at the heart of The Cultural Front was that everyone despised Popular Front culture, and said "oh, this was just Stalinist kitsch," and yet the great works of that generation came out of that social movement. I wanted to rethink how that could be. It couldn't have been as ridiculous a culture if indeed it produced the most interesting works of American culture at that time, which I think it did. That's why it feels to me now very much an Americanist project and a canon-making project, for better or worse. Though not, I hope, in the unreflective sense of the canon, because I would not want to call it a canon, because that has the biblical connotation of sacred books. I'd prefer to recast "the canon" as "common readings": there's a kind of cultural commons to which we all have right to, one which neither Disney nor Gates has the right to copyright and own. In fact, I like the notion of "common readings" even better than that of the "selective tradition," even though it is selective. I wanted to say that these works of the 1930s are part of the cultural commons that we have in North America, that they come out of the struggles in North America, they're very contradictory, some of them are failed books or works, but you know, as Dylan says, "there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all." And there's a great line that I think I quote in there, from Fred Jameson as well, that it's better to think of Brecht and Lenin as failures, than to think of them as some kind of plaster bust on the shelf. And so hopefully, that sense that this was a failure, but a productive failure that becomes a kind of cultural commons - that was the project with that book.
VC: So, when you say we should learn from the failures of that moment, that's the lesson you had in mind for that project.
MD: Yes, whether it's a lesson or something you just meditate on. I guess this is a way I still feel I come out of the humanities. In the modern social sciences, there is a tendency to think you don't have to read old books over again, of any kind. You just go to the latest research and drop the other stuff. But the notion of a cultural commons means that one does re-read the old books. If you're part of left-wing traditions, one has to go back and re-read Marx and Luxemburg and Douglass, not because they had all the answers, but because one's trying to understand, as Gramsci says, that "infinity of traces" that is your own historical constitution.
VC: So were you surprised when critics of the book said you should have adjudicated more between forms, or that you were too general in your analyses and descriptions of the social movements?
MD: No, aside from a couple of instances, I thought the critics were generous. I remember Michael Rogin saying it was the consensus version of the history of the American Left. And he meant that as a compliment, I think. That's one of the things I learned from Stuart Hall - he had this whole metaphor where you bend the stick too far one way, you might end up bending it the other way. We've had so many histories of the 1930s left that emphasize the kind of internecine, sectarian debates and divisions, that we lost the sense that there actually were things that were held in common, and were seen as being held in common, and not to underestimate that. That's why I've found Jameson's argument about the three different horizons in The Political Unconscious so powerful; it seemed to me that The Cultural Front worked largely at the horizon where there are certain ideologemes that are held in common, even by people who imagine they are antagonists in other kinds of ways.
The only criticism I really disagreed with was that of Adam Schatz in The Nation, because he returned it to the old Cold War debate, echoing what the Partisan Review intellectuals had long said about the Popular Front: this is all just a whitewashing of Stalinist culture. I didn't mind Alfred Kazin saying that. But I was annoyed that a younger scholar would say this, because that was not the weakness of the book. And there are weaknesses in the book - I can tell you a whole bunch of them. There's a whole genre of fascinating C.I.O. novels that nobody had looked at, and I had intended to write a whole chapter about them, to complement the chapter of the traditionally recognized proletarian novels. So it's not like there aren't limits to the book, but the limits are not that I hadn't sufficiently rehearsed debates that had been going on for forty years, or attacked people for being Stalinists, or something like that. But that's a generational difference - I was not surprised that there were readers reading it from that standpoint, and that was not a problem. I suppose that Nation review was the one that most shocked me because I would have expected a younger scholar to see the ways this was moving to the future rather than rehashing the past.
VC: What did you think of Kazin's reading of the book, his article that appeared in Intellectual History Newsletter? He makes comments that sound almost identical to what Schatz says.
MD: That was ok, that's what you take. He was a participant in many of the conflicts, and for him the hostilities of that moment between the CP and the Socialists were a genuine part of his life experience. He basically said two things about the book - one was that I made it seem like a much happier time and that he remembered it as the bleakest kind of time, and that he remembered that time when the Young Communists in 1934 came and broke up one of the meetings of the Socialists, and I'm glad that he put that on paper. I didn't mind that kind of criticism at all, but I know others from that generation had a different response, like Tillie Olsen. There were other people that did feel, and I think I got this across in some ways, that this was a moment of tremendous optimism. I remember one person I interviewed about the period who said to me, "I have to apologize for this, because I've been a pacifist all my life, but the war years were the most exciting years. We really felt like we were on the verge of creating a new world, and that after the war there was going to be this new world coming out. And it really wasn't until 1947-48, the Cold War comes in, that it really became bleak."
Now, whether Kazin's version is right or this person's version is right, is neither here nor there - that's what the memoirs are for. There is a necessary tension between memoir and history; after all, history does take place behind our backs. I was not trying to write a book that would capture Kazin's memories; he may not have been aware of some of the formations I was researching. I was trying to write a book that captured a sense of what that era and its culture had come to mean in subsequent US culture. I think my book probably over-accents the cultural politics of the 1930s because of the cultural politics of the New Left. I remember when we interviewed Ring Lardner Jr., and I asked him what were the most important kinds of cultural things that the left did during that period, and his answer - this was a guy who was a screenwriter - he sort of said, well, The Grapes of Wrath was really important, and mentioned a few other things, but he went on to say "We didn't think that much about culture - it was really all about politics!"
I don't remember if I put that in the book, but it does illustrate the way the book is written by someone with a different conception of the relationship between culture and politics who came out of, and indeed, is an extension of the mass culture of the 1960s and 1970s. And that's what made it impossible for me to finally be a person of the 1930s. So the fact that the people of the 1930s might see this differently is not surprising, though I was as encouraged by the fact that Tillie Olsen really thought it captured the movement as I was unsurprised that Alfred Kazin thought it didn't capture it. What I wanted to do was clear the ground so that other people could be thinking more interesting questions than was she or wasn't she a Communist?
VC: You know, there's one reaction to the book that sticks in my mind, and that's Walter Szaylay's comment that The Cultural Front is a New Left re-reading of the Old Left, and that what you end up with is a kind of cultural socialism that has no relation to transforming the state, that the book's ambition was to imply a socialism that avoided both the New Deal liberal as well as Soviet state. It's a very critical comment, and basically suggests a trenchant reading of the New Left as a naive political movement that had no sense of what it would take to actually make a better world.
MD: Well, a number of readers really wanted to read a book about the politics of the Popular Front social movement. My focus was the "cultural" front, and, with the exception of a few digressions, I never thought of it as a history of the politics of the Popular Front social movement. That book has yet to be written, one that would really analyze the political structures and strategies, the relations of force, particularly in the places where it had the most impact, which was not at the national level but at the urban level. What did Popular Front politics mean in the Bay Area where Harry Bridges and the ILWU helped shape Bay Area politics? In some ways, Josh Freeman does it in Working Class New York, where he shows what it means for New York to be a social-democratic city, and how that social-democratic city then lasts until the 1970s. That project would not look at filmmakers and novelists, nor simply at Communist Party resolutions, but at the key political figures, figures like Adam Clayton Powell, Vito Marcantonio. And that was not a project that I was ever thinking of. I tried to sketch some of that, because I don't think you can see the cultural figures without understanding that, and I think that in some ways, some of the criticisms of the book come from the reactions to the innovative ways I was trying to think about Popular Front politics without writing the full story of it.
If the state comes in, it's not the issue of the state and Popular Front politics, but the issue of the new state role in culture, which is crucial in the New Deal, and there I think the book does deal a fair amount with what happens to radicals who end up in state cultural apparatuses from the WPA projects to the expanded state universities. On the cultural front, that's the place of the state, and many of the analyses in The Cultural Front, not least the chapter on Orson Welles, explores the conflicts and contradictions opened up by the politics of working inside and around those state cultural appratauses. That's slightly different than looking at the state, as others have done, in terms of labor relations - there's some wonderful work done on what the New Deal state did to shape unions, or what the New Deal federal system meant for those urban coalitions.
VC: So, as a way of transitioning from The Cultural Front to your latest book, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, how do you see the difference between what you call "the laboring of American culture," which is a key term from the previous book, to "a labor theory of culture," which is one of the central concepts in the recent project?
MD: Well, first, I'd separate them a bit, though a critic might say they're not sufficiently separated, and so there's either a projection of something that happened in the 1930s into a much larger kind of cultural frame, or a projection of a larger theoretical position onto the 1930s. But I actually think that the "laboring of American culture" argument is a specifically historical argument: the sense that, in many ways, a kind of rhetoric of labor, a concern with labor and work, powerfully inflects American culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century, partly because of the trauma of the Depression, partly because of the migration of huge numbers of people to this amazing Fordist industrial world, and partly because of the creation of new unions of the C.I.O. Indeed, as I hope to show in a book I'm working on right now, the U.S. working class becomes a much more significant part of the world working class in the 1930s and 1940s, partly because of the destruction of the organized working classes by fascism in Europe. In some ways, the U.S. working class has a disproportionate world position, once the German working class is smashed by Hitler, once the Italian working class is smashed by Mussolini. So the notion of the laboring of American culture, and the subsequent destruction of that laborist culture, particularly in the 1980s under Reagan, is an important historical argument that I would stand by.
The other argument - the "labor theory of culture" - is really part of the larger theoretical issues that came out of that early marxist literary criticism project, which is just trying to figure what a marxist cultural theory would look like. In some sense, that was one half of the work that dominated the next decade, 1997-2007, some of which is captured in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. I think of this work as moving in two directions. The first is to make more explicit some of the theoretical arguments and directions that were there in the earlier historical studies, and the second is to bend the stick against the Americanism of that work and to think U.S. culture in a more global frame: what it would mean to think through a kind of world Popular Front? What is the place of US workers in a world labor force? what are the specificities of U.S. development in terms of the Americas or in terms of settler colonial regimes around the world. So, to begin with the first point - and this is more difficult to articulate because this is what I'm working on now - I've been working on a book tentatively called The Accumulation of Labor, which is on workers in the 20th century but is also on how we have conceived of work and labor, on the invention of work and workers as categories.
Oddly enough, the marxist tradition has undertheorized labor. There's a tremendous theorization of capital, and labor is in some ways nothing but the inverse of capital; nevertheless, the accumulation of capital has been more written about than what Marx called the multiplication of the proletariat, which was the other half of the accumulation of capital, or what I'm calling the accumulation of labor. And in cultural studies, culture has more often been seen through the lens of the commodity - through reification and fetishism, themes that come out of Lukacs and Benjamin and go right to Jameson - than through the lens of labor. So too culture has more often been seen through the lens of politics, as a stake in a political struggle, from Gramsci's theorizations of culture and its role in hegemony and Trotsky's theorizations of cultural revolution and the place of culture in daily life right up to Stuart Hall and the Birmingham work on the connections of culture and hegemony. So one of my long-term projects has been to figure out whether there is a labor theory of culture, whether culture could be seen through the lens of work, something suggested in the very common American idiom of "making a living," a phrase that means what's your job, how do you make your living, but is also a good definition of culture.
So, just as capital and labor are synonyms - capital is nothing but dead labor, and labor is nothing but living capital - work and culture may be synonyms, distinct from each other, but nonetheless distinct moments of a dialectic of making a living. In this theoretical reflection on making a living, on the relation between work and culture, I find myself intrigued by and drawn to the theorizations of everyday life, both in the tradition of Henri Lefebvre, but also as it moves through labor history as the attempt to get beyond the workplace. The theorization of daily life can take you out of the workplace and into the household, into the neighborhood, into the street, and into those other aspects of working-class life that are not the shop floor. I think of Charles von Onselen's great studies of everyday life on the Witswatersrand, the mining cities of South Africa. So for me, the labor theory of culture is really a theoretical reflection rather than the specific historical argument of the laboring of American culture.
VC: I was glad to see you spending so much time with Braverman's book in Culture in an Age of Three Worlds, since he seems to be such an important lynchpin for how a question like this has been thought through before. What surprised me, though, was seeing you return in this book to an early essay, or even a talk, of yours, "The End of Mass Culture," which describes your skeptical feelings about the usefulness of mass culture as an analytic framework for cultural analysis. Why did you feel you needed to go back to an issue that seemed settled for you decades ago?
MD: The funny thing about that earlier story, about how when I got to Birmingham, Braverman was one of the three things I was told to read, is that he was the person I spent the least amount of time on at the time. I mean, you can't do everything. One of the wings of the Birmingham Centre, what I think of as the Braverman wing, was the work that Paul Willis was doing on working class kids - Learning to Labour and Profane Culture. It was very ethnographic, studying specific working class lads in Birmingham and the neighboring cities. I was aware of that work, because it was a small place - we were learning from the folks who were doing that, we were talking to them. People were out there doing ethnographies of office workers, and thinking about other kinds of work rather than the classic industrial work that Paul was studying. But I didn't join the Work sub-group - I joined the English Studies sub-group. And since I was only there for a year, I don't think that that work hit home in the same way; I was still largely concerned with literary-critical practices, as well as the theoretical issues raised by the Frankfurt school. It took much longer time before Braverman's account of the labor process registered. Some of that developed when I was taking labor history seminars with David Montgomery; he was an advisor and reader of Mechanic Accents. David's work accented the labor process, its historical evolution, and the contests over work on the shop floor. So in that sense, when I started teaching Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, it was a return to a book that had sat on the shelf for a long time.
I think of "The End of Mass Culture" as the theoretical capstone to the decade of work on popular fiction. It was written for a wonderful and fascinating conference in Paris on mass culture, which was essentially French theorists and historians of the workers movement meeting American mass culture critics. It was a lot of fun, but at one point I remember turning to one of the other people who was there and saying, "you know, we could solve this whole thing just by having a show of hands - who likes mass culture, and who doesn't." Sometimes the elaborate theoretical arguments would dissolve, because basically some of us really hated mass culture and wanted nothing to do with it, and others - well, we were probably too enamored of it, perhaps, too American in that way. I used it in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds because it fit the structure of the book. The form I found for theoretical writing at the time was not a kind of synthesis but rather a series of interventions - I would write one essay/talk, deliver several times to different audiences, get responses and criticisms, and that would lead me to the next essay/talk cast in a slightly different way, trying to develop the unsolved problems of the earlier essay.
So Culture in the Age of Three Worlds is a recovery of that entire trajectory, from the work that tried to synthesis of what I had been doing in the 1980s - the essay on mass culture, the essay on American Studies and marxism - those were written between 1984 and 1987. That was the point when I'd finished all this research for those two books on popular fiction, and those two articles were the culmination of all the work I'd done with MARHO (the radical historians group), the MLG, my own discovery of American Studies and trying to figure out what the politics of that discipline were. Then there was a second cluster, which are really from 1987 to 1997, from the moment when cultural studies really does come to the US, in the midst of the moral panic about "political correctness"; these are the essays on what cultural studies means in the United States. Then there is a third cluster, which tries to consider cultural studies in a global frame of reference. The book puts the most recent ones at the beginning as well as at the end to make it feel more contemporary: so it begins with the present, drops back to those earlier debates, and then comes back to the present.
VC: So in that book are you trying to formulate what cultural studies means currently? You say early on that cultural studies comes out of the "three worlds" moment (the separation of the globe into first-, second- and third-worlds), and that the global forces which produced cultural studies have shifted. In a way, it seems like you're saying cultural studies is dead and alive at the same time. Or is that a bad reading of the trajectory of that argument?
MD: No, I think that's a reasonable reading, but I want to respond with an analogy. I always thought that tendency journals (which may no longer exist - maybe it's tendency websites or blogs) should have an expiration date - maybe ten years - because most of the great intellectual journals became much less interesting than they were at the beginning. There is a way in which the liveliness of their intervention and their tendency is such that when it becomes a cliché rather than a new metaphor, it's less exciting. Kenneth Burke called it the "bureaucratization of the imaginative," and then wittily remarked that the phrase was itself an example of the process. So that's what I would say about cultural studies. On the one hand, because of my own biographical limitations - I'd love to make myself twenty years younger and twenty years older at the same time - I will always be a cultural studies person. I was shaped by that moment, I tried to change in some ways, and I doubt I will ever lose a powerful sentimental attachment to the term.
On the other hand, I'm extremely reluctant to argue that this ought to be the banner under which we do our work - the moment when it was the slogan on the banner has passed. It's not that I'd oppose someone who wants to have a cultural studies program or PhD, but I was never driven by the desire to institutionalize cultural studies. This is in part because, as I said earlier, the name itself was in some way a euphemism; the real slogan, and what I still feel much more committed to, is the larger tradition of historical materialism. It's like theorists - at one moment, some figure is really exciting, and lots of people are reading that; I'll always in some ways be loyal to Gramsci, but I'm not out there every semester teaching Gramsci to turn every student into young Gramscians, or something like that, or even into young Marxists. That would be insane.
I do think it's important to return to earlier texts and debates, but each time, it might be a different text or debate. Take Marx, for example. Every time I've read Marx with people, we've gone back to a different part. When I was a student, it was the 1844 Manuscripts; we didn't want to read Capital. For various reasons, the last few years have seen a return to Capital; one doesn't read Marx on alienation, but rather on the world market. Marx on child labor, Marx on sweatshops, that's what seems vital to students I've taught in recent years in a way that it didn't seem so in the late 1950s and 1960s, when everybody was reading the early manuscripts. But who knows - ten years from now, there may be a whole other Marx we need to discover.
VC: Earlier, you were talking about how crucial to your own intellectual formation the people you met were who came from the Old Left, as well as the New Left. To what extent do you see yourself (or not) as one of those people from the New Left in 2007 informing another generation? Do you feel you have a responsibility to them?
MD: Absolutely. But I was just young enough never to feel like I really was of the New Left. In a larger sense, I'm sure people from the outside would say just the opposite. But it seems there's a difference between those figures who were of an age to really shape the agenda of the 1960s, and those like myself who were barely teenagers in 1968. One of the differences, I think, for better or worse, between me and that generation is that I never shared the revolutionary optimism of the New Left. Because of the time in which I was politically formed, the coup against Allende in Chile made a greater impression on me than Fidel marching into Havana. For me, it was not a revolutionary moment, but a moment of defeats - the much more chastened hopes for a Euro-communism and Euro-socalism in the 1970s lent a much more social-democratic accent to me than to people who were ten or fifteen years older than me. But I do feel like there has been a remarkable new generation of the left that has emerged out of the global justice movements - out of Seattle and everything that meant, out of the anti-war demonstrations right before the war. It's a much bleaker generation because its touchstones are Guantanomo and Abu Ghraib, and the lack of a real mass movement against this war.
One of the key contributions that a cultural analysis of the left can give is the sense that the left-wing political life is not a set of different issues, causes and campaigns. It's actually a long-term culture, often accented regionally, by religion, race, ethnicity, by different migrant communities. If one thinks of the Debsian Socialist Party, the figure of Eugene Debs held together Oklahoma populist socialists, New York Jewish immigrant radicals, German-American socialists of Midwestern cities like Milwaukee - all of whom had very different kinds of ways of living socialism. But any kind of left is actually the putting together of those very different left family traditions. When I ask the students in my Socialism and Marxism classes why they're there, many times students will write things like "well, my grandmother was a Jewish Communist in New York in the 1920s and I always wondered what she was about," or "my father was part of the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and always thought of himself as a Puerto Rican Socialist" - those are different kinds of left-wing cultures, and the knitting-together, making them speak to each other, is work that still needs to be done.
A real history of the New Left in the US has yet to be written, because the New Left is still seen as essentially the white, college-educated, Ann-Arbor left. The impact of Asian-American semi-Maoist New Left on another generation of Asian-American radicalism in the U.S. is still hardly visible. Similarly we don't have full accounts of the various forms of Latino New Lefts that emerged from experiences of different struggles in Latin America as well as the US. In some ways, that's what The Cultural Front felt like for the Old Left of 1930s. There was the official recognized cultural front of the New Masses that had been written about. But because so much more material had been put together as that generation grew older, I as a historian was able to see that there were these other cultural fronts across the continent that weren't even necessarily visible in The New Masses in New York.
VC: What about the C.I.O. calls to you so strongly? It seems a real undercurrent to the story you want to tell about the 1930s, and in particular, it seems to inform what you mean by radicalism. Why that model, rather than, since you mentioned him, Debs? This question also comes from reading that last essay in Culture in an Age of Three Worlds, which describes the future of radical democracy in terms of the shop floor - I think the phrase you use is "neither capitalist nor American."
MD: The grand struggle that shaped my entire entry into the political world was the struggle of Old Left and New Left. It was a generational struggle: I saw it individually with people and their parents. It was there because people would say "why don't you go to Russia" if you said you were a socialist, and so one had to have an opinion about the Soviet Union and that entire history. Part of my earlier political stance, that we didn't need marxism because we had our own American form of radicalism, was simply the product of not wanting to deal with people who said, "well, if you're a socialist, go to the Soviet Union." Because of that, and all of those struggles, even the issues around race, the women's movement, feminism, were structured around the limits or the successes of Old Left and New Left. It was: "the Old Left hadn't done this right," or "they had done this right"; indeed anything before 1917 didn't exist. There were some books out there on the Debsian party - it was a kind of mythological thing - but even that I approached through a great Old Left book; it was Dos Passos' U.S.A. that gave me the histories of the Wobblies and Debs. It is the same way the wonderful film Reds, a weird kind of New Left Communist version of John Reed, reads Reed solely through the Bolshevik Revolution. A very different movie might have read him through the Patterson Pageant and the New Jersey textile strikes, or through the Mexican Revolution.
The reason I say that is because the end of the Soviet Union has made possible a much longer sense of what the history of the left is, a much greater interest in the history of pre-1917 socialisms and the whole Second International, the connections between the first wave of the women's movement and the Second International, the rediscovery of that early pan-Africanism associated with the early Du Bois. It seems to me there's a resurgence of interest in the various radicalisms around the world at that time, not just of the Debsian party, but of the forms of anti-colonialism, since that was a key moment of imperialism. Given our present circumstances, the history of Britain's late imperial wars, from South Africa to Iraq seem vital to understand. When I teach the first half of the Socialism and Marxism class, I end with four remarkable figures of the exactly same generation - Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, Emma Goldman, and W.E.B. Dubois. They're born around 1870, come of age in 1890 in the world of imperialism and global depression, and the 1900s really shape them (there are other figures one could put in there as well). The juxtaposition makes Lenin much more interesting, in some ways, because he's no longer the sainted (or satanic) figure of 1917, but is one of those radicals trying to deal with that new world that Marx and his generation had not seen, which has weird parallels with this globalized, post-1989 world.
VC: Speaking of long-term struggles, how has it been being involved with the GESO campaign?
MD: It's been amazing, and one of the great things I've learned at Yale. As soon as I arrived here in the fall of 1979 as a graduate student, I was instructed in Yale's labor history - a series of major strikes from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. In those years, there was organizing going on to create what became Local 34, the union of the clerical and technical workers, organizing that led to the long and bitter strike of 1984. By the time of that strike, I was teaching at Columbia but still living in New Haven, so I stayed involved and kept informed about that. When I came back to Yale to teach in the late 1980s, the organizing of GESO began. At that point, the contracts lasted three years, so it seemed like every three years, there was a labor struggle.
So it has been a constant education being around here, in two ways. Though I didn't realize it at the time, the union struggles of the clerical workers were to become one of the significant struggles in the emergence of a new kind of service sector unionism. Obviously it had predecessors in the public sector going back to the 1970s, and in that sense, Yale was well behind as a private university. But the form of unionism that the Yale locals of HERE (the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, which later became UNITE-HERE) were developing was innovative and more democratic, not driven by professional organizers from outside, but by organizing committees and a density of organizers within the bargaining unit, using tactics often taken from the civil rights movement, and making connections with the community. This eventually was a key part of the shifts in leadership in the AFL-CIO in the mid-1990s. It felt like we were seeing the invention of a kind of service-sector-based unionism, and I participated in some ways as a faculty supporter.
Similarly, as the graduate student union took off, I think I went through many of the same stages the graduate students were going through: the arguments over whether graduate students were teachers or students, over the kind of work teaching was. The graduate student teachers unions were supported and nurtured by the other unions who had a visionary sense of an industrial unionism for the education industry. And remember, most educational unionism, which doesn't go back that far, still had a craft model; in many universities, professors had their union, and they didn't really have much connection to the workers in the dining halls and the electricians and the maintenance people or the clerical workers. The exciting thing at Yale through all of those years was also very difficult, because it was not clear to any of the workers in the university that they had anything in common with the graduate teachers, or that the graduate teachers thought they had anything to do with the people in the dining halls. Forging that alliance was, and is, a continuing effort because, of course, workforces change. New people are hired, old people with memories of earlier struggles leave or retire, so it's a continual political project to forge a sense that we have things in common in this huge educational plant with eight to ten thousand people working for it.
And so for me, for anyone teaching at Yale, even if you've had tenure for fifteen years like I do, GESO is my union. I don't technically pay dues because I'm not a graduate teacher, but in many ways GESO has been the one organization to place issues of teaching, of the casualization of teaching, of the inequities regarding the way teaching is done in the university, on the table. For me, it's been a tremendous education throughout, to watch it, to be involved in it in some kinds of ways, to see that struggle, and to see the ways the unions connected their struggle to politics in the city, campaigning for a living wage ordinance and for community benefits agreements, and trying to cross the divides which are so powerful in this apartheid town of New Haven.
VC: Were there tensions between the faculty when the graduate students were organizing, as opposed to when the clerical workers were unionizing?
MD: If you ask many faculty, they'd say yes, because the faculty will always say "oh yes, we supported the clerical workers because obviously, they deserve a union, but we don't support the graduate students because they're not really workers." But if you were around as I was, from 1982 to 1984, that's not the case at all. The same people - the same individuals or their institutional equivalents - who oppose the graduate student union opposed the clerical workers union too, for largely the same reasons - "oh no, it'll destroy the collegiality of the department, they're not really industrial workers. Unions are alright for the maintenance workers, the blue collar guys, but not for the women, because they're not working in some kind of industrial environment, they've got a nice relationship with their supervisor, who's not really a supervisor but just a professor." Exactly the same kind of nonsense about how the union will destroy the graduate school was said about the administrative people in the departments, and how organizing them would destroy the life of the department. So back then, it was a relatively small minority of faculty who stood by Local 34, and it's still a relatively small minority of faculty who have stood by GESO.
VC: Just to go back to what you said about how this experience has been educational for you - did participating and witnessing these local labor struggles influence the conclusions you come to in your latest book about the relationship between unionism and democracy?
MD: Oh yes. It has shaped much of the work of the last fifteen years. When I was a graduate student, no one that I knew of was thinking about graduate teacher unionism, even among activists. The radicalism of the craft - being a radical historian - was really what dominated. And as I began working on The Cultural Front, my imagination of radical culture was still shaped by the old model of Writers on the Left. For most of the time that I was writing it, I didn't think that the essay I had done with Holly Allen, an early GESO activist, on the Disney cartoonists was part of the book. The idea that culture industry unionism was a central part of the cultural front was something I came to by seeing the GESO organizing. That allowed me to see how it was not only the struggles of the CIO industrial unions that so deeply influenced the writers and screenwriters and cartoonists, but also the struggles for their own unions (it's true also of the Newspaper Guild, a very important union of the 1930s).
In a way, the beginning of culture industry unionism lies in the age of the CIO, and that really recast the way I understood the parameters of The Cultural Front. The essay on democracy which ends Culture in an Age of Three Worlds was delivered as part of a Yale celebration of its three centuries; they wanted a series of talks on democracy, and I was invited to give one of those. It was an occasion not only to think historically about what democracy meant - "the democracy" as a social movement - but also specifically to reflect on what democracy in the workplace, as opposed to democracy in "civil society," might mean. Those reflections came out of the GESO experiences.
VC: Speaking of the department, you mentioned during an earlier conversation that you'd changed the way you teach, that you'd moved away from the graduate seminar format?
MD: Yes, and this goes back to one of the earlier things we were talking about. One of the things the Birmingham Centre had attempted was to reconceive how work at the research level could be done in the humanities. They had these collective sub-groups that wrote books together. In part, it was easier to do this in England because graduate work was relatively unstructured - people just went and wrote a dissertation. They didn't have orals, they didn't have classes. I remember the Centre faculty saying at the time, "well, we thought that if you're here writing your dissertation, we could meet together and do something." The very lack of structure in British post-graduate education (as they would call it), which was often a very isolated and isolating situation, led them to create these collaborative spaces. But in the U.S., graduate education had a structure of course work, oral exams, comprehensive exams, all these different stages and steps. In the midst of this, I felt like I had become someone who would sort of wax nostalgic about the Birmingham model, while teaching inside the structures of an American graduate program.
So about four years ago, I decided to really try and put my money where my mouth was, and without trying to change the whole program into the Birmingham Centre, created an ongoing collective research group that would not be the sort of spectatorial thing that a seminar is - you have the syllabus, people come if they like, and it's all over at the end of the semester. Instead, we sit down at the start of the year as a group of people that want to do something together. We come up with the questions we are interested in, the books and essays we want to read together, the project we want to research and write together, the ways each individual's writing connects to that project, and the way we will present that project to others. Over the past four years we've done four of those projects. Some people have been in it all four years, others have gone off and taken jobs in other places; we've taken new people each year, and there's usually some core that continues from year to year. The first year we studied the commodity chain of the cell phone, the second year we did a project on the politics of the neo-liberal university (we were one of a number of different groups who came together on this at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre). The third year was on the practice of transnational history, which we presented at the Tepotzlan Instutute in Mexico, and this past year we did a project on audio-politics.
VC: And so they've all been global in their focus?
MD: Well, yes. If you are thinking about doing a kind of trans-national or global cultural studies, you're talking about expertises that go beyond the capacity of a single person. So we tried to bring together people from different disciplines, with different home specialties, different linguistic capacities, to craft something that would give a sense of global cultural studies. The other source was the overall experience of GESO, which led me to change my attitude toward "graduate students," indeed not to think of graduate students as "graduate students." Particularly after the first year, people in a graduate program are part of the profession, they're part of the industry. They have exactly the same day-to-day concerns as I do: how do you manage teaching on the one hand, and getting your research done on the other, and in that sense, they're managing what is the central structure of the research university. And once people are into that mode, where part of their time is how do to their research, and the other part is how to do their teaching, then they are part of the industry. Obviously, there are different markers from when you're a graduate teacher in the industry and when you're an assistant professor in the industry, and when you're a full professor, but those are differences in quantity. The gap between being an undergraduate, which is a very different situation in the industry, and being a graduate student, committed to a career in that industry, is dramatic. And so that's why I don't really think of this as graduate training.
Or, rather, it's training by having a cultural studies laboratory as one might in the sciences. Part of this experiment was to answer the question of how to take the laboratory model from the sciences, and to adapt it in two different ways that are necessary in the humanities, and necessary in a political sense. The first is to develop it without the strict hierarchy of the sciences, without the kind of primary investigator, but rather with the kind of democratic model that the Birmingham Centre had attempted. Not every is jointly authored, because, in the humanities, everyone has to have their own publications, their own writing, their own voice, and in many ways that's more powerful. So the question was how can we work collectively, develop a large project, say on audio politics, and yet enable an individual who wants to work on global advertising, or somebody else who wants to work on this form of music, to do that kind of project and be able to write that in your own voice and get that published in their own name.
And so that's actually been the kind of balancing act of the working group on globalization and culture, which is the kind of thing that the humanities has not been good at fostering. Some of those projects have developed into a collection of essays; in the case of the first one, some of the essays didn't develop beyond a public talk, though one of the essays turned into a forthcoming book. And once you're beginning to think about some kind of transnational cultural studies, it's really necessary, even to begin to think about collaborating on our next step, which we're only making, between this research collective here, and other research collectives in other parts of the world that are interested in some of the same issues, but maybe bring different perspectives and different expertises and different questions.
VC: Have you had contact with other groups like this? What has it been like?
MD: Perhaps the most developed group encounter - I think it was called "Beyond the Ivory Tower: Another University is Possible" - took place at the World Social Forum, which works by encouraging what they call the "aglutinization" of different groups. So there was a group called Alter-Quam from Quebec City, a group from Toronto, a group from Geneva, a group from Sao Paulo, a group from Montivideo, and then our group from New Haven. We planned a series of sessions at the World Social Forum via emails, and then had a series of sessions on how to understand the neo-liberal university around the world. The sessions were, as you might guess, both extraordinarily productive and fascinating, and extraordinarily frustrating, because people were often talking past each other: sometimes what one person thought was the most vital issue in the world, another person thought was not even an issue at all. One place is interested in how to get unions recognized in their university, another place want to break the power of official state-run unions in their university. One place is worrying about free tuition, another place has free tuition, but there's no money in the university and it is falling apart. We ended up less with a a global agenda for transforming the university than with a deeper sense of the contradictions of the neo-liberal university.
VC: Do you think that's where the energy of American Studies is travelling?
MD: I feel about American Studies exactly how I felt about Cultural Studies a little while ago; I'm not sure that the banner, the slogan of American Studies, is one that I really want to go out and say, "Oh yes, this is what American Studies ought to be." Because it's an institutional space - it's a terrain on which one struggles. It's an interesting one, and students in North America are attracted to it, whether they're U.S. citizens or not. They're interested in America, in the history of this country, and they come with a real investment to learn, so it's an interesting terrain to teach on, inside a university. The American Studies Association has become a coalition of people involved in women's studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, African American studies, post-colonial studies, so it too is a fascinating terrain to get together with people on. So I think of it as a terrain to be involved in, but not necessarily as a thing that I have any opinions about.
I don't really care whether American Studies ought to be X or ought to be Y, because as a slogan I think it wore itself out back in the 1950s. In the fifties, perhaps until the mid-sixties, it was a kind of academic reform movement which was very necessary, interdisciplinary and focused on the U.S. in a way that the older disciplines hadn't been. Now, when the U.S. looks like one of the most insular cultures in the world - we translate fewer books, we import fewer musical works or films - the idea of exacerbating that by having students focus on the U.S. seems to me to be kind of counter-productive. Serious critical cultural studies analyses of what's taking place in the U.S. remains absolutely important, but the frame has to be wider in both space and in time.
VC: So is that where you're a kind of optimist on some level about cultural studies? That it still has a lot of work to do, even if as a slogan its moment has passed?
MD: Last week we were at an American Studies symposium in Purdue, and George Lipsitz gave a marvelous keynote talk. He said that there was something wrong with the entire optimist/pessimist dicothomy, noting that he often thought of himself a pessimist, while others always thought he was an optimist. He concluded by citing a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. (from 1967, I think), in which King spoke about "the fierce urgency of the now." In fact, the reason why people always see George as an optimist is not because he is more "optimistic" than "pessimistic," but because his work always has that fierce urgency of the now. And I hope that even when I'm working on things that are distant in time or space, it too carries that urgency of the now. People read that as optimism, simply because one thinks the now has a fierce urgency; pessimists are those who think that the now has all been done before, or something like that. Yet that urgency may be deeply pessimistic in some other way, which is why I've never felt comfortable with those terms either. Even the old Gramscian line that I've quoted many times - the pessimism of the intelligence, the optimism of the will - can be misleading. Perry Anderson used to say it should be the other way around: optimism of the intelligence, because the intelligence is a way to really be open to the future, and pessimism of the will so that one doesn't get carried away with a sense of voluntarism. Now, I don't know if that's exactly right, but there's a title from Anderson that's always seemed to me to be a definition of cultural studies: "The Origins of the Present Crisis." It contains the double sense: first, that you had to look at the origins, that one always has to think historically, but, second, one did so because there was a present crisis that had to be reckoned with.
VC: So, you're obviously thinking about how to produce that critical analysis of the present in your teaching, which is a global present, as opposed to the present that is framed by the age of three worlds, but would you say it's true that your model for reckoning still seems to resonate with the C.I.O., with that moment?
MD: No, no, I was powerfully attracted to that moment, that movement, so I wrote a book to settle my accounts with it, but I haven't even taught a course on the age of the CIO in a number of years. You know, one of the critics, a reviewer, picked up one of the very last lines in The Cultural Front which says that the failure of the laboring of American culture is still what we have to reckon with. And the reviewer said, no, that's not the only thing we have to reckon with; she was right - that was a kind of flourish for that book. I do think the moment of the CIO is part of our cultural and political commons, so one would be ill-advised to ignore the history of the C.I.O., the history of the Popular Front social movement, but I'm not sure that it's any more necessary than the history of the women's movement of the 1960s or the Debsian Socialist Party or the Abolitionist movement. In fact, the recent taking up of Du Bois's notion of "abolition democracy" to think about the now - the return to the moment after the Civil War and to the hopes of Reconstruction - may be more important right now than dealing with the Old left and the C.I.O.
I will say that one of my inheritances from the moment of the CIO is a persistent leaning toward what might be called the "syndicalist" tendency. Right from the beginning of the Marxist and socialist tradition, there's been a conflict between those who felt that the political party was the key instutition, and those who felt the unions, and the industrial unions, were key - a "party" tradition and a "syndicalist" tradition. I have come to realize that, without consciously decided, I have acted more or less a syndicalist. I've always been less interested in the party, in developing parties, in thinking about parties, than in working in the line that runs from the Wobblies to the C.I.O. into the new service unionism.
In that sense, I guess I'm more workplace oriented, and feel that what people do at work shapes much of the way they think about things, that the organization of people at their workplace has powers that we have not yet fully realized. So if there was a heresy inside the marxist tradition that I would be particularly prone to, it would be the syndicalist heresy. Rather than the party heresy, which is "where's the new party," or "how come we don't have a mass party," or "should it be a mass party or a vanguard party." Those questions have been less important to me, and that may be my own inheritance from the moment of the CIO.
VC: That explains somewhat your interest in Lenin, Luxemburg, Goldman and Dubois as pre-1917 figures, doesn't it?
MD: Partly, though they also represent early reckonings with imperialism and feminism - from the Czarist empire as well as from the situation of post-slavery imperialism of the U.S. Luxemburg and Goldman are both thinking about the women's movement of that time as well as the relation between mass unionism and mass parties, whether that leads to a kind of anarcho-syndicalism, as it does with Goldman, or to some kind of new party in the case of Luxemburg, because she's deeply involved in German social democracy, but is also critical of the Lenin party model. In teaching that course, I begin however with the generation of 1848, the world of socialism and women's rights and abolition, the world of Marx and Engels, of Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass. The course ends with four weeks on the figures born around 1870. This is an undergraduate course, the second part of which begins with 1917 and covers socialism and marxism in the 20th century.
VC: What do students think who come to these classes?
MD: I think of the socialism and marxism classes as my "general education" classes for Yale. They aren't really American Studies classes, they're not aimed at American Studies students, and many of students come to them because they have some connection to a wider radicalism, or, as I've said, come out of families that have some relationship to the left. They are not sure why it is that grandma or great-grandma was a communist and nobody else wants to talk about that, and so that ends up being a very interesting mixture of students. There are students from other disciplines, the arts, political science, biology. However, I have also regularly taught the lecture course on modern American culture (1920 to the present), an introductory overview for students who want to study U.S. culture.
The graduate working group has drawn in people from a number of different disciplines - anthropology, history, music, American Studies - and part of working together is everyone bringing their own disciplinary skills and chauvinisms to the table, because we all imagine that the techniques of analysis that we learned are the best techniques and the most interesting ones. So that's actually been very effective and powerful for me - I've learned a lot.
And one of the elements has been, and which Birmingham taught me, is that I write as much as they write, and that changes the relationship between us. So even though obviously I've written and published more than they have, given more talks, nonetheless I'm not in the position of someone who is simply teaching the course, reading what they write, and evaluating that. I'm putting my new writing on the table at the same time they are, and getting the feedback and arguments. I can remember going to Birmingham, and within two months I was part of a group that was supposed to write the introduction to a collection of the Centre's work, the volume Culture, Media, Language. I remember Stuart Hall bringing in a draft, and he says to us "ok, what are your suggestions and criticisms?" There was an interaction in the process and seeing how he moved from one draft to another that was as instructive as any kind of comments he could have written on my own drafts.
VC: One more question about teaching - do you think you're able to get across things like the labor theory of culture in the classes you do?
MD: Well, I hope so. But I tend to have modest aims in teaching. Most American leftists are Deweyite liberals when it comes to education; they actually think education changes minds and society, and the reason they teach is to teach critical skills to will change students. That has always seemed odd to me. Coming out of the marxist tradition, and particularly out of Gramsci, I've always had a much more modest approach to teaching than most of my radical teaching colleagues. Teaching, and going to school, does not shape people's ideas. People's ideas are shaped by the material circumstances that they come out of, the material situations they find themselves in, by "making a living." It's not that people can't change their minds and ideas - you're not set by where your family came from or what you learned it in your formative years, because you've got new challenges. You may come from a family with money and now you have no job, or vice-versa - a lot of things can happen. Moments of crisis change people's thinking. As a teacher, I'm simply trying to give people some of the resources, that cultural commons, that may be useful when those moments of crisis hit. I've always thought that if anyone became a socialist after taking my class, well, they'd be a neo-liberal next semester after taking somebody else's class which is equally persuasive and eloquent.
Sometimes radical teachers over-estimate the power of teaching, and have too-high hopes for what they can accomplish as teachers. After all, the great majority of what I do is to pass people through what is essentially a stage in the labor market; many of the students are not going to remember a thing that I said, just as I don't remember most of my undergraduate teachers. I took more than thirty different courses, and I probably couldn't tell you the names of fifteen of those teachers, let alone what it was they taught. Three of them changed my life - Lou Renza, Peter Bien, Marlene Fried - and I could probably even tell you the kinds of impact they had. The others, I just zipped through. I do know that there are a few students who come through my class, and because of where they are at that moment, this is the resource they need to think through the issues in their lives.
And they may argue with me, as I did with Marlene Fried in her marxism course. I still recall arguing the anti-marxist position in that seminar; many years later, I saw her and told her how much I had learned in that class, and how it had a long-term effect. Even though I was this obstinate student, I was fighting through those things, and even though she didn't persuade me, it was a resource. As I continued as an activist, and learned more, and read more and went to England and began to think about the left in a more international way, those things that Marlene had taught about marxisms in other parts of the world became that resource I needed.
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